Chapter 1 - The Ashen Templar

"-mmander, we need to get these people out of here-"

"...impossible. We're in the heart of their encampment. Where would we go?"

"-disguise them in the remaining robes, evacuate the vulnerable in the guise of acolytes-"

"-scent would give them away, immediately. They'd never make it."

It was a swift, terse argument, amid the bodies of the dead. An abattoir in miniature, the smell of the slaughterhouse mingling with the eye-watering stench of incense, sacrificial smoke hanging overhead like a miasma.

Sabrine was conferring with Leontes, with Caius - Away from the others, with the brisk intensity of people who knew their time was running out.

I was no tactical genius, no Salvager. I didn't know how to bind wounds or soothe the dying. Instead, I seated myself on the stairs, aware that I was going through something like shock.

One of the survivors - Raynault, I think - had handed me a waterskin, taken from one of the dead. I'd tried to hand it back, but he'd pressed it on me. "Take it, Sir Knight," he'd urged. "It's the least we could do."

He'd bobbed his head, and returned to the others as I stared after him.

At last, I drank.

The water was gritty, and tasted of old leather and uncured hide. But - even before I'd known it - thirst had me in its grasp. My throat worked, as I tried not to wonder where it'd come from; the tasteless flavor brought me back to the here-and-now, ever-so-faintly.

As the water sloshed in my stomach, I saw a man with one eye staring at the waterskin, a crude bandage over the other socket. I made myself look away, a pang of guilt lancing through me.

There was one thing I knew, now: I wasn't about to wake up. This was real, and it was spelled out in the essential nature of this awful place - In the buzzing flies, the stench, the gore.

Of the two dozen or so people here, four were dead. I hadn't even seen them die, in the frenzy of the fight that had followed; One, pinned to the wall with a brass lance, was still standing in a mockery of life. More were wounded, by claws or fangs or rusty ritual knives.

Every one of the survivors was armed.

I'd seen Caius picking his way through the corpses of the beast-men, efficiently slitting throats when he came across any that still twitched. He'd seen me staring at him, looked up, shook his head.

"Not a single damn bow to be found," he'd said, noted my look of incomprehension, then carried on. He'd acquired a bandoleer of knives, worn across his chest like a desperado's ammo-belt, and he moved with the confident ease of a long campaigner.

Leontes - his features still flecked with blood - had a grimace on his face. He had one hand on his stomach, as if pained, speaking quickly and urgently to Sabrine. The other man I'd seen, the one who'd looked like a merchant, fidgeted with the battered rings on his fingers, as if unsure whether he should risk himself. 

Then, he tried-

"Commander, Prince Valerius must be warned. We must withdraw - A messenger must be sent, to let him know of the atrocities being committed here-"

"And you'd volunteer, Gospel?" Caius said, and I could hear the sneer in his voice. "Saving your own skin, more like."

The other man flinched, as if he'd slapped, but pressed on all the same - "The Holy King must be told," he said. "You know I'm right. If we all perish, who will get word out? We must-"

"Enough." Sabrine's voice sliced the air, like a blade. She'd armed herself with a great cleaver, holding it with an easy proficiency that was somehow chilling.

"-They have my sister," she said, as if that decided everything. Caius closed his eyes, just for a moment. Leontes laid his hand on Gospel's shoulder - as if commiserating with him - and just looked sick.

Then she looked at me.

"Sir Gabriel," she said. "Will you help us?"

She sounded as if she never had a reason to doubt my answer.

Heart in my mouth, I nodded.

"Yeah," I said. "-Yeah."

"Then this is what we shall do…"

---------------------

In the end, the plan was simple - Necessarily so.

You have to understand, all of this had happened in the span of less than an hour. Time was short, desperately so. There was only enough to tell me the essentials.

This ancient temple was a place of summoning, a place sacred to the beast-men ("Cloven," Sabrine had called them, and she'd spoken it like a curse). Those dragged in never left, except for their shamans, their dark priests, their conjurors-of-demons. And when they departed, they came out alone.

The wounded and the infirm would wrap themselves in robes, and conceal themselves among the other corpses. It was the best that could be done for them, but I couldn't imagine what that would feel like: Lying on the floor of a charnel house, for hours. Face-to-face with death.

