Unconquered Pt. 15

The city of Samsara was not pure chaos -- Chirp thought that was mildly inappropriate. A city with so many people, packed into such a tight area, falling to an invading army should have been a place where chaos was expected and bloodshed was plentiful. But as Chirp walked beside Ejana, the Black Rose, the generalissimo who commanded the Piss Boot Legion and their auxiliaries, they found that the conquest of a city was so far fairly neat and tidy. Part of this was because the citizenry of Samsara, long ground beneath the heel of the Regent and his brutal Regency, were taking to the streets. Buoyed by the words of Ember, the Unconquered, they were self-organizing into their own squadrons, gathering up weapons and taking the fight to the First Legion, whose men were tasked with defending the city.

"I don't like it," Ejana said, shaking her head.

"Wh...you don't...why?" Chirp asked, trying to quash the feelings of being a useless hanger on.

An Infused Knight wearing First Legion colors sprang from behind a cart where he had been hiding. He punched at the air and a snarling bolt of lightning shot from his knuckles, hissing towards the two. Ejana kicked upwards from where she stood, her heel rising above head. Dragged behind her heel was a shimmering wall of rosebuds and thorns, their colors vibrant in the haze and dust of the embattled city. The lightning bolt slammed into the wall of flowers with a smell like charred wood. Ejana shifted on her heel and slammed her palm into the wall -- which collapsed onto the Infused Knight with a groaning, creaking crackling noise.

Dust and wind blew Ejana's rose red hair as she frowned. "This is too easy. Fifteen cruisers, a smattering of antimagic fields?" She shook her head, then turned to one of the runners -- a young woman with short cut white hair and a scarred face. "Go find me the Unconquered."

Chirp gulped. "D-Do you think Ember, uh, is in danger?" they asked.

"I doubt it," Ejana said, frowning. "Unless he ran ahead without the other Lunars."

Chirp felt their stomach knotting with tension and guilt. "I..." Before they could continue, a massive, furred figure slipped past them, grinding against their back. They blinked in time to see the immense brown panther that Ceaith had become moments before a blue haze surrounded the Lapis. When it had faded, Ceaith was standing beside Chirp, scowling at Ejana.

"I thought that Samsara's first and finest would be, you know, less of a fucking pushover," she said.

"Well, um, we are being led by Ember?" Chirp said, their voice soft.

Ceaith looked at them -- and Chirp saw the normally fierce, crackling intensity of Ceaith's eyes (like a pair of spiky porcupines had been how Xora had described Ceaith's eyes when she hadn't been listening) soften. Ceaith reached out and ruffled Chirp's hair. "I mean, if you call this being led. I haven't seen hide nor hair of him since we got over the walls."

Chirp felt a slow turning twist in their stomach. Then a flare of golden light sparked out of the corner of their eye. The sounds of battle around them faded -- and she saw the Legionaries that were hurrying to take up positions in the front lines were pausing, slowing. The civilian bands who were moving up to take their positions as well stopped as well. Chirp lifted their head as Xora and the Rose both joined them and Ceaith. The other Lunars had come from an alleyway, and their conversation had faded in the brilliance of that golden blaze. The last of them, Tayar, pressed her hands to Ceaith's shoulders. Ceaith took Xora's hand in theirs, while Ceaith grabbed Chirp's other hand.

Together, they gaped up at the most horrible dawn.

Standing atop the immense golden statue to the Regent was a figure wreathed in a golden bonefire of excess mana.

But it was not Ember.

The Regent stood there, upon his likeness' shoulder. But he was unmasked and terrible, his lips turned down in a frown. Even from a mile or so off, his features were burned into Chirp's eyes -- into the eyes of every soldier fighting for the Unconquered. The magic that burned through him made it possible.

"No..." Ceaith whispered. But Chirp saw the same thing she did.

The Good King Bahul, the Tenth Unconquered, stood upon his own statue, and held the body of Sleepy Ember in one hand, his fingers clenched around Ember's red hair. The sagging, boneless way that Ember hung made Chirp feel as if their ears were filled with a wild roar. Bahul lifted Ember one handed as his anima burned all the brighter. His voice boomed across the city. "The blasphemer known as Ember...the anathema...has fallen!" He swung Ember around, gripping the limp form in his hands, holding Ember the same way a carpenter would hold a few cubits of wood. He brought Ember's body down upon his knee and the crack was audible, even from the street.

