30th of Glade, 4621
With naught but his Necromancer’s kit, Arkash slunk home beneath the stars. The stomp of his polished shoes echoed against the tall stone walls of that Amoren street. The only other sound to fill the air that night was the whistling wind of Solace’s last breath. The month’s end was upon them, and a lot had happened since the start.
He'd come to accept that his magic was gone and that he wouldn’t be able to cast again. The only way he could alleviate himself of the curse was to earn the favor of an ascendant Nightfallen, a Stygian. Arkash knew only one ascended mage who just so happened to be a Stygian, and that was Brilan Ald, the woman that would conquer the world if she got her way. He wouldn’t go to her, not for a thousand years, not for all the power in the world. The young rath would sooner take a knife to his chest and carve the gunk from his soul by force.
He’d allowed himself to be weak before another in the confrontation of his loss, and such only strengthened his bond with that one.
And then he’d started his own business in Necromancy, a freelancer who performed services for the nobility… And he already hated his new career after the first assignment.
Something about the birthright of a noble meant that they saw themselves above the rest of the world, that they were more important, and that their needs came first. Their greed and entitlement, the pure evil and disregard for others had cost him his wages, his dignity, and his stability that night. Arkash was furious, seething through the cooler breeze of the evening’s air.
The broil of his anger clouded his senses and blinded him to everything but the image of that noble family, that girl’s smile. The intensity of the turmoil drowned out all sounds in the background, including the step of Sabatons on the cut stone road. The clank of metal eluded his keen hearing until he turned a corner, and the thrum of metallic boots quieted. At once, Arkash’s eyes widened, he perked up and listened to the open air. The pace was slow and methodical. Arkash furrowed his brow with a squint and continued down the road.
Even as the stomp of those boots stopped somewhere behind him, Arkash didn’t stop to turn. He walked with calm composure onward so as to not invoke suspicion, but the sound continued down his way after a deliberate turn in his direction.
It was then that Arkash began to believe that he was being followed.
Quite casually, Arkash slowed to a halt, then checked his wrist as if to imply there was a watch there. Then, he began to turn and lowered his wrist in the same motion. He made a bee-line for the nearest alley and enclosed himself in the stone walls. He proceeded as deep as he could with a quickened pace, which deepened the impression of his tracks in the alley’s mud, then turned to the right as the passage of stone turned, and continued until he came to a dead-end some maze of passages later.
The odds that someone would accidentally follow him there were slim to none; if the fall of boots became louder in that direction, he’d know the metal man was coming for him.
…
Echoing down the halls, the fall of a sabaton sounded. That same methodical, slow pace proceeded afterward. Arkash’s heart began to beat faster as his mind cycled through who it might be. Asmodei? No, that was much too hopeful, much too quiet. An Ebonknight? Possibly. The Halamire? Also possible. With a grimace, Arkash looked to the nearest rooftop, hefted his bag onto his shoulder, then launched it for the gutter. His heart stopped as the bag tumbled through the air, then continued to beat as it landed somewhat roughly on the rooftop. A deep exhale saw him bend down to undo the laces of his shoes, and he threw those in tandem. One missed and needed to be rethrown after it returned to the alley floor, but all his perishable belongings were out of the way.
Arkash was then presented with the choice; he could also climb the wall in an effort to evade whoever it was that followed him, but it was possible they’d just follow him to Degare’s Estate. It was better to deal with the threat then and there, he believed. So, he began to change to his true form and allowed his Cardinal features to unveil.
His basalt carapace turned pale with darkened scales around his eyes. The length of his tail fell from his tailcoat as vicious claws elongated from his toes and fingers. Black, featherless quills grew from the back of his neck and hands as black, frigid flames engulfed his sharpened teeth and claws. Once dormant, his venom glands activated and filled his mouth with the thick, sickly yellow composition of his natural toxin.
He fell into silence as the sound of marching sabatons grew louder and louder, meticulous in its tempo…. Until finally, it stopped.
Arkash squinted at the sudden halt, then rose his brows at the sound of metal striking mud.
Silence followed.
A dagger struck the ground in the distance ahead of him, followed by another a little closer. A third struck the ground with some sort of glyph drawn in the dirt around it, and Arkash squinted.
The air changed, and the quills of his neck and hands rustled at the shift in pressure. Instinct warned him that something enormous was coming, and Arkash threw himself out of the way as a storm of something flew toward his original position and struck the ground he’d stood upon with the crash of a reverberating tonality. All at once, the ground beneath him burst in an explosion of force that ruptured the earth and sent flecks of stone and earth hurtling through the air in all directions.
A duck of his head and a kick of his feet threw him out of the way of the debris, and he rolled across the ground to stick the landing.
As smaller pieces of earth rained on him, Arkash cast a glare at the man in the suit of armor as he stepped around the corner. The man was familiar in appearance, broad jawed with a tan complexion and dark hair. Thin stubble shadowed his sharp eyes, which raised in surprise as they settled on the Cardinal. His quills twitched again as the storm of tools that had rushed by him flung back toward his direction, and Arkash bared his teeth as he threw himself forward with a powerful leap.
Every strike of those things saw the ground reverberate and shatter with an ear-piercing ring. The whole ground shook around the fall of the unknown implements as they rushed toward Arkash with every throw and roll of his nimble form. Every strike was just mere inches from its mark or connecting with his body, and it obliterated the surface it struck with far greater damage than Arkash thought natural. The knight was wielding a Relic of some sort, it seemed. Several Relics, from what he could tell.
It was almost impossible to keep up with, as another fell within a split second of the first and the rumble of the earth pressed his sense of balance to his limit. Arkash had to throw himself from each tremor at the right time to seamlessly weave through the strikes, and with every miss, the battlefield became more turbulent.
Pieces of rock, brick, earth and other debris flew past and collided with him from all angles, some struck hard enough to knock him off balance, but he didn’t feel the pain as his adrenaline rushed.
Then, as a brick from one of the alley’s walls crashed into his leg above the knee, Arkash stumbled and fell. Before he could roll, one of the hammers that came to crash against him stopped. The Rathor’s own sharp eye caught that hesitance, and the way it altered its course to strike the ground beside him with an explosion of kinetic energy and threw him off his hands and knees and sent him tumbling through the mud.
His ribs were broken, the smell of his own blood was rich in the air and his body ached with the roots of abrasions all over his carapace.
Through his haze of pain, one thing stood out to him. Why didn't the knight finish him off? The flying hammers could have struck him a dozen times in the time he laid there, but the only thing he could sense was the fall of sabatons on the earth while his body repaired the less intense damage through his limited breathing.
He shut his eyes as the thud of Sabatons drew closer and when he opened them, he found the knight standing above him, hammer in hand with an enormous coffin shield strapped to his arm. Both hands seized the handle of the hammer with the head pointed down, the spike of which was aimed at Arkash. The spike, Arkash spied through the haze, and recalled the events near the beginning of the month… It was a Sunderstrike.
