THE FORSAKEN LAND OF GENèSE

  600

  “Where are your men?!”

  The Eunuch’s shrill voice penetrated the emptiness.

  It was wrong! All wrong!

  The comet arrived ahead of course.

  Their steel protectors broke through their strings of command and disobeyed a royal edict. Less soldiers than ballerinas, they’d found all but one prancing around in circles without a smidge of monster blood on their armour.

  The mercenaries, six able-bodied and somewhat able-minded men chosen personally by Her Radiance, failed to carry out the simplest task of all. How the hell were they going to slay the world destroyer without the meat-fodder?

  Hovering above a horde of inhuman shapes, the motifoir narrowly restrained the urge to descend to the ground and collapse to his hands and knees. A clew of Nematoda emerged from the sand in a ring. They were double the size of the Scorchland Scourges, with a strange purplish pattern on their hides.

  The motifoir realised a bronze cube.

  There were nine faces on each side, segmented into three layers.

  “Analysis!”

  The topmost layer rotated only once. At this, he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Temperature control!”

  The worms shrieked as their internal moisture evaporated, desiccated before their lifeless husks hit the sand.

  “You’d better watch your head, Penny boy!”

  Eunuch Penn ducked as a breeze blew over his head.

  It cleaved through a shadow that rose behind him. A worm larger than all the others was this close to swallowing the scholar. Instead, the captain’s attack caught it between the jaw, splitting it evenly as its maw descended.

  “See that?” Boasted the mercenary. “A perfect split.”

  “I know you heard my question, Windshear Fang! I demand you answer at once!”

  A troop of archers loosed their bowstrings. A volley of arrows shot forth. Like the skeletal archers themselves, the arrowheads were made of a reflective black stone. Each one exuded a sinister aura, like a bad omen falling from the sky.

  The mercenary captain called upon a breeze to shield him from the assault. “What was that?” He chuckled. “Oh, no need to thank me.”

  Seven arrows hovered around his figure.

  “Thank you?!” roared the scholar.

  “Ah, what the hell,” panted his comrade.

  It was the only sign of effort. Because between the chaos of battle, the elation of using his abilities, and knowing he had a forever-playful friend, such as the wind, to share in his ecstasies, his shoulders couldn’t feel any lighter.

  Jonah, the Prodigal Son of Dunreach Village, was beaming from ear to ear. “You’re welcome!”

  But the scholar was not happy with this.

  Years of pattern reading. Thirty-seven thousand scrolls of calculations. All those sleepless nights. And nothing was going according to plan!

  The reason for that was clear.

  This mercenary was an irregularity.

  The queen spent months convincing the court to take up this plight. Planning started another three months prior, with a banquet with the kingdom’s top scholars. Of course, none of them refused the call to action.

  Firstly, who in their right mind would turn down a request from Her Radiance? And secondly, what self-respecting motifoir would turn down a chance to come up with the equation that saved the world?

  Selecting the right variables was the first step in their calculations.

  So, in that sense, this plan was doomed from the very start.

  It should take a miracle for a room of the world’s most self-centred lot to agree on millions of possibilities. But the world was doomed in every equation where this man showed his face.

  But the queen, that foolish woman, saw his face in her revelations. She insisted that they build an equation around him. Likely having fallen in love with him at first sight. Penn, like all the others, obliged, finding few expressions in which his rashness could be tamed. They were wrong.

  The only thing worse than hubris is the power to back it up.

  This man had both of those in spare.

  The skeletal archers shattered as the arrows tore through their skulls.

  The mercenary didn’t wait for their shards to fall. He propelled himself into the middle of the horde, where the last remaining steel man was severing and splitting the horde time and time again with an arsenal of lusterless weaponry.

  When its enemies were tall, it switched to a polearm.

  When they were small, it switched to a warhammer.

  When they were fast enough to dodge, it switched to a dagger.

  With each choice of weapon, a templar’s wisdom. And with every fallen foe—a soldier’s resolve.

  A one-eyed beast shook the earth and lunged over its kin.

  The soldier received a punch with a single gauntlet. An impact that echoed beneath the heavens. The cyclopean shadespawn scoffed, its un-skinned muscles tightening, driving the soldier to his knees under the weight of a living mountain.

  The soldier dropped his weapon.

  But he pushed back.

  His gauntlet bent, but he pushed back.

  He could dismiss his sword and realise the weapon again if he wanted to. End this battle with wits instead of brutish strength. But he saw contempt in the enemy’s eye and pushed even harder.

  Because to look down on a tourist was to disdain his nation. And to look down on a student was to mock his teacher. But to look down on a knight was to disdain his liege.

  And to this particular commander, who’d lost his squadron to an order, that sin remained unforgivable.

  His visor glistened in Evermore’s light.

  The armour groaned back to its feet and met the enemy, eye to eye.

  The cyclops wept.

  And then, its stomach rippled.

  On the second punch, it caved in.