There were nine of us, willing and capable of fighting. Too few, I'd thought, but such was the way things went. Enough stained, stinking hooded cloaks for us, too - But it was Caius who put the finishing touch on things.

The priest-caste of the beastfolk, he knew, carried their scent glands under their jaws, beneath their arms, in the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. A few minutes of knifework, and he was smearing them across the surface of the already-rancid robes.

Sabrine endured it stoically. Leontes looked nauseous, and I didn't blame him - When I met his gaze, I felt much the same way. Raynault was invisible within the folds of his cloak, but I heard him dry-retch more than once...Even as Gospel merely closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

"It won't fool them if they get close," Caius said. "We'll have moments, at most."

"Long enough," Sabrine had said, and gripped her weapon a little tighter.

There would be two groups: One led by Caius, one by Sabrine. The first would head for the stockade, where the other soldiers were being held. As for the other-

"Commander, there's no reason to believe your sister is still alive-"

The look she gave Leontes was as flat and deadly as a blade. "She is," Sabrine said, her chestnut-brown bangs swaying against her cheeks. "She must be."

"But the Cloven Ones know the danger of magic-users…"

"That's why," Sabrine answered. Her eyes flashed with heat - I knew this wasn't a point she was willing to give ground on. But it was more than that; I could sense something at her core, something she clung to with an iron grip. The kernel of some secret, that lent her words the belief of desperation.

It was more than her sister, whoever she was. She needed it to be true.

"-That's why she will be in the Meat Locker." A pause. "...With the other sacrifices."

---------------------

The Meat Locker.

That was what the beastfolk called it, I was told. Once, it might have been a dungeon, or some collapsed annex to the temple; Now, it was merely where they kept those who would soon go under the knife.

The misbegotten, atavistic gods of the Cloven Ones, I was told, loved nothing more than sacrifice. The sacrifice of human spellcasters were especially prized, not just as a trophy of victory, but as a tool of war. Those of the faithful who culled them would be rewarded - With strength, with gifts, with potent and bountiful offspring.

Caius told me that Hordeleader Gorakk had been conceived after his tribe had yielded up the coveted hecatomb: the sacrifice of no less than a hundred priests and their retinues to the savage gods. Like his kin, he'd grown up blessed - Fast, strong, physically flawless. Knowing no fear, for all the many days of his life.

If it was up to Gorakk and his Mawborn kin, the priests and spellcasters of the Holy Kingdom would have already been put to the torch or the flaying knife. But the tribes of the Thorn-blooded, the Bone Howlers and the Crimson Brood longed for champions of their own, and sought the same for themselves - If only to deny their rivals the prize.

The Cloven hated each other. That had always been their weakness, until the Shrouded Prophet had welded them together into a single invincible force.

"And even that wasn't enough," Sabrine had murmured, almost to herself. "If not for him, we would never have been beaten."

But then we were outside the temple, and there was no more time for speech.

---------------------

Outside, it was night.

But there was flamelight enough to see the horror by.

Every race, every beasman clan, held to its own quarter, great reaches divided by avenues of flame-topped pillars. The sprawling vastness of the camp shone with flames beneath great pavilions of gilded plates and stitched hides, black smoke breathing into the air from firepits.

A forest of impaled humans rose above them.

That was the first shock, I think. Those suspended bodies, hanging above us. Ruptured, some of them filled with coals, cooking from within. Partially eaten, as if those who passed had simply decided to tear morsels free. I kept my gaze lowered, but it did nothing about the stench - Nothing about the sound, the screams and drumming rolling out of the dark.

And the smell. Filth, like an animal's stables. Smoke, sweat, blood.

Vomitous, in the way only creatures like that could be. It was something out of a propaganda broadcast, the kind we would see coming out of the Eastern Bloc Wars, but luridly, achingly real. It was a physical force, as substantial as a fist in the face.

There were four of us, in this group: Sabrine, Leontes, myself - And to my surprise, Gospel. The emissary or noble or merchant, whatever he was. Somehow, he'd donned that bull-mask (short of horns) without retching, his figure moving ahead of us all in stained finery. How he managed it, I couldn't know - All I knew was that I stared at the trailing hem of his robe, the entire time.