And with that, Bahul threw Ember forward -- and Chirp could not tear their eyes from the tiny dot that was their husband, their love, their life, plunging towards the city streets. The buildings that arranged themselves between where they stood and there were a mercy. But a thin one.

Beside Bahul, an Infused Knight with marble white skin and hair like stone plates stepped up. He held aloft a war standard for the First Legion and a set of horns blared. The clouds overhead rippled, like water under the pounding of rain. Ejana stepped forward, her face slack with shock. "Oh no," she whispered. "That signal flag -- it means-"

The clouds parted.

Arranged over the city, concealed until this moment, was the aerial detachments of the First, the Second, the Fourth and the Eighth Legions. A hundred and twenty eight battleships. Their mana cannons twinkled and flared, sparkling across the sky.

For a moment, there was beauty.

And then, Armeggedon.

***

The first thing he felt was the heat.

Then the smell.

And then the laughter.

"Well, well, well. Someone's off the wheel."

He groaned, slowly, and opened his eyes. "I was awake..." He mumbled. "I was awake, just...resting my eyes..." He pushed himself onto his palms and felt the rough, jagged stone under his palms and he knew, instantly, that he was not in Rataka Village.

Ember's eyes snapped open and he saw the demons kneeling before him. They were green skinned and covered in short, spiny protrusions. Their muzzles -- long and doglike -- dripped with bile. Their eyes bugged out of their stubby skulls and their bilious black pupils fixed onto his face as they leered at him with exaggerated delight.

"He's awake, is he?" one of the demons cackled.

"Oh, I bet he wishes he wasn't," the other said.

Ember tried to scramble to his feet. But his body felt sluggish and slow -- and then one of the demons, moving faster than he had ever seen anything move in his life was upon him. Their clawed hand closed around Ember's throat and them the demon twisted and flung him against the hard wall of the roughhewn cave that they stood in. Ember felt his head ring as he collapsed to his palms, gasping as the demons laughed. Ember shook his head, trying to focus, trying to let his mana flow through him. There was just one problem.

He didn't have any.

His hand went to his forehead, and he felt it was bare. He didn't have his soulgem.

"None of those here, Unconquered," the demon cackled before pulling out a leather collar from behind its back. It snapped it around Ember's throat with a single cruel twist of its hand, before dragging him to his feet on the leash. "Come on. Lets give the hero his tour."

"W-Where am I?" Ember hissed.

"Isn't it obvious?" the other demon asked.

The two of them pushed him to the jagged opening of the cave. It looked like it was opening towards an infinite drop towards a swirling sea of madness -- but then Ember was shoved through and felt his center of gravity spinning wildly. His arms flailed and he tried to keep himself standing -- and he was standing. He had just walked from the lip of a cave to the wall underneath it. But now the wall was the floor, and the cave he had been in looked like a hole in the ground behind him. The wild chaos that he had seen as something that was outwards now hung above him.

It looked as if he was standing at the bottom of an immense cyclone...or maybe the eye of a hurricane would be a better description. But rather than wind and water, the eye was made of souls. They didn't scream, or howl, or wail. Instead, they looked as if they were slumbering as they whirled around and around and around overhead, shimmering like a red froth. Occasionally, a purple-blue arc of lightning would reach across the center of the eye and rush outwards, towards where it opened into the more familiar red chaos of the Sunder.

However, the cyclone was merely the chimney. It started half a mile up, capping a long set of terraced walls, which themselves formed an immense amphitheater. Those terraces, each one large enough to hold the city of Samsara itself in its entirety, ringed around the pock-marked plain that Ember stood upon. Those terraces held cities. But they were made not of stone and wood...rather, they were made of brass and blackened soulcidian. Devils and demons flew from rooftop to rooftop, while the wailing screams of the tormented filled the air. Towers, made of stacked cauldrons filled with bubbling water and capped with heavy cages, thrust into the air throughout the cities, and he could see arms sticking out past the cages, reaching desperately for salvation as devils snapped and cut at the arms, laughing and cackling.

"I'm in Hell," Ember whispered.

"Wow, got a real smart one here," the demon beside him said, laughing. "Yes, you're in Hell, Ember. An express ticket, courtesy of a knife tipped with devil venom."

Ember shook his head, numbly.

"Come on!" The demon said, tugging him forward on the leash. "The boss was told to expect you special."

