Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

Interlude 2: Three Deaths

Interlude 2: Three Deaths

They brought out the king in a cocoon of chains. Overdoing it a bit, in Donnelly’s opinion, but who cared what a ghost thought?

Not just a ghost, he reminded himself, watching the procession from his shadowed nook. Shade that he was, very few in the grand grove would be able to see him as little more than a slight deepening of the gloom between the trees. He leaned against one towering trunk, arms folded beneath his dun traveler’s cloak, quietly observing.

A scene out of legend unfolded before him, a mural come to life. Beneath a tapestry of stars, the moons — both the living and the dead one — high in the sky, beings ageless and mortal gathered to watch a remnant of the last great war put to justice. They marched the prisoner through a path of stones set between scattered patches of violet flowers, whose petals drank the od shining down from the night so they shone, casting the scene in dreamlike illumination.

Rhan Harrower had been a lion of a man, when Donnelly had last laid eyes on him. That had been… Bleeding Gates, has it really already been eight years? He thought, shaking his head. Eleven now since Elfhome burned, and eight since the last battle of the war against the Recusants had been fought. Rhan, King of Losdale, had been at that battle. So had Donnelly, though not in the flesh. Many of those who gathered amid the towering wrecks of the eardetrees or within the moonlit circle had also been there.

No lion now, unless one imagined an old, sickly one, its mane of red hair gone all to pale gray, its proud head bowed by time, wear, and illness. Rhan hadn’t cut his hair in a long time, and one of his eyes had been eaten away by some blight — ugly veins spread from the pale, cataract-ruined orb, making him look half mad. Perhaps he was, at that. They’d let him keep his armor, a very Urnic custom, but its gilded frame had bled away, showing rusted, poorly tended steel beneath.

Even still, bowed by age and the heavy chains, Rhan stood as tall as the Accord knights who formed his guard. Once he would have towered over them, even in their wing-crest helms. Of his famous war spear, Donnelly saw no sign.

Elves, both Wyldefae and Seydii, watched like hungry wolves as the chained Recusant passed by them, their eyes shining near bright as the flowers. Human lords, representatives from the Accord, gathered in little groups here and there, whispering among themselves. Donnelly didn’t like how spread those little packs were, the suspicious eyes they cast to other representatives — not a good look, for those once united by the oaths of the Ardent Bough. How had a mere decade divided them so much?

Starting to think like an elf, Donnelly scoffed. Been Undying for a handful of years and you think everything is happening too fast, all the sudden.

Tearing his eyes away from the representatives, Donnelly studied the heroes of this tableau. A group of adventurer-mercenaries, a true Fellowship, stood at the end of the path with the eldest of the Sidhe. Six members, each a story unto themself, but he focused on the leader — a woman near tall as Rhan, powerfully built, with steel armor gilded in archaic bronze. She’d draped her broad shoulders with a cloak made of leathery hide, no doubt cut from some nasty thing Donnelly wouldn’t have wanted to meet, living or dead.

“A sellsword from the northern islands,” Donnelly muttered, scratching at his incorporeal chin in a habit he hadn’t lost along with his flesh. “Now, after this stunt, a hero of the Accord to be knighted by Forger himself. Impressive.”

“She will play a part in what’s to come,” the Other whispered. “This is but the first test.”

Donnelly winced. Damn insights. He’d never put much stock in them, when the old Table knights had talked about it, but now that he had his own divine ghost whispering into his thoughts he half understood why they all seemed looney half the time, and grouchy as ogres the rest.

“What is to come?” Donnelly asked aloud. “What’s that even mean?”

But he got no answer. The Other only spoke to him when he witnessed something important, or got near breaking some obscure supernatural rule. Damn frustrating thing, having the maimed remnants of a demigod sharing spiritual space with you.

Still, better than being locked away in some sarcophagus in Draubard. Donnelly shuddered at the thought. “No, thank you,” he said to no one in particular.

