They dodged early-morning travelers headed at a more reasonable pace for the capital.Turn back, you fools, she thought, barreling toward the very place she wished they wouldn’t go. When the rising sun began to dim, Amma refused to look over her shoulder, only driving forward harder as the day’s darkness crept up her back.
Eirengaard was silent save for a quiet hum of arcana. Normally one would hear the distant sounds of a city well before reaching it, but there were not even bird calls in the air as they approached the gates. The sky had completely darkened, the aligned moons holding the sun captive in the eclipse, but a ring of red light still shone over the realm, giving everything a bloody glow. The horses were spent, and Amma dismounted at the unpatrolled city gates. There was no need for guards, a wall of shadows thickly shrouding the entrance instead. She knew those shadows.
At their feet, the three imps went right up to the arcane barrier, and Quaz bolted in. A second later, he returned, tail wagging.
“Noxscura,” said Diana, raising a hand to it, and the shadowy wall bowed around her palm but didn’t break. She unsheathed her sword, glimmering with radiant light. Holding it aloft, she was poised to swing, then froze.
A set of eyes flashed from the hazy darkness, and then another, and another. Nothing crossed the barrier, but they watched, waiting to strike at the divine magic.
“Don’t attack them,” said Amma, kneeling into the dirt of the road and laying her fingers flat. She felt the earth pulsing under her hand, tumultuous with so much noxscura so close, but that was, perhaps, good. It had been shattered, but she could bring her staff back, stronger than before, and it formed under her fingers, growing up from the ground as she stood. Silvery strands of noxscura pooled inside its head, gathering from theshadowy wall itself, and liathau leaves, red under the darkened sky, blossomed along its length.
The glinting eyes took stock of it and her, and then they faded away. Amma took a step toward the arcane gates, they bowed, and then began to clear. Hands steady around the staff, Amma led them through, and they passed into Eirengaard.
Silence still rang through the capital, the streets clear of villagers but not empty. All manner of beasts stalked openly from the smallest rat with eyes aglow to massive behemoths, three stories tall on legs as thick around as trees. Fire imps like Kaz and the others, but blobby shadow imps too, and others with wooden-like limbs and antlers instead of horns, a few that were scaled, and some with skin like stone. Nothing moved to attack them, but eyes watched as they crept along the main thoroughfare.
Fissures blinked in and out of existence, drawn messily across the sky or through the earth. Tears bubbling with silver noxscura at their edges, eyes peered through from them, and then carefully a beast would emerge on spindly legs or leathery wings to join the rest.
Eirengaard was otherwise a clean, flat place, laid out thoughtfully so it was easy to traverse. The road into town continued down the city’s middle, pathways jutting off of it to take one to markets and inns and specialty shops, but led directly to Eirengaard Keep which loomed over the entire city. In the distance they could see it, more fissures crackling over its spires and arcing about like lightning. That had to be their destination.
Columns dotted the main road at every intersection, banners hanging laxly from them celebrating Osurehm, and under the reddened light, their burgundy had gone dark like pooling blood, the sun they depicted looking more like an eye, holding watch over all. Breezeless, the shadows that encircled the city held eventhe air captive.
Amma lowered her staff, confident they would be able to pass through the city unbothered so long as it was out. “I don’t understand what happened here.” Carts and market stands littered the thoroughfare, transactions abandoned on the road before them, coins and goods scattered.
Diana’s sharp eyes darted from beast to beast, a hand on her hilt but the blade sheathed. “There are infernal things crawling everywhere,” she said as if it were obvious which, to be fair, it was.
“Yes, but there’s no destruction. None of the buildings have been touched, there’s no blood in the streets or disembodied limbs hanging from the eaves. No fires have even been set. I mean, I expected carnage and mayhem, but look.” She pointed to the window of a shop where the faces of two small children were pressed against the glass, eyes wide with wonder and unharmed. “They’re trapped inside sure, but that’s…it?”
Diana grunted in confused agreement, and they picked up their pace, finding that nothing challenged their steady march to the castle. The keep grew more foreboding as they approached the sprawling gardens at its front. A silver fissure streaked above it, and a sound like many trumpets being blown off key filled the air as a flock of infernal geese burst into Eirengaard. They swooped overhead in formation and landed themselves in the garden’s pond, skimming across water that reflected the reddened sky, so like a pool of blood. Amma and Diana waited, but the birds only watched back ominously, floating on the unstilled waters, eyes like hollow sockets. It seemed infernal geese were not quite so different from ordinary ones.
The capital gardens that blanketed the keep’s entrance were always pristine and beautiful no matter the season, open to all and constantly being tended to. On this day, however, there were no gardeners about, only more of those bark-skinned imps andthe occasional slithering serpent. But even under the darkness of the odd, red lights, Amma could sense something different the moment they entered the high-hedged courtyard.
The garden once held ornamental trees in places of interest amongst the crossing pathways and flowering bushes, but those were gone now in favor of statues. She remembered, specifically, a plum willow she had always had affection for, but in its place now stood a massive pedestal holding a human figure. And it was…it was waving?
Amma came to a stop with a gasp, Diana taking a defensive stance at her side, but there was no apparent threat. Yet Amma could still feel a latent magic to the gardens she hadn’t before, something friendly mingling with the infernal, but sad too.
Amma broke from the path and crossed the soft grass to the statue that moved of its own accord. Magic that animated objects was not uncommon, but this felt unique, so similar to the bend of a tree in the wind. She’d also never seen a statue with such a strange coloration or pattern across it, and squinted, reaching out to touch its base. As her fingers grazed its smooth surface, a tingle ran up her arm, and a pink petal bloomed out of the wood.
“Liathau?”
Auberon Lumier, read the plaque carved into the statue’s base, more of the precious timber from her home. Amma’s eyes trailed up the effigy of the previous king of Eiren and Archibald’s father, depicted in full plate armor with a holy shield on one arm, the other extended in friendly greeting, forever immortalized in enchanted wood.
Bewildered, she sought out the other statues that dotted the gardens. More kings or knights or men of some repute were carved from liathau cores, moving with the arcana inherent to the trees. There was even one of a dog, its tail moving merrily in the breezeless air. “This is why they desecrated my orchard?” she breathed, voice hitching on the words. “For glory?”
“Amma?”
She spun despite thinking it could have only been her grief that cast the voice into her ear. Peeking out from behind a hedge was a set of pointed ears attached to a face still somehow pulled into mischief surrounded by so much chaos.
“Laurel!” Amma bound toward her, and the women collided, arms wrapped around each other, competing to see who could squeeze tightest. Laurel lifted her, and at her back there was Perry, staying close, irresolute and wide-eyed. Amma grabbed at his robes and tugged him into the embrace, tears springing to her eyes. “You came to Eirengaard?”
“I did say I would get Perry to the exams. But I think they might be canceled.” Laurel’s slick hair was pulled high on her head and trailing down her back, swishing as she looked at the acolyte beside her and hooked her arm into his. “We did have some help though. Stitches, come meet Amma.”
A skeletal figure eased itself out from the hedge. It was hugely tall, likely due to its four-legged, lower half, and wore a bandoleer over its bony, human chest that was outfitted with daggers, needles, and thread. Stitches said nothing, but the skeleton centaur waved, and Amma politely waved back.
“He’s from the Army of the Undead, isn’t he?”
Laurel nodded with a grin. “And you should see his herringbone ladder.”
Stitches pulled a small square of fabric from a pocket on his bandoleer covered in embroidery.