It was better to see that, as compared to anything else.

A vast field of bonfires stretched out, painting the night with pools of illumination. In their malformed, hideous hundreds, the beast-kin and monster-men pursued their equally misshapen lives - the air echoing with chanting and singing and eating and whatever else these things did when nothing special was going on.

When it was not yet time for war.

"This is one of the smaller camps," Leontes had said - He'd pulled his hood up, looking green around the gills, before I could ask him to elaborate on that alarming notion. But now, I saw his point.

We forged our way forward. Shuffling figures, lead by a cult priest. It felt like it would not work - that something would absolutely see through our feeble disguises. But it held, as we cut our way forward, wending between the flickering fires.

I tried to ignore all else. The Meat Locker loomed in the distance, a lonely stone spire - half-crumbled - marking the location of the chambers below.

We made it all of halfway, before Sabrine stopped. So abruptly that I nearly walked into her - And that would have been fatal.

It was a cage, of sorts. Made from spears and pikes, each long shaft stabbed blade-down into the earth, each a few inches from the next. They staked out a rough circle, with chains lashed around the shafts midway and at the top to keep them solid.

Even from here, I could see the mound of bodies within. A jumble of them, some in stained blue-and-white livery, some in rough homespun. Bloody, filthy, mangled - Unconscious or dead. Limbs pushed through the ground floor of the bars, at irregular intervals.

"Commander?" Leontes's voice was a low hiss.

"Those are our men," Sabrine said. I could tell she was gripping her weapon, so tightly her knuckles went white.

Two panther-headed sentries - grey-skinned, feline, broad chests rippling with muscle - stood at lax attention. They had the look of guards dealing with a tedious, pointless task; One of them glanced in our direction, eyes narrowed to slits, then looked away.

Ahead of us, Gospel was still walking. Head erect beneath his mask, though the stench must have been wretched. I don't know how he withstood that.

Leontes gave her a desperate look. His gaze flickered to me, for some reason.

"Commander, please - We're so close…!"

"We can't leave them."

"We have to." He would have reached for her, but something stopped him, I think. Self-preservation, maybe.

And so - without thinking - I did.

When my gloved hand closed on Sabrine's arm, she tensed. In the shadow of her hood, I could see the firelight flickering redly in her ears, her shoulders stiff with imminent violence. Somehow, I could feel an immense, corded strength in her limbs.

"Please," I said. "Please."

She drew a breath. A deep, shuddering one. Her jaw set.

And then, miracle of miracles, she nodded.

---------------------

She would have done it, I knew. It was killing her not to fight for them, not to intervene. I think it went against everything Sabrine believed in, to keep walking.

But she did it anyway.

Why, I'm not sure. Maybe her sister loomed larger in her thoughts.

Maybe she did it for me.

But I doubt it.

---------------------

We made it as far as the doors of the Meat Locker, before our luck ran out.

I don't blame Gospel. He carried himself stiffly erect, with all the poise he could muster, all the way to the entrance. Playing the role to the hilt, which made me realize that there was steel in him, after all.

The Locker might have once been part of a fortress, the stone crumbling but still whole; Even from here, I could see the guards stationed on the second-floor ramparts, hideous things with a serpent's coiling lower-half. Right at the front, at those great double-doors, hulking apelike half-men with huge axes stood at the ready, simian eyes yellow with malice.

They saw us coming. One of them - knuckle-walking, axe strapped to its back - regarded Gospel, rasping grunts resolving into the words:

"Long way from den, little pain-priest. Why here? Not yet time."

Gospel didn't say anything. He merely gestured, his hand half-hidden in the folds of his sweltering robe, as if he could simply wave them aside.

It was then that I realized: The others couldn't speak their language. They didn't even understand it, the guttural growling and hooting through throat-tubes.

He took a step forward, and that was a mistake. A huge paw - crowned by blunt claws - rose, and shoved him back. The depth and timbre of a growling throat-roar-

"You trespass. Gorakk does not rule here!"