Ember, his eyes widening further, started to walk forward. Without the power of the Unconquered flowing through his veins, a thousand things that he had forgotten about began to make themselves known. The blazing heat of Hell caused sweat to bead on his body. The sharp rocks and uneven ground that he walked upon tried to trip him and send him stumbling to his knees. His big toe nail cracked on one impact and began to bleed sluggishly, and still the demons jerked him to his feet and kept marching him forward. Time seemed to stretch and compress without rhyme of reason. Ember felt as if he had been walking for centuries -- but then he blinked and they had moved from the plains that stretched around the hole he had woken in to the ramp leading into one of the devil cities. Here, more devils eyed him as he walked by. Leering. Laughing. Jeering. A few of them threw rotting fruit at him, which splattered against his shoulders.

Ember saw other people like him. Humans who had been sent or dragged to Hell. Many of them were being whipped or boiled alive or, in one horrible case, eaten alive. But some of them were walking mostly free about the city. He saw a man in a green robe with glowing black eyes, who strode past demons as they bowed to him. He held, in one hand, a folded piece of paper scrawled with the word Sorcerer, which he flashed at any devil that wasn't quick enough to suit him. The last Ember saw of the sorcerer was him slicing a hole in the air with the card, then stepping through it.

After ascending another ramp into the next level of the devil cities, Ember was taken before a pyramidal structure that radiated a shadow so deep and intense that it felt as if all light from beyond it was growing dimmer. Even the storm of souls overhead seemed muted and distant as Ember was pushed forward. There was no door to the pyramid. Just one moment, he was standing outside. The next, he was standing in the presence of evil.

The presence was hard to pin down, precisely. Ember found his eyes skidding away from the full bulk of it -- but he had a sense that it was large. Larger than the room should have been able to hold. Larger than the whole of Hell should have contained. And yet, within that immensity, he felt many shifting senses of attention. Like there were a dozen men and a dozen women, all of them looking right at him, whispering to one another under their breath. He forced his eyes to look straight forward, clenching his jaw -- sweat breaking out on his forehead and dripping down his spine.

His effort paid off.

Curled -- coiled -- before him was a dragon made of pure, midnight shadow. And when it spoke, it spoke by creating a nothingness inside of Ember's head. A void that was filled in by Ember's own mind -- like completing the sentence of a hated lover, or filling in the words of a puzzle written by the terminally insane. The fact that the not-words were so clear to Ember made his stomach turn over in his belly.

[Welcome, Unconquered. You are the first of your breed to be in my court for a very long time. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the First Circle worldbody of the Devourer, the Shadow Dragon of the Devil Court. I believe you've met several of my Sixth Circle Shards before? Viridai of the Vitriolic Depths?]

Ember nodded, slowly, trying to sound brave when what he wanted to do was to burst into tears of pure fright. "Y-Yes. I dropped a house on them."

The Shadow Dragon's not-eyes narrowed and a not-tongue caressed unair with delight. [How wonderfully provincial.]

Ember nodded. "So. Hell. What a place."

The Shadow Dragon chortled. [Quite.]

Silence ticked by.

"Can I go now?" Ember asked.

The Shadow Dragon laughed, unmoving his antihead, his uneyes remaining unclosed as mirth bubbled through the skein between realities. His claws scraped along the ground as he drew his foreclaws along the stone, leaving behind fresh white furrows on the soulcidian. Faint puffs of greenish ghosts began to try and creep out on the furrows. [Absolutely not, Unconquered! We have not had a valuable prize like you in many thousands of turnings of the Sunder.]

Ember clenched his hands. "Bargaining chip? Why? Are false Unconquered's so valuable?"

[False? No. Not false. Never false.] The Shadow Dragon unleaned forward. [Do you know what your world is? Why it is? And why you are?]

Ember blinked. "Uh. T-The Sun decided to make the world. He made gods and then they-" He stopped as the Shadow Dragon giggled. His tail had actually moved up to try and cover his non-muzzle. Ember scowled. "Fine! Just tell me the horrible truth now! Rip off the bandage. I'm in Hell. It's not like things can get any worse."

[Very well,] the Shadow Dragon said. [But the story must begin at the beginning. Have you ever heard...of Earth?]

Ember's brow furrowed. "Like...the ground?"

The Shadow Dragon chortled. [No, my dear Unconquered. The planet.]

