Heir of Iron

"Yes, brother. I don't think any of us will ever be the same, and for that I'm sorry." Nazir nodded, looking over the wrecked effigy of his former life, a tear ran down his cheek and he sniffed loudly, blinking it away and working his jaw to swallow a sob, resting his free hand heavily on the cart's fire and filth-scarred side, his head hanging low. It seemed a small thing, yet Bart understood it.

"Let us make it worth it, yes?" he said after a moment, looking back up with eyes lined with freshly-smeared kohl, "A mighty sum I paid, and I will have my money's worth from the expense," he said, smiling, though there was a bleakness in his tone. Lidia slid closer as well, her tiny hand joining Bart's on his other shoulder, gently pulling the young man into her arms. Bart blinked at that... but it made sense to him after a moment's thought — if anyone could understand what it was to lose a livelihood, a home of sorts — it was the orphan thief. Nazir returned the embrace for a moment before pulling away, resting his head on the knuckles of one hand for a long moment. "Forgive me, it was a moment of weakness. They are merely things, and things can be replaced..."

"No, Little Lion," to their surprise it was Cithara's voice, the Unicorn trod closer, her eyes sad as she surveyed the wreckage, and she turned to him with a wistful gaze. "Do not short yourself so. This was a violation, as much as anything done to your body or soul," she said in a motherly tone. "It is a fine thing to mourn the loss of a way of living earned honest and true. You are a man of rare qualities... and I would have you see them as one such as I do."

Nazir seemed to almost flinch from that, the Queen of Love smiling at him, her radiance seeming to lift a bit of the pall of darkness around them, the southerner avoiding her gaze with his own golden eyes, their amber depths troubled.

"I thank you for the kind words Holy One, but..."

"No buts, Little Lion," she interrupted him softly, her gaze looking to the burned and befouled caravan. "To lose one's place and purpose is... a wound, I have seen such wounds bleed men to death by inches," she said and looked back to him, even as he turned his gaze from hers, shame coloring his features. "There is no weakness in that. What you are now is wrought by circumstance — what you shall become..." she smiled again. "I will watch that path with interest, Little Lion." With that, she stepped forward and gently laid a kiss on the stunned man's forehead, right at the bridge of his nose and brow, there was a faint feeling of... electricity in the air, at least to Bart. None of the others seemed to react — other than Nazir, who stood stunned and seemed like to hide away inside himself from the discomfort, though for a moment — a twinkle of the familiar dandy spread across his face, and he glanced back at the cart.

"I suppose I have not changed too dearly," he began, his spine straightening a bit. "I can still catch the eye and grace of beautiful women," he said, and it was Cithara who reeled back a bit, an incredulous little smirk on her soft lips, and she tittered quietly.

"Oh I like you," she breathed at him, "If only you were taller," she answered with a snide little wink, and the southerner's face drew into an expression of mock shock, touching his heart. Lidia giggled next to him, giving his arm a friendly slug as he turned away to the cart, arms folded across his chest. Seeing his friend standing there, wearing mail and gambeson, a weapon of war at his hips, stronger, straighter... Bart couldn't help but echo his beloved's sentiments. He looked forward to the man his sworn brother was becoming.

They took a moment longer at the wreck, Nazir checking if anything at all was salvageable, and then with disgust he simply drew a tinderbox from his belt, after a few fruitless strikes in the damp and mist of the morning he sighed, and looked up to Bart.

"Brother, could I perhaps...?" he left it hanging, wiggling his fingers in an arcane manner. Bart snorted bemusedly and stepped forward, his eye flashing with golden radiance as he reached out and produced a flame, dancing above his palm with golden energy — this time, he recalled how he'd been taught, pulling the ambient heat from the surroundings in bits. Nazir marveled at the flickering holy fire for a moment and then ignited a bit of tinder with it.

"My thanks," he said, and quite without ceremony — tossed the burning stave into the open bed of the cart. The befouled wood and its destroyed goods caught quickly, smoke and fire leaping high into the air. He watched it a moment, his gaze distant and hard, and then nodded once with purpose, rolling his shoulders in a gamely fashion as he faced his friends. His family.

"Let us be about it then, evil to smite, legends to make," his eyes gleamed with a renewed fervor in the flames.

"This will be quite the story to tell someday."