  And on the third, the steel man’s bloody gauntlet broke through a thick spine and emerged through his back. Because if an enemy disdained his lady, he would simply beat them to death with his fists.

  With some unwanted help from the Eunuch, Jonah cleaned up a second cyclops a moment later. Fighting back-to-back with the suit of armour, it was a feat that the young man was able to keep up. Together, they cleaved through another wave of enemies.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The steel man dismissed his weapon and assumed a meditative position with his head down and his legs crossed.

  “Good job, guy!” Jonah slapped the soldier on the back of the head. It gave an indifferent glance.

  Sir Penn dismissed his instrument, ready to descend. But when he saw the blanket of slaughter covering the battlefield, he scowled from his position above the others. “Our calculations were unanimous in that Signus would depart when the comet struck, and it did so several days ahead of schedule.”

  “Signus? You mean the dragon?”

  Rolling his eyes, he continued, “Her Radiance’s beast—a wyvern. Yes. And its early departure means that the horde wasn’t lured away as far away from our destination as we would have preferred. If we don’t want to end up as some creature’s brunch, we can’t keep waiting for your men.”

  “You said that we need canon fodder for the world-destroyer.”

  The scholar gave the mercenary a once-over from head to toe. “I admit that the pattern-seers didn’t give the queen enough credit. This time,” he added through gritted teeth. “I ran you through my calculations as one of many variables. When, instead, you should have been an operand—something that changes the very foundation of the equation. In that, you may prove beneficial as you are detrimental to the original expression.”

  "But if we stay here, fighting shades on a madman's whim, we will perish long before reaching the crater." He didn't need to say who he meant. "For now, we rest. Then we make haste."

  Jonah shrugged. The air here was getting stale anyway

  He was having fun, pretending to be a knight. Holding an imaginary line with one of the legendary steel soldiers. But so far, he hasn’t even got to try out his new sword. And it was itching for a better fight.

  “Your comrades. Is there any chance they may have perished?” repeated the scholar. There was a slight unevenness in his tone. Hopeful, almost. “Do you think they even tried to follow us in?”

  Jonah shrugged. “Those guys can get pretty rowdy when I let them out of my sight,” he said, vibrating with his own rowdiness. A barely contained energy in his hands and feet, that wanted to keep on moving. Like them, Jonah’s hair never remained still. There was an eternal gust around his fringes, making them sway—his lifetime play-pal urging him to go, go, go! “They might have killed all the prisoners on the spot, though. Fifty-Fifty, maybe?”

  “Fifty-Fifty?!” shrieked the scholar. “How dare you suggest such abysmal odds!”

  When the first human being discovered the language of probability, his caravan numbered less than seventy. Thirteen noble households on a pilgrimage across the Land Forsaken, following revelation from a prophet wearing a golden crown: their kingdom’s complete annihilation at the tendrils of an eclipsant, the second-largest threat to humanity.

  It was on that journey, beneath a hardwood in a garden, that the patriarch of the noble house of numbers, Solomon, fell asleep. A man who’d grown quite fed up over the years with the scales of chance, which seemed ever-tipped to a single side—misfortune.

  Misfortune when a madman masquerading in flesh chanced upon their kingdom and demanded entry. When the king ordered his execution, he erased their arrows, then their soldiers, then their king.

  Misfortune when he took up residence anyway.

  And his presence was so utterly vile that the women were scared out of their rhythms. They stopped bleeding. And therefore, they stopped bearing children.

  Misfortune when their ancestors drew borders around a sleeping shadespawn’s domain. That beast, returning victorious from its century-long hunt, found that cockroaches had built a nation upon its bed.

  And just when he thought the scales had tipped enough, the heavens wrought upon him the greatest misfortune of all. He jolted out of his sleep because an apple had fallen upon his head!

  The irate mathematician picked up the apple, fully intending to toss the damn thing into the sun. But when he felt its weight, saw the sleek lines carved into the surface of its golden peel, feeling the radiance of an everlasting promise seep into his fingers, infecting his very soul, he sank his teeth into the fruit.

  He woke up again, thinking it was all a dream.

  Solomon, the unsurprised. Humanity’s first pattern-seer.

  From that day on, he stood atop the scales of fortune.

  If it weren’t for him, humanity would have died out there in the wilderness. While the other twelve noble families kept the bestowments of their fruit to the grave, the wise Solomon was said to make disciples of every man he met.

  He and his students were like prophets, spreading far and wide.

  The man died without an heir, but chance arithmetic has been passed down through generations. Especially in Shindholm, where he lived out his days as counsel to the king.

  The motifoirs—to say that no project in the kingdom’s history succeeded without their input was a fact. To say that none was undertaken without their approval was an understatement.

  Until recently, of course.

  Jonah stretched his arms with a yawn. “He’ll probably make it, though.”

  Clicking his tongue, the scholar asked, “You mean the one called Albane?”