A beast-man would have known what to do. But Gospel staggered back, trod on his robe, and it was the very human helplessness of that gesture that revealed him.

I heard the sharp exhalation of breath from Leontes, his muttered "Oh, no-" as he reached for the hatchet hooked to his belt-

And then the sentry's head vaporized, in an explosion of gore.

---------------------

It was Sabrine who moved first, of course. As if she'd been ready for this all along.

It took me a moment to realize that she had moved. That it was her mace that hit the beastman right in the face, and detonated it with the force of a hand grenade.

In that eyeblink of shocked disbelief, she'd already lined up a shot on the other ape-man. Was already swinging.

I have to give it credit. Even as its companion's skull-fragments ricocheted out, even as that simian form toppled forward and collapsed, the Cloven One was already responding. Already wrenching that huge axe free, throat-tubes swelling as it prepared to roar a warning or challenge, massive jaws opening on their hinges-

But that just meant that Sabrine's next shot connected with its head and neck, and lifted it clean off the ground. Black blood pumped from the ragged holes her spiked mace had left in its throat, but the convulsions were just nerve-spasms - the immense force of impact had already crushed the thing's skull.

Her mace was stuck. She released it, drew the pointed cleaver as she cast off her ragged cloak.

I'll admit: Right then, covered in black arterial blood, Knight-Commander Sabrine terrified me.

Leontes had just pulled his hatchet free. Gospel had caught himself, staring in open-mouth dismay, his mask askew.

A rasping, protracted hiss - like a drawn-out threat - split the air, above. One of the serpent-bodied nagas pointed an accusing claw at us, limbs writhing in the flickering torchlight.

Other shrieks rose in accompaniment.

Sabrine turned. Looked at us.

"Go," she said. "*Now*."

---------------------

And just like that, everything went wrong.

The Cloven Ones might have been infinitely cruel, infinitely malicious. Hateful of humans and of each other.

But they weren't stupid.

A horn blew, the sonorous note ringing out across the camp. It was a bone-chilling, iron-bound sound, like the lowing of some tortured deep-sea leviathan; Even as Sabrine put her shoulder to the great double-doors of petrified wood, I heard the clamor of frantic activity.

Running feet. The clash of steel-on-steel.

"Commander, hurry!" Leontes's eyes were so very, very wide - His teeth peeled back from his lips. He'd drawn his hatchet, then drawn a dagger too, as if he wasn't sure just one would be enough. I could see torches bobbing towards us, illuminating the shapes below; whatever else was going on, the alarm was well and truly raised.

"It - won't open!" Sabrine forced out the words, through gritted teeth. She slammed into the doors again, and they shivered but didn't give. "They're…!"

"Barred," Gospel finished. "From the inside-"

I'll be lying if I said I wasn't panicking, too.

And I thought - Wait.

I drew the Interfector, brought the sword up in front of me. A wave of blue light rippled up the blade, igniting the tip - A great gout of fire flashing upward, before the sword settled down to a steady burn.

"Step back," I said, with a confidence I didn't feel.

You have to understand: I didn't know how to use a sword. Not really.

I knew how to hold one, how to swing it, the same way everyone who plays a VRMMO does: Subliminal algorithms and automatic assist-programs, trickling meaning into my brain. It was, I think, one of the reasons why the era of the invasive virtual reality had come and gone - the megacorporations' fear of subliminal programming.

Not that they were against it, specifically. They were against anyone else doing it, except them.

In the heat of battle, I'd simply acted. Let the wave carry me along.

But like the proverbial centipede, now that I had started thinking about what I was doing, I could no longer walk.

For a moment, I stood there. Another. Staring into the flame, as if all the world's answers lay within. It was an instant upon which everything was balanced: Sabrine had backed against the arch, Gospel looking stricken, Leontes whey-faced but determined-

All of them, watching me.

Pounding feet, coming closer…

Please, I thought. God, please-

I remembered-

---------------------

A moment in time.

Arcadia, in the early days. Swinging a sword around, cutting nothing but air.

Impact, earth and sky whirling over each other, as the boar slammed into me, sent me sprawling. Hearing it snort, ambling away to continue its virtual life.