The five rejoined after a moment's silence, moving forward with Lidia at their head again, her keen sidheborn eyes flicking to and fro, but more so her sensitive nose it seemed; the little changeling had pulled back her customary red cowl and was gently sniffing every so often — reminding Bart of their time in the catacombs beneath Lachheim. It dawned on him then, that must be part of why she was so valued in the siege — early warning of the Ghuls, their telltale stink.

More than just that, Bart was struck by the changes in his little sister. Exposed as she was, her fiery red hair spilled down her cheeks and chin in soft waves, her hair grown out in the three months he'd been gone... she had curls! The wide waves of hair framed her face and pale, freckled skin in a way that filled his heart. No longer was it the hacked-off short style that concealed her identity and womanhood. She exuded confidence rather than defiance now. He couldn't help but smile into his gorget, he and Gram alike in full armor, visors raised. The tall Darrowmite caught his eye on Lidia, and a gentle nod passed to the Paladin, not missing the importance of what they saw.

"Oi, Ah got somthin'," she said, her nose tilting one way and her eyes fixating on a path stamped into the earth through the crushed and ruined camp, Bart was unnerved by how little he remembered of the layout of the place, and how alien it looked to be... so scoured of life. He jerked his chin at her to go on, and she sniffed a few more times and wrinkled her nose.

"Blood. Lots o' it."

The three companions all showed physical unease as she related that — each knew what that meant. The layout of the camp may have been scoured from their minds in the crush and chaos of their escape and the further madness of pitched battle — but none of them would ever forget the presence of that altar.

"Lead us, dear one," Cithara said to her in a quiet, reassuring tone. Her presence buoyed them with her lambent energy.

They picked through at a renewed pace, none of them eager to remain as the air seemed to grow colder, and the sounds of life, even wind distant. The air became heavy and stagnant, and before long even Bart could smell the familiar metallic stink of blood and viscera, as before he could taste the coppery tang of tacky gore in the air, twisting his mouth in disgust. Gram pointedly lowered his visor, clearly finding the steely, sweat-stained smell of his armor preferable to the sickly-sweet rot in the air. Lidia was again, the most affected, looking a bit sallow and green as they found their way towards a depression in the earth.

The details he'd missed before beneath the crush of damned souls stood out as they paused at the lip of the bowl of earth. Beneath their feet simple stripped logs had been beaten into the mud, creating a primitive walkway down into the natural amphitheater that appeared to have been scooped out by hand, exposing roots and the guts of the earth in its loamy soil. Split logs used as pews were arrayed around it in haphazard tiers, leaving a single, central road to the altar... that still stood. The air around them was stagnant and wrong, the earth itself seemed bleached where it was not so soaked in the spilled blood of men that it had turned sticky black, and then Nazir gave a cry.

"The sky!" he shouted, pointing upwards. All eyes looked heavenward, and hands went to weapons. Bart even half-grasped the mantle as they searched... and with shaking comprehension, they understood.

It was frozen. The sun hung perfectly immobile behind clouds that did not dance nor coast on wind that did not blow. The air was dead and still. Little wonder the sidhe had left this place in such a hurry.

"A sample of the Empty Queen's corruption," Cithara said as she stepped down towards the altar, still a simple butcher's block of black stone on rough, wooden risers. Caked in sticky gore, it seemed to almost writhe across its blade-scored surface. The Unicorn continued; "Her presence is here, and with it, her weight drags down time and space around this object of her devotion. The rest of you, stay back." she said and turned to Bart.

"You, beloved. Come." she instructed, and without hesitation, he jogged down to her side in a clatter of plates. Each step closer to the slab seemed to gnaw and chew at his mind, he heard... distant whispers, screams, the scratch of nails on slate... and a sobbing sound he could not place. His teeth set as Cithara's eyes met his.

"Endure it, beloved. My mantle protects you... yet the Wendigo's mark lets it reach into your mind. Listen carefully, learn the sound of the Queen's song — but pay it no heed." she said as they stopped before the altar, the din of sound loud, the air... physically thicker, slowing his movements, pulling at him, forcing him to manually straighten himself against the sheer weight of gravity that seemed to drive him downward, to force him to kneel.

"What am I hearing?" he whispered, chest rising harder with effort.