“Please tell me you aren’t going insane like all the other wild ghosts,” a dry voice said behind him. “The last thing they need is a mad Herald.”

Donnelly glanced over his shoulder, and saw an elf approaching him from the deeper woods. He was one of the more typical sorts, appearing as a handsome man with pointed ears and narrow features. Despite his unlined face, the Sidhe walked like an old man, slightly stooped, and had very little immortal light in his eyes — it hung around him instead, as though he were the centerpiece of a dim lamp.

Only the oldest got like that, their souls growing so big their bodies were hardly necessary anymore.

“Lord Irn Bale,” Donnelly said, turning and dipping his head into a hasty, half-proper bow. “I didn’t know you’d be appearing for this.”

The Oradyn — a great captain-hero of the Sidhe — held up a hand to indicate Donnelly didn’t need to stand on ceremony. “I didn’t expect to, but I started wandering the woods and…” he shrugged. “Something drew me here.”

His ageless eyes went to the slow walk of the Recusant lord. “A legend passes tonight, lost like so many others to the entropy of time.”

Donnelly glanced at the fallen king and sneered. “Rhan is a bastard. I saw the sorts of things he did to his enemies during the war. Good riddance, I say.”

“Even dark dreams have worth,” Oradyn Irn Bale said with a sigh. “Still, perhaps you are right. I see only a shadow where once I saw a great adversary.”

“Besides,” Donnelly noted, folding his arms and leaning back against the tree he’d picked to watch the show. “They say King Harrower is the last lynchpin holding the remnants of the Recusants together. Without him, whatever holdouts they still have in the Amberhorns and the southlands won’t last long. We beat them at Kingsmeet, eight years ago, but the war never really ended. Maybe, today, it does.”

“There is still Talsyn.” The old elf seemed about as skeptical as Donnelly felt. “Its king is old, but yet has strength in him. That aside, you know it is no warrior lord who truly brought our enemies together, Herald.”

“Yeah, well, old man Reynard went with the wind after this all started. Not that I’d put it past a wizard to make a surprise comeback, but I think everyone has bigger problems than worrying about old bogeymen. Like famine.”

Irn Bale quirked an eyebrow. “A spirit, concerned about an empty belly?”

“Hey.” Donnelly jabbed a finger at the elf. “I grew up an urchin during the Bantesian guild strikes. You don’t forget being that hungry.”

“Fair enough,” Irn Bale conceded.

The scene below drew their attention again. The four Accord knights and their prisoner had reached the end of the grove path. Upon a tiered slab of river stone cut to form a sort of dais, the highest ranking members of the ceremony had gathered. These were great lords of the Accorded Realms, mostly, some of whom Donnelly recognized, had even interacted with in the past decade as the Herald of Heavensreach.

But all eyes went to the deep shadows at the far end of the dais. Something stirred at the top, where the roots of two tall faerie trees, the once beautiful Earde, formed something half throne, half nest. Donnelly couldn’t quite see the figure sitting in those roots, only a shadow in the vague shape of a person.

Then the one sitting within the roots stood, stepping forward on bare feet. Deep blue cloth rustled, dry skin stretched like bad leather, and one of the most horrible crimes the Recusants could be held to account for entered the moonlight.

She’d been beautiful once, the Archon’s only child and heir to all the Sidhe dominion. That had been before they’d burned her alive. Now she looked a misshapen smudge on the world, bald skull sunken and cracked, limbs stretched into charcoal branches, blackened flesh covered in weeping blisters and open wounds. She’d clad herself in a simple dress which left her arms and shoulders bare — no doubt a deliberate touch, so Rhan could see what his allies had done.

Maerlys, Princess of the Seydii, flashed silver teeth in a smile which might have once stolen many a mortal heart. Now, it seemed more like the macabre grin of a demon shadow, the pale teeth unnervingly bright within a face mottled into an indistinct ruin.

Her eyes… Donnelly had to avert his own, couldn’t bring himself to look too long. Her eyes were the worst part. Wide, lidless, and full of madness. The originals had been melted, later replaced by artifice, but they still held an awful awareness.