"Not like that," Gabriel says. We looked like ourselves here - Everyone who makes their first character does. It's part of the fantasy; to be yourself, but better in every way. "Got to remember the first movement. That's what matters, y'know?"

Rolling over onto my back, my voice at odds with my form - the latter rendered in heroic brushstrokes.

"-I don't get it."

He sighs, an infinite patience in his voice.

"Start the right motion, and the system will take over. It'd put the skill in motion, hit the target for you. You just have to let it happen, yeah? Be less up here-"

Gabriel taps his head.

"And more down here." His hand settles on the hilt of his own sword.

"Here, let me show you. It's easy if you know how."

He draws his blade, a short, robust falchion. His eyes narrow, in momentary focus-

We'd promised to fight alongside each other.

Why had I forgotten that?

---------------------

I looked up, and swung the Interfector with both hands.

There was a whoomph. Wood splintered and billowed out, burning. A bloom of flickering, sickly energy surrounded the blade as it slashed across, as if the blade was biting not just through ancient wood, but tearing through something half-seen but palpable.

Energies fizzled and spat frothing residue, bright and eye-hurting. The ancient doors were blackened and crumbling, as tongues of blue flame leapt and crackled greedily across them-

And with a rumble like an avalanche, they fell inwards. Chunks of burning wood tumbled outwards across the stone. I heard buzzing shrieks of distress from above, the ruined doors collapsing upon themselves. Hot dust and embers swirled, and shouts of dismay issued forth from within.

Gospel's hands went to his mouth. He looked like he couldn't believe it.

"That's - a fine weapon," Leontes said, as if our pursuers had momentarily been forgotten. He stared at the blue-burning blade, with open awe. "Almost like Justicia-"

It was Sabrine who broke the silence. "Come on," she said - Her gaze meeting mine, quick, thankful. Then she was stepping over the remains of the doors, through the smoke-filled haze, her weapon raised and ready-

I turned away.

"Sir Gabriel!" I heard Leontes say, urgently. "Will you not-"

"Go," I said, firming my grip. Aware that my palms were sweating.

"I'll hold them here."

---------------------

Why I offered, I wasn't sure.

It wasn't confidence, not really. Back then, I wasn't certain - not yet - what I could do. Perhaps it was something more fundamental-

Perhaps I didn't want to go in there. Into that grim place, where the air was a soft blackness tinged with red. What had happened within, I knew - that would be unspeakable.

Sabrine could bear that.

I don't think I could have.

After all - I was no knight. I merely looked like one.

---------------------

The dog-men were the first ones to arrive. I don't know what they were called - What intoxicants they'd ingested to push them to the edge of madness - but they saw me standing in the doorway, and simply charged.

They had spears. They had fighting claws strapped to their misshapen paw-hands. They had those wicked cleavers I'd seen, spiked maces like the one Sabrine had put to such devastating use.

I decided not to give ground. The Interfector moved with such blinding speed, it looked like a series of whirling blades. I killed the first one to reach me with a single swing, sending that hideous head - features clenched in a rictus of rage - spinning over the others. Arms and hands flew, blood cooking on the Interfector's hissing blade as I swung and swung again.

The last two tried to rush together, even though the space was too tight - I stepped forward to meet them, and put all my strength into a two-handed cut at waist-level.

They went down, howling as their entrails spilled out at their feet. Howling, as the blue flame turned them into thrashing torches. There was the hideous smell of burning fur, competing with their unwashed stink - A smell that became immeasurably worse a heartbeat later, as their fetal forms began to blacken, to lose all cohesion.

Seven, I thought. Seven of them, in as many frenzied seconds. Dying or dead, along the threshold we'd fought our short battle in.

Behind me, distant shouts and the clash of steel-on-steel. A flare of unnatural lightning, something that made the flagstones shake - But I paid it no mind.

Because the rest of them could see me, now.

It was a half-circle of burning torches, a flickering yellow light entirely different from the Interfector's rippling blue illumination. They saw the armor, I think. Saw the burning sword, as I waited for them.

They didn't see the cold fist of fear that clenched my heart, the sweat running down the inside of my armor.