"The damned, and the lost," she answer sadly, looking back and forth between the altar and the ground, thankfully the bodies that had once been heaped upon the surrounding dais were mercifully absent, diluting the horror, if only just. "You hear the true voice of the Empty Queen, it is agony. It is grief."

"She's... crying," Bart added as he focused more on it. "I do not understand it... but I can feel it. Weeping." he said, and Cithara nodded.

"The Queen's hatred is driven by loss, by grief. A dead child of a dead mother, sibling to dead races. Unborn, unwanted." she said, and there was sorrow in her voice, pity even. Yet there was also steel as her golden eyes flared, her orbit enveloping the stone altar and her head tilting as she seemed to probe and press at it. There was a psychic rumble, a primordial snarl of sorts and she snapped her head back briefly, as if struck.

"Yes, it is the focus as expected," she murmured, "Bart, your sword." At the instruction, he snapped his hand to the blade; the feel of its heavy oblong hilt an immediate comfort in his mailed hands as he slowly drew it with a singsong metallic ring, the pitted black surface of the absolute iron immediately gaining its golden sheen even in the wan light of the frozen sun. He grasped it in two hands, bringing it against his shoulder in a parade rest. Cithara turned towards him, her orbit igniting, a slow, crackling energy crawling up her horn.

"Lower the blade, my love," she said, and he did as instructed, dropping the weapon before her eyes, which then met his sternly, alight with the lambent power of her orbit. "Grasp my mantle beloved, and do not release it until I say — lest this destroy you."

Startled by that for a moment, he lowered his visor, reaching for the mantle — praying for strength. Beneath the steely mask, his eye flashed pure golden, a piercing point of light as he set his feet, holding the blade before him, the faintest glimmering outline flowing around him as the power of the Lady in White buffered and reinforced him. There was a pause wherein she took a breath, and then touched her horn to the weapon. The crackling, killing energy he'd seen her wield against Ghuls and Gatekeeper suffused the entire weapon, leaping across it in a black-on-gold sheathe of hostile, destructive force that engulfed his hand and part of his arm, causing him to tense in alarm... and yet he felt no pain.

"Go, now Bart. Now my champion, strike the altar. Strike it with killing intent," she breathed to him, eyes still aglow as the savage, destructive force he wielded vibrated the weapon in his hand. Grasping it firmly, he stepped forward, raising it to the sky like a beacon of hope in the dingy, grim frozen moment they occupied, he stepped forward into the cut with a bark of effort, swinging the blade down in a brutal overhand chop, as if he intended to shear the stone in twain as if it were a hated foe. Parias' face flickered in his mind, the Wendigo's leering skull... and the distant sobbing became a plaintive wail as the First Blade spat its own venom at the abomination before it...

... And cleave it did.

The blade met almost no resistance as Bart's mighty blow struck down into the stone slab, the mantle's enhanced strength giving the cut such velocity that it displaced the still air around it, snapping the half-cape across his left arm and back in a sudden, seconds-long gale as the weapon reaved its way through stone, wood and finally with a bark of defiance, cleaved the altar as a whole in twain, the destructive energy detonating on impact in a crackling, sizzling force.

The sky then shattered.

A blast of air blew out from the altar, chips of stone and wood rattled against Bart's armor, pinging off his visor, promising to have torn his flesh were it unarmored. The force of the preternatural shockwave hurled Lidia and Nazir from their feet, even Gram's heavier frame braced against it was still thrown to one knee as the frozen moment seemed to catch up all at once, the clouds moving at a manic clip, and the sun streaking across the sky to hang in its proper place. The wind howled and tore at them as if built up behind a dam and finally released in a torrent of whirling air, blasting bits of dirt, loam, and wood around them.

In all of it, Bart's mind was assailed with screaming — an inhuman howling of curses he could not understand but for the venom they were spat with from a thousand voices at a thousand, thousand places in time. It clawed and tore at his mind, trying to drag him along with it — but finding no purchase, psychic talons glancing off the golden shield of Cithara's loving mantle as he drew the blade back once more, there was a whirling darkness where the altar once stood; and by pure instinct, blade still wreathed in that unmaking force — he thrust it with a yell into that writhing blackness.