“Heaven on Fire,” Donnelly said aloud, horrified. “She must be in so much pain.”

“Her hate allows her to endure,” Irn Bale remarked, looking at the princess with sad, ancient eyes. “Though, it is a terrible thing, to trap one of our spirits in a vessel so ruined. Of all his crimes, Reynard has earned his place in Damnation for this more than any other.”

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“King Rhan.”

Donnelly’s incorporeal flesh shivered. The Princess’s tongue had been lost in the fire that’d disfigured her, so her voice rippled out into the world as a psychic whisper. It was not a pleasant feeling.

The Recusant lifted his head. He had defiance in his aged face, though Donnelly thought he saw a hint of hesitation in the man as that one-eyed gaze alighted on the elf.

“Do you not recognize me, O’ Great and Terrible King?” Princess Maerlys tilted her head to one side, having never lost that eerie grin. The motion looked disturbingly boneless. “Do I not still please your eyes?”

Several of the human lords and knights standing nearby shuffled uncomfortably. All had fallen deathly silent. Even the adventurer fellowship, and its dour leader, looked disturbed.

Rhan Harrower swallowed. “I know you, Your Majesty.” His voice emerged as a gravelly croak, a bare remnant of the growling baritone he’d once use to command armies.

The Princess’s false eyes ran over the chained lord. “You have grown old, Rhan Harrower. Old, and weak, and tired. You have fought so long. Are you not tired?”

Donnelly felt, even at a far remove, the strength of compulsion in those words. Rhan Harrower, taking the brunt of it, slumped in his chains. If not for the guards holding his arms and the restraints, he would have fallen prone. But the old soldier grit his teeth, shook off the elf’s power, and growled his next words.

“I didn’t order them to burn you, you golden witch, but I’d have held the torch myself had I been there. Even if it takes stripping the pretty faces off every immortal in Urn, we will all wake from this tired dream.”

Donnelly unfolded his arms and stood straighter. He recognized a fragment of the Recusant rallying cry in those words, something he hadn’t heard in many years. It brought back memories, mostly bad ones, and stirred something in him. Something he’d thought he’d quelled.

Irn Bale shifted at his side. Donnelly coughed, hoping the elf lord hadn’t noticed his interest. “Brave bastard, ain’t he?”

“Foolish,” Irn Bale murmured. “She will not give him a kind death, if he pushes her too far.”

“Ah… there you are, general.” Princess Maerlys sighed in satisfaction. Donnelly could hear her dry flesh crackling with the movement. He felt suddenly very glad he didn’t have a stomach anymore, because he suspected it would be churning.

“I have thought of many ways to punish you. I have punished many of your allies, your brothers and sisters in arms… would you like to know how I did it? What each of them experienced at the last?”

The burned elf knelt down and whispered something into the Recusant’s ear with her own voice. Donnelly didn’t know how she managed, how she made herself understood, but whatever she said, Rhan’s face bleached of all color.

Then, leaning back, Maerlys became aloof. “But this is a public affair, and I must forgo such indulgences. Many representatives of the Ardent Bough, all bound by the Accord of Urn, are here to witness justice done today. I, Maerlys Tuvonsdotter, pass the sentence agreed upon by all these gathered. Rhan Harrower, O’ Pitiful King, you shall die by beheading.”

Then, raising a charcoal arm hung with golden bracelets, the elven princess beckoned. A deeper hush fell over the grove as several figures near the trees across the way from Donnelly parted.

And he stepped forward. The Headsman.

He wore a cloak of deepest red, like dried blood. The garment shifted subtly, as though caught in a light breeze no one else felt, its deep scarlet folds seeming a near liquid thing. A pointed cowl obscured his face, casting the features beneath into deep shadow so only the hint of an unshaved chin showed, lips pressed into an uneasy line. He stood taller than Rhan, perhaps two meters and change.