  Jonah didn’t ask why he’d called one of his men by name. He didn’t like much like talking to the eunuch. Too many words. Not enough action. “Nah, I wouldn’t mind if he kicked the bucket. I’m talking about the dreamer-boy. My kid brother, Sully.”

  “Your kid brother?” asked Sir Penn with a light scoff. “I know brutes don’t care much for semantics, but to still call him your brother after what you’ve done to him is even more ludicrous than suggesting he’d make it here on his own.”

  “Oh yeah? What are the chances?”

  He realised a cube with nine faces on each side. The Decanohedron.

  It was the measuring tool and weapon he’d used earlier on in the battle, gifted to those who graduated from the school of thought. It was only a copy of the original, but thirty-six cells were more than enough to run the necessary equations on a snot-nosed brat.

  Turning the edges as he’d done a thousand times before, his expression went from a brilliant sneer—not as brilliant as he, of course—to disbelief. As if the world’s greatest mathematician had momentarily forgotten what came after two.

  Jonah picked up his fallen sneer. “What’s the matter, brainbox-”

  “One per cent,” interrupted the scholar, dismissing the cube.

  Mental exhaustion tugged faintly under the eyes. As expected of running several hundred calculations in under a moment. Absurd that a single child could be surrounded by so many variables, but the Decanohedron was never wrong.

  “Factoring in your abuse, the Forsaken Land’s conditions, the little goliath’s likely combustion, and his history with the rest of your men…” His bony hands returned to the sleeves of his spacious purple robe. “There is less than a one per cent chance that your little brother will make it here at all, much less on his own.”

  Sir Penn took back his sneer. “He will die, Windshear Fang. The scales do not tip in his favour.”

  Metallic humming covered the background as the steel knight sank into meditation. His armour turned red hot, chips in the surface resealing. Dents pulling back to perfection.

  Jonah looked over his shoulder, just as unfazed by the eunuch’s proclamation as he’d been by everything else in this forsaken place. “You wanna bet?”

  The Forsaken Land of Genesis was a sea.

  A sea of lightless nothingness all the way to the centre. A sea of tales, the contents of each one whispered lower, deeper than the last, and darker, still. It was a sea in the middle of the world, made of dreams desiccated beyond recognition.

  A giant’s rageful echo rippled across the sea as it sank beneath the threshold. Drowning in the depths until it was muffled, then no more. When the fire died out with him, the depths were tranquil.

  But there was another.

  A basin in the middle of the larger pool, its contents an opaque ‘glass-like’ borne of his violent eruption—obsidian. Its surface was glossy. Pitch-black. A colour owed to a sand that was dark to begin with, and, like the ocean mirrors the blue, the reflection of an eternal night sky that held nothing at all.

  It was a lake frozen in time.

  And on its shores, there was a certain predator feasting on its prey.

  The insect chirped happily as its mandibles clasped his temple.

  Its last legs pressed into his chest so the body wouldn’t move with the head. It pulled until bloody fissures were tracing the wrinkles of his neck. And widening until the spine was the last thing keeping him together. Stringy connective tissues resisted their pull, stretching to their elastic limit.

  Nearby, a hand burst out of the obsidian lake and dug its fingers into the shore. Heat in the place of red hair. Five obsidian mirrors had replaced its fingernails.

  It hoisted itself from the depths, roaring anguish across the abyss.

  The insect stopped feasting when it heard the sound. Instinct over appetite. Thinking it was about to be swatted by the first hand in aeons that was large enough to splatter it.

  The goliath burned with a sigil on its chest. Crimson hell fires charred its hide, its inextinguishable red beard giving a faint resemblance to the boulder brothers both.

  When it saw the insect, it more resembled the older brother, Albane—his utter disinterest in anything that could not burn to benefit him. And when it saw the golden crown on a couple of bloody strings, desperately tethering it to the spine, it tilted its head, more resembling the brother who burned himself out.

  But like the shades, who were sensitive to humanity’s warmth, it picked up a disgusting chill coming from the west. The goliath turned away from its past wishes to be small, its brother with a golden crown, and all its burning memories, leaving predator and prey with no farewell.

  The insect wasted no time in crushing the head.

  Its remaining legs scuttled mindlessly, stinging the body and tickling his exposed skin with numerous hairs. Half its remaining legs were trying to impale him, while the other half was scuttling away. It was caught between the throes of its basest instincts: one to feed, and the other to escape before the goliath returned.

  However, the corpse of a shepherd was listening.

  Listening to the buzzing insect—crushing the flesh.

  The Heavens and their apathy—lapping up his thoughts.

  The ringing emptiness of a Land Forsaken—devouring the flame.

  But loudest of all was the voice of deepest temptation.

  Crown of Thorns

  Rank: ???

  [Gift of Genesis]

  [Aspect of Apotheosis]

  Curse of the Ten Commandments - I

  Thou shalt not kill.

  Solvanel’s eyes rolled across the sand.

  He felt the crown loosen around his half-consumed head.

  As he died, he saw the words of the commandment rearrange.

  ? Thou shalt not die. ?