***

Ceaith trudged forward, her head bowed with exhaustion. The weight of the six hundred people on her back was beginning to ache, and her anima flickered every few steps. But she kept walking forward, shifted to her largest of her aspect forms -- a house sized house cat. Her fur was bedraggled and sooty and covered with grime. The people on her back were barely any better. Most of them were survivors from Samsara, dressed only in what little they had been dressed in at the beginning of the march. To her left, Xora was dragging three whole wagons, her shoulders straining as she kept her hands braced on the yoke that was normally hooked to the harnesses of elephants. Each time Xora put her foot down, the road crunched and cracked under the pressure of the weight she was carrying.

To her right, Chirp was in their aspect form as well -- the battle form that they hadn't used for the entire battle, which gave Chirp the strength to drag just as many carriages as Xora. Overhead, Tayar flew in slow circles, keeping watch in every directions to make sure no one was sneaking up on them. Ahead of them, Jaquline was scouting the route in her fox form, using her ears and her nose in equal measures to keep watch.

Those who could walk, though, were. Civilians and the Seventh Legion both walked together. It was sometimes almost impossible to tell where a civilian began and a Legionary ended -- everyone who could walk was grimy and bitter and battered. Many of them were wounded.

"He's not dead..." Ceaith whispered, her voice a husky growl.

Xora and Chirp both looked at her.

They didn't say 'i thought you never liked him' or 'he was a guy most of the time' or 'we saw him get broken in half, before being thrown into a city that was shortly turned into swirling chaos by a bombardment of mana cannons and vortex arrows.'

Instead, they just kept walking.

As the Sun's eye began to creep open overhead, the Lunars ushered the tattered remains of their army off the roads and into the shelter of the forests. Overhead, skyships would sometimes dart by. But the Regent -- King Bahul -- didn't seem to be hounding them as hard as he could. When Ceaith brought that up around the camp fire, while a hastily butchered deer was being cooked, a voice she didn't expect snorted.

"Of course not," June Devilblooded said, looking just as battered as the rest of them. "Ember's rebellion threw the whole of the Regency into chaos. Bahul, the dickhead, is going to be fucking putting out fires for months. And it's not like we're an actual threat. We're down a God-King. In case you-"

Each Lunar glared at her. June's face fell and she looked away. "Sorry."

Ceaith shook her head. "Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck him!" She said, then stood, scowling. "Where's Goat."

"Uh...hey!" June shouted. "Kiddy diddler!"

A soft groan sounded and then Goat Who Wrestled stepped out. "I told you, she was perfectly-"

Ceaith thrust her finger at Goat. "Can you teach us?" She asked.

"Ceaith?" Xora asked.

"Can you teach us how to use that...fuck you up combat style that Ember was learning?" Ceaith asked, her hands on her hips. "We might not be...fucking...Chosen by the Sun to save the world or anything, but we can still fucking do it. So, we just need to get stronger so we can find that dipshit Bahul and kick his fucking ass."

"Ceaith-" Chirp started.

"Shut up, Chirp, I know you don't kill anyone. That's fine. Four Lunars against one Unconquered, those are basically almost even odds. They'll be even more even when we can do that whole...fuckery...with the..." She trailed off, her ears drooping. She felt very tired. She knuckled at her eye. "With the shit."

"The fuckery with the shit, huh?" Goat asked, his voice wry.

"You know what I fucking mean!" Ceaith shouted.

Goat sighed. "No. Teaching Ember was foolish."

"Oh, you-" Ceaith stepped forward. Jaquline and Xora both grabbed her around the arms, jerking her to a stop. "You're giving up? Why? Just because the last Unconquered is still alive and a fucking dickhead?"

"He's the Unconquered. History is littered with the corpses of people who underestimated the Unconquered," Goat said, his voice grim. "Besides. Even if I was convinced to teach you. Even if I agreed to do this foolish, foolhardy thing, even then...we'd still need to not be hunted. We'd need to be in a safe place. With allies." He nodded. "Can you manifest those out of thin air?"

"Yes!" Ceaith snapped.

Goat laughed. "Oh, wonderful, I-"

"Tayar!" Ceaith snapped her fingers, pointing at the Pearl. "Fly west." She grinned.

Tayar, who looked less wan and tired than everyone else through some obscure magic inherent in being the oldest of the Lunars in the group, blinked at Ceaith. Then she smiled, slowly. "You know what? That's an excellent idea." And before anyone could say anything, Tayar folded in on herself, a white haze surrounding her body. Her wings flared and she fluttered into the air, then shot off -- a streak in the gathering daylight. Ceaith yawned and settled back onto her knees.