The scream reached a fever pitch, the inky well of darkness seeming to have a fleshy core somewhere within, it grasped at the blade, tried to yank it and Bart both within, but Daedolon's lessons echoed in Bart's mind, and he twisted and jerked the blade back — another roar splitting his lips as he rolled his shoulders into a brutal horizontal slice, bisecting the shadowy, twisting thing with another blast of force that rocked his companions and buffeted his armored form... and then just like that...

Silence.

Bart held fast to the mantle, blade at the ready... and after a long moment, there came a faint sound of birdsong. The warmth of the sun filtered down over them, the scent of blood and coppery gore lessened, the very weight of gravity lessened. In the ruins of the altar, sat a single, small wicker doll, wrought of mud, hair, and sticks, cut in twain by his blow, the interior of the slab hollow and pouring a disgusting, tarry effluvium like a grisly stone womb for the broken fetish, the substances rapidly dissolving into a greasy black smoke that further evaporated to nothing in the gleam of the sun. The crackling power faded from Bart's blade, and Cithara's eyes and markings dimmed.

"You may release the mantle, my love... there is no danger here any longer, only sadness," she said, stepping forward to look down at the tiny wicker toy.

"What the bloody fi, fie, fo fiddley FOOK was THAT!?" Lidia spat as Gram helped her to her feet, her exposed face and arms lightly peppered in paper-thin slices from thrown debris, Nazir rising in a similar state, his black hair a windblown mess he smoothed out as he spat dirt from his mouth.

"An Altar to the Empty Queen," Cithara stated; "Yet more than that. Her altars are carried from the Ossuary, from the Balelands, made of the bones of the earth, wrapped and shaped around a tiny bit of her own stillborn womb," she said, eyes on the tiny wicker doll. "It was an actual piece of her, given blood and souls to grow and put down roots — creating a slice of her reality, her preferred world beyond the bounds of the Ossuary," she said grimly, turning to meet the companions' gaze.

"We destroyed many of them in the Verdant Crusade. Left unchecked, it would call new worshipers to it, to carry it away — and eventually to feed it more and more blood and souls until it grew wholly into a new..." she paused, considering her words a moment; "... limb, of the Queen herself. She is trapped within the Tombthrone by her own stillborn essence, bonded to the fetid womb of her dead Mother — these altars allow her to reach beyond it, to influence minds and reality as she does there." she explained, shaking the dust from her mane; "Your disorientation and difficulty remembering this place was her influence, she attempted to dissuade us, distract us."

"This is what they took the Ziggurat for, what the Wendigo killed all of those people in the Middlelands to get," Nazir said bitterly, Cithara nodded grimly as Bart raised his visor.

"Could you have destroyed it yourself?" Bart asked and she hesitated, looking back to the shattered altar, its black substance now nearly wholly gone, the little wicker fetish crumbling to dust.

"I could have... but to make direct contact with it, to strike it with flesh and bone is a danger... part of her could have entered unto mine own flesh, earthbound as I am. Thus why I needed your sword," she said, eyes meeting Bart's.

"Iron cares not, it cuts because it is made to."

The five brushed themselves clean, Bart keeping the blade at hand, more out of comfort than any necessity as he passed minor healing out among his companions; it did his heart good to be able to take a proactive role with hurts of the body, he understood Naima's drive even more now.

"Cithara," Bart said as he finished with Nazir, the southerner's bare arms had taken a beating when the altar had split, She looked up at him with an inquisitive glance.

"That power you wreathed my sword in, I have seen you use it before. Against the Ghuls in the Glade, and in our battle here — what is it? Why did you not teach me to conjure it?" he asked, and her eyes widened a little, flicking between the others and himself.

"... It is not for you, beloved." she hedged, Bart released his grasp on the mantle, hefting the blade in one hand. It was more and more comfortable at hand, a year of toil showed in him — and blood had told the story in battle.

"You know I will not accept that answer, not now," Bart said calmly, and the Unicorn sighed, her gaze rueful but she closed her eyes as if gathering herself.

"It is a difficult thing to put into words, you and your kind lack the understanding of it," she said, taking her gaze from Bart, his one-eyed stare intense as he inverted the blade before him, leaning his hands on the broad crosspiece. She paused once more, meditating on it for a long moment before she seemed to shrug her shoulders and then she met Bart's gaze once more, directly.

"It is the Light of God."

Bart frowned, his brow creasing as he looked down at the blade in his hands, running a thumb across the pommel, and the bundle of braids that dangled from it.