And as for me-

They were all terrible hybrids of human and animal and things without name, grown large and bulked with muscle and robust. They had slabby axes, skull-crushing bludgeons, hacking blades - the faint gleam resolving out of the smoke, blankly hungry eyes fixed on me with predatory wariness. They were snorting at each other in their indecipherable language, the meaning failing to emerge, as I stood there.

Wondering if Sabrine and Caius were still alive. Wondering if anyone would survive.

I was still thinking that when the first arrows hissed towards me.

---------------------

The arrows used by the Cloven were a masterwork of cruelty. Each shaft was thumb-thick, the head of each arrow shaped and finished from a single, iron-hard scale taken from some primordial beast. Barbed, like a backwards-slanted comb, they were designed to go into a target and never come out.

The first shots fell short, or went wide. They hit the walls around me, or punched into the ground.

The second wave was dead on.

No, I had time to think, as they arced towards me. I had a vague thought - too late - of diving for cover, of ducking out of the archway, fleeing into the corridor. Enough time to think that it was what I should've done in the first place...

The Interfector flared. Brighter than ever before. Pellucid blue flame shimmered before me, and I flinched as a spray of ash dusted my armor. Another, then again; As I forced myself to uncurl from my half-cower, and I saw-

Each arrow hit the heat-envelope around me, the rippling wake of flame hanging in the air like a mirage, and crumbled to nothing.

Oh, I thought. Oh.

They were muttering, now. Ape-man and lizard-man and stranger things yet. The archers looked bewildered, as if wondering whether they should try again.

At the back, something horse-headed and mottled-brown - grotesque form sheathed in malaria-yellow robes - shook a knobby fist as it harangued them. Spittle flew as it brayed, a purple airsac rapidly inflating as bulging eyes glared hatred at me.

At this range, I couldn't understand what it was saying. But the meaning was clear.

A form loomed, behind them all. Gravel crunched underfoot, the half-circle of beastmen parting, as if at some unseen signal.

The chanting began, steady and slow. It had words to it, a rhythm.

Manflayer

Manflayer

MANFLAYER

Fully ten feet tall. A wall of muscle, half-shod in iron and gold. Arms thick with trophy rings, forged from the weapons of those he had slain, personally.

A great axe, chased with silver, the emblem of a spider etched into the pitch-black metal, spreading arachnid limbs. The double-headed battleaxe was as large as my torso, and the sabertoothed brute carried it in one hand.

The ground seemed to tremble underfoot, as he strode forward. Corded muscle rippled with vigor, red eyes locked directly on my form. He held up one arm - like a sack full of boulders - and the chanting fell away.

"Human." It was a bass rumble. "I am Vorgosh Nargul. Champion of the Red Talons, slayer of a thousand. Name yourself."

Oh shit, I thought. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to simply make myself walk forward - But somehow, I managed it. Somehow, I took one step.

Then another.

And another.

"Gabriel," I lied. "Sir Gabriel, of Arcadia."

That red-eyed gaze swung to the scattered corpses of the Cloven, the burning pyres that marked the dog-men.

"Your work?"

I nodded. It was all I could do.

Vorgosh laughed. It sounded like an avalanche, rocks tumbling over each other over and over again. "Such spirit, for a human." Glowing red eyes. "Surrender, and it will be swift. No priests, no knives. A warrior's death."

I said nothing.

I thought of Sabrine, killing her way through the Meat Locker. Of Caius and his four, making for the stockade.

Of the people in the temple, surrounded by death yet praying for life.

I swept the Interfector across my chest, in a fencer's salute. Raised it to guard, flame rippling across the blade.

"Good," Vorgosh growled, a deep subsonic purr of anticipation. Drool glistened on his fangs, as the panther-man freed his wrist with a practice hack, the great crescent-moon blades hissing as they cut the air.

The brass spider-crest seemed to writhe, to twitch, as if alive - I could feel the deep and abiding glee that seemed to radiate forth from him, a being about to do what he did best.

Vorgosh rested the haft of his great axe on one slablike shoulder, chained wrath burning in those murder-red eyes.

"Then this will be interesting, after all."

Next: Manflayer