He carried an axe in his right hand. The long crescent of the blade had been wrought from an alloy of faerie bronze and mortal steel, its scarred surface inlaid with golden motifs. The handle, fashioned from an uncarved branch, twisted around the head and split into small roots at the bottom, as though it had grown even after being grafted to metal.

All eyes followed the red figure as he marched slowly down the same path Rhan and his guards had taken. The human nobles murmured among themselves, and Donnelly knew what they were saying, even at a distance.

For years, rumors surrounding the Headsman of Seydis has drifted like an ill wind through the Accorded Realms. No one had been able to pin down the exact identity of the enigmatic executioner. Every sort of possible half-truth had been tossed about, in inns and court rooms alike. Some said the Headsman was the last survivor of a noble house destroyed in the war, seeking just vengeance against all who would threaten the land’s peace. Others believed him, or her, to be a Sidhe, a Seydii elf perhaps, who’d survived the conflagration in the East.

Tales became wilder from there. A restless creature of Undeath sent up from the Underworld, an assassin employed by the leaders of the Accord to cow and cull a heavily factionalized society. Some even said there were many Headsmen, that it was merely a loose collection of hired killers and murderers using a story as a convenient cover.

Donnelly knew the truth. He knew the man. And it made him very sad, seeing that ominous figure striding through the grove, looking to everyone else like an image of blood and fear.

“Three deaths,” Irn Bale muttered.

“What’s that?” Donnelly asked, not taking his eyes off the scene in the grove.

“Three legends are dying today,” the elf said, his tone and eyes distant. “All these gathered lords and adventurers, they remember a mighty, honorable enemy in Rhan Harrower, a compassionate beauty in Maerlys Tuvonsdotter. Now they see a withered old man and a monster.”

“Hm. And the third?” Donnelly felt he knew the answer, but wanted to hear it anyway.

“We both know who’s under that hood.” The elf nodded to the Headsman. “It’s a quieter death, but he was a hero too, once. This is a perversion of what he could have been.”

“I think he’d agree with you,” Donnelly noted. “Leastways, now all the Accord will know the Headsman isn’t just some ghost story. All these bureaucrats and old soldiers will spread the tale of what happened here tonight, and they’ll talk, talk, talk. Sure, no one will know who he is exactly, but they’ll have confirmation he exists.”

And most of them will think he’s working for the Accord, or the Sidhe, or both. Damn Al, who roped you into participating in this?

Donnelly inwardly grimaced at the possibilities. The stubborn muscle-head had been adamant about sticking to the fringes, keeping the wider public from having any ability to guess at his identity or affiliations. It was part of his blasted fool’s sense of honor — not wanting to throw anyone else under the wagon, or pass around the blame. Taking it all on himself, even if it left him in the cold.

Now… things would change.

The Headsman reached the bottom of the stone steps and knelt beneath the Sidhe lady. He, for his part, showed no sign of disgust, though who could tell under that cowl? He rested the misshapen butt of his weapon against the ground, taking one knee and lowering his hooded head.

Maerlys’s features changed. Donnelly couldn’t quite read the emotions that passed over the ruin of her face. Hate, sadness, rage, fondness, possession… She knew the executioner’s identity, Donnelly believed. The Table had been sworn to her as much as her father — she’d been their High Priestess.

She settled on something distant and weary, some of that light of madness fading from her. She knelt, her blue dress pooling across the stones, and placed her skeletal hands on either side of the Headsman’s skull. She kissed his brow, cracked lips brushing beneath cloth, then seemed to whisper something in the red man’s ear.

She stepped back then, and the Headsman of Seydis rose to his full height. He stepped to the kneeling Recusant, and another perfect hush fell over the grove. Only the rustle of cloth and a gentle wind in the boughs remained.

The Accord knights held Rhan Harrower in place. The Headsman lifted his strange weapon, and another sound disturbed the night air, a dry, crackling noise. The branch forming the axe’s haft grew, like a living tree experiencing a year of time in a moment, until it stood near tall as the man who held it.

