The Grim King carefully lifted up the baby, who was wrapped in the blue receiving blanket the Host had given her.
“Little one, my name is Eldred. Three thousand years of legacy flows through me. Now kiss my hand.”
He gently held out the back of his hand to Tychon’s lips.Tychon woke, looked at Eldred’s hand, and grabbed one of his bony fingers.
In a voice softer and more pleasant than Yuma had ever heard him use, the Grim King said, “You are hereby apprenticed to Eldred. And you shall become king of this land.”
He lightly lowered the baby back into the crib and covered him up to the chin with the small orox-hide blanket.
“The flowers embroidered on this blanket used to proliferate on the steppe,” he observed. “Now they are no more. They used to bloom only for a few days in the summer every year, but they disappeared around fifty years ago and not a trace of them remains.”
Aidan had managed to pass every trial the Grim King had put before him, only to have his Power taken away and to be banished. That the Grim King considered him unworthy but allowed Aidan to survive simply to leave behind progeny—Yuma did not believe this anymore. After all, the Grim King hadn’t cared about the lives of the other children who hoped to become his apprentice. Maybe Aidan was special in that he had passed the tests, and to Eldred was no longer as insignificant as the forgotten white summer flowers of the steppe.
The Grim King nodded to Yuma and left the room.
That night, a bell that had never rung since Yuma’s arrival rang three times. She could hear the roaring of the legion outside. But this was not the roar of attack upon a fortified wall. It was the roar of victory. Yuma was trying to look outside the windows when one of the skeletal servants entered. It bowed and gestured to her to follow.
Yuma then knew that this was the end. She took her timedressing herself in her riding gear, held Tychon close to her, and followed.
The Grim King sat on his white throne of bones, his robes burning silently like hearth fire, a large crystal ball in his hand. Through it, he could see everything the stormbirds that patrolled Merseh saw. Yuma walked up the dais to him. Eldred gave her a glance and said, “Chief Herder of Danras, I believe what we have expected and feared for so long has finally arrived.”
Peering into the crystal ball, she saw a lone legionary with a strangely shaped body. Why was the stormbird flying so close to a single soldier? Then, she realized what she was really seeing. This wasn’t a soldier. It was a giant made of iron, as tall as the smaller towers of the castle. It was walking toward them on two feet.
“What is that?”
“The Empire’s ‘gigatherion.’ A machine titan running on a Power generator.”
“I never would’ve imagined such a thing would exist.”
The roaring outside coalesced into a single discernible name.
“Apollyon! Apollyon! Apollyon!”
“It must be that thing’s name,” mused the Grim King.
“Is it all over?” She was almost relieved.
But the Grim King floated a mischievous grin. “We shall see. I am not finished yet. I have prepared something for this very occasion.”
His mouth made a sound no human mouth could have made. Flinching, Yuma covered her baby’s head. The floor shook, the throne of bones rose upward, and the ceiling above them split and opened like the double eyelids of a lizard. The Grim King andYuma now looked down at the battlefield from a great height, the Powered chariots and soldiers of the Fifth Legion looking like ants compared to the gigatherion Apollyon approaching from afar.
The Grim King held out his arms to the sky, dark clouds gathering to cover the starry night. His robes burned brighter, flames threatening to lick the sky itself. Yuma caught glimpses of stormbird shadows in the clouds. Then, lightning flashed, lighting up the night sky. One of the lightning bolts hit Apollyon squarely in the chest, but aside from a loud mechanical screech, it seemed unaffected. Rain began to pour. It was thick and black. Her body battered by rain and wind, Yuma turned to the Grim King.
“My young apprentice,” he said, “you don’t think all I’m about to do is throw a few lightning bolts, now, do you?” His words were for Tychon, but his eyes were fixed on the sky. “Behold. Your master’s final wonder.”
The rain thickened into a dark cloudburst, and the wind threatened to blow Yuma’s hat away. She pressed her hand on it. Four bolts of lightning crashed down between the approaching Apollyon and the legionaries. There was a rumbling separate from the thunder, and the earth shook. All the legionaries looked behind themselves.
High up in the sky, the air rippled like a pond disturbed by a pebble. The ripples slowly merged into a violet swirl, a veritable maelstrom of magic. A fearful murmur rose among the soldiers.
Something red and black sprouted from the sky, a hand or a paw, neither human nor animal.
The legion began to retreat, their cries for the gigatherion turning into screams of fear.
Yuma stared at the monster emerging from the sky. LikeGaramund, it was made of orox bones and flesh, but this creature was as tall as the gigatherion. It had a long neck; a head of countless eyes that glowed green; sharp sword-like teeth made of bones; front paws with huge, curved claws… It even had a pair of bat-like wings made from orox leather and stitched together with thick tendons.
The Grim King, his arms stretched before him, kept making strange vocalizations. Yuma did not know whether it was the language of his birth or that of another world. He never did answer Yuma’s questions of where he had come from and why he chose Merseh as his conquest.
The monster struck Apollyon’s shoulder with its clawed paw. The sturdy gigatherion, which had looked unstoppable, fell backward from the force. The monster immediately pressed down on the machine with one paw and ruthlessly struck down with its other at the machine. The Grim King laughed excitedly.