The Headsman took his stance, judged his aim, and swung. He did it without further ceremony, without drawing the moment out. The weapon whistled as it parted the air, then came the sharp crack of impact, the rattling of chains and the sound of a body thumping to the ground.

A legend, and a nightmare, died.

The red-cloaked man bowed again to the faerie princess, then turned to depart. The grove came alive with whispered conversations. Most of those eyes stayed on the executioner, the dead king all but forgotten. No doubt a few of them are wondering when they’ll end up falling under the axe, Donnelly thought darkly. Leaning to Irn Bale he said, “excuse me.”

The Oradyn nodded. “By all means. Until next we meet, Herald.”

Donnelly stepped forward, and appeared in another shadow across the grove. One of his favorite tricks, since becoming a spirit. If he’d been able to do that when he’d been a thief, oh, the trouble he could have gotten himself into…

But all idle musings left him as he stepped out from beneath a tree near where the Headsman wandered back into the woods. Speaking just loud enough for the cloaked man to hear him he said, “Alken.”

The tall man stopped. He had his axe, its haft still in its long form, rested on his left shoulder. On his right hand he wore a ring, an ivory band set with a glassy black stone, which he rubbed at with one thumb in idle habit. He took a deep breath, as though steadying himself, then turned so Donnelly got a better look under the hood.

It amazed Donnelly how little the man had aged since they’d first met nearly fifteen years before. He remembered a young warrior from a backwater domain, looking bewildered, lost in a sea of myth. Donnelly almost smiled, remembering the times he’d taken advantage of the youngest member of the Table, how Al had known he was being conned but couldn’t quite decide how, or whether he minded.

In truth, little had physically changed. The elves had given their chosen lasting youth, and Alken Hewer still looked in his prime, his hair holding a bright sheen, like gilded copper, his golden eyes dimly gleaming in the poor light.

But he did look older, if one inspected further. His eyes were troubled, distant, his mouth pressed into an uncertain line — the look of a man who let his mind wander, focusing on anything other than the distasteful thing he presently did. Four thin, livid marks stood out on the left side of his face, from temple to just above the left corner of his mouth, half concealed by hair that’d been left uncut, probably to help obscure the scars and the aura in his eyes.

He looked tired, worn, and not at all happy to be where he stood. He did not look well.

“Al…” Donnelly tried for a smile, despite the circumstances. “Been a few months.”

Alken nodded. “Yes. How’s Heralding?” He had a dry, worn voice which emerged half whisper, yet carried that subtle intensity every being with a potent Aura seemed to possess.

Donnelly shrugged. “Strange.”

An awkward silence fell. What was there to say between them? They’d never really been more than professional acquaintances, and drinking companions for a brief time. A lifetime ago. Even still, Donnelly wanted to think of the ex-knight as a friend — who else could he call that, these days?

Donnelly wanted to ask how the they’d roped him into this situation, what had caused him to show himself to the nobility. He wanted to ask about the business with Bloody Nath several months back — he’d been in part responsible for putting the man into that dubious business, and still felt some guilt for it. He wanted to ask about the rumors of the Headsman taking on an apprentice, and if they were true.

Instead he asked, “what did the princess say to you?”

Alken frowned, thinking a moment. Then, in a quiet voice he said, “she told me she’d thought of a thousand ways to punish me, for failing to protect her father and her city…”

The Headsman turned toward the woods, squaring his shoulders. “But she couldn’t think of a more fitting hell than the one I’m already in.”

Though he hadn’t known the bite of winter or night since his death, Donnelly suddenly felt very cold.

“See you around, Don.” The fallen knight left then, vanishing into the dark.

“See you around Al,” Donnelly muttered into the night. “Try to keep your head.”

The death of three legends, Irn Bale had said. He hadn’t mentioned how death didn’t have much of a way of sticking in their world. Donnelly wasn’t certain he wanted to see what would crawl out of this grave.