THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter III: The Fall of the Stone Giant

  There were no war horns to herald the end. No drumrolls.

  Death came in the dead hour, in that frigid void that precedes the false dawn, when the cold has bitten so deep it freezes breath into ghostly white shreds and the guards on the walls fight, with eyelids of lead, against a sleep laden with omens.

  Vael lay in the camp's darkness, his eyes closed like two thin incisions in the night. He wasn't sleeping. He was feeling.

  Before any sound, before any scream, he felt the vibration. Not in the air, but in the very blood of the earth, a deep, corrupt pulse rising through the stone. A heavy, dull, synchronized rhythm. Thousands of bare feet pounding the frozen ground beyond the walls in a march that was a single silent howl.

  —ALERT ON THE EAST WALL! —A watchman's cry, torn by pure, sudden terror, ripped the silence like a veil.

  It was the last thing he said. A black spear, longer than a man and silent as a cast shadow, whistled from the absolute darkness. It pierced the watchman through the chest with the ease of a thread through silk, lifting him off the ground like a doll and hurling him into the void of the inner courtyard. His body hit the frozen paving stones with a wet, final sound, bursting open against the stone, splashing the slabs with a sudden, bright red.

  —UP! EVERYONE! —Irina's roar was a hammer blow in the confusion. She rolled off her cot, grabbed her shield with one hand and kicked Elara's side hard with the other—. WAKE UP! THEY'RE INSIDE!

  The main gates of the Grey Cleft Fortress, forged of cast iron and mountain oak beams thicker than a man, groaned. It wasn't the creak of old wood. It was the sound of a giant animal mortally wounded. Once. Twice. The containment bars of steel, thick as thighs, bent inward screaming like beasts on the pillory.

  On the third impact, the gates exploded.

  They didn't open. They blasted inward in a storm of lethal splinters the size of spears. The first defenders who ran to plug the breach were impaled where they stood, nailed to the air or the ground by projectiles of their own fortress, their bodies becoming gory scarecrows.

  And the tide poured in.

  Not dozens. Hundreds. A legion of Undead spilled into the yard like the contents of a putrid belly opened to the sky. Their advance wasn't chaotic; it had a horrible hydraulics, flowing through points of least resistance, drowning everything in its path.

  The battle erupted everywhere at once, a multidimensional collapse of order.

  To the left, the Mercenary Battalion, veterans with mail coats gleaming weakly under the torchlight, tried to form an old-style shield wall, a last act of desperate discipline.

  —HOLD THE LINE, DAMN YOU! —bellowed their leader, a giant with more scar than skin, his voice a thunderclap of desperation.

  It was useless. The Undead didn't fight; they consumed themselves. They threw themselves at the shields with the abandon of what no longer fears oblivion, ignoring the spears that pierced them. One, more agile and twisted, slid like an eel under the barrier and sank its teeth into the mercenary leader's groin, tearing out his femoral artery with a dry pull. A bright arterial jet painted the air in a grotesque arc. The wall broke not with a blow, but with a collapse. The veterans were dragged to the ground, the shouts of hard men drowned by dozens of grey hands tearing off their helmets to bite their faces, their eyes, their tongues.

  In the Central Keep, the Imperial officers, trapped in their stone cage, tried to organize a desperate breakout. They fired crossbows from the narrow windows, but the Undead, insensible to terror, began scaling the bare stone walls. They drove bare fingers and toes into cracks, ascending with a spastic, unnatural agility, like giant spiders of grey flesh.

  A young lieutenant, his face pale with fear, leaned out to pour a cauldron of boiling oil. A hand, cold and strong as tongs, closed around his gorget. He was dragged out without a sound, his body disappearing into the darkness before falling three stories and landing, with a crunch of bone and metal, on the pikes of his own men in the yard.

  The butchery was total, a tapestry of horror in real time. Blood, frozen mud, screams cut abruptly short.

  Then, the tide of monsters at the main gate parted. It split like the Sea of Legends before something worse.

  He entered.

  The Executioner.

  An abomination three meters tall that made the other Undead look like toys. Grey muscles, swollen and taut like ropes of a giant ship, plates of rusted and twisted metal embedded directly into living flesh like a suit of torture armor, and a black visor, with no slits, welded to the bare skull. In its hand, it didn't hold, but dragged a black iron greatsword, notched, crusted with dried blood and bits of things one didn't want to identify.

  Three spearmen of the elite guard, the fortress's best, charged at him in a final act of suicidal valor.

  The Executioner didn't even stop. He swept his weapon in a horizontal arc so wide it whistled like a giant serpent.

  The impact didn't cut the men. It pulverized them.

  The wooden shafts, the armored torsos, the legs, everything shattered into a red cloud and fragments of steel. Halves of bodies flew in opposite directions, watering the mud with warm blood and steaming entrails that glistened in the torchlight.

  Irina, seeing the line crumbling like a house of cards and the recruits under her charge being hunted and torn apart like rabbits, made a decision. She planted herself directly in the giant's path.

  —HERE! —she shouted, banging her sword against the rim of her shield to create a metallic, defiant sound—. RUN TO THE CELLAR, THOSE WHO CAN! —she ordered the terrified recruits still alive.

  The Executioner turned its blind, armored head toward her. It advanced. Not in steps, but in mass displacements. Its greatsword rose and descended not as a weapon, but as a nightmare meteorite, tracing a black line in the air.

  Irina raised her shield, planting her feet in the frozen mud, gritting her teeth. Her entire being, all her training, concentrated on that single point.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  It was devastating.

  The giant steel slammed into the shield. The reinforced wood and iron didn't break; they exploded. Shattered into a thousand pieces that rained down like shrapnel. The force of the blow, barely deflected, continued its path and smashed into Irina's left side.

  The crunch was heard. Not one. Multiple. A repulsive crackle of dry twigs that were her ribs breaking, one after another.

  Irina was flung away like a rag. She flew five meters through the air, spinning ungainly, and tumbled across the frozen mud, instantly spitting a thick, bright gush of pure blood.

  —IRINA! —Elara's cry was born of pure horror.

  Irina tried to get up, a spastic movement of a wounded animal. Her legs failed. She propped herself on one elbow, gasping with an agonizing, wet whistle coming from her crushed chest, pale as wax, but her blue eyes, bloodshot, remained conscious, burning.

  —BACK! —she snarled, her teeth stained red—. TO THE CELLAR! WE CAN'T… WE CAN'T WIN THIS!

  Vael appeared from the smoke and chaos like a ghost, grabbed Irina by her good arm, and pulled her with surprising strength, yanking her to her feet.

  —LET'S GO! —he shouted, his voice strangely clear in the din—. THE SERVICE DOOR! THERE!

  The retreat was a personal hell. Elara threw frantic, clumsy thrusts to cover their withdrawal, parrying blows that numbed her arms to the shoulder, while Vael dragged Irina, whose dead weight and groans of pain were a terrifying burden. They managed to get through the small service door leading to the kitchens and barricaded it just as the yard finished being consumed by the horde and the screams became a distant, muffled chorus.

  They went down the service stairs, narrow and steep. Irina descended with difficulty, leaning on the wall and Vael's shoulder, gritting her teeth not to scream with every step that echoed in her shattered side. A warrior's pride was the only thing keeping her conscious.

  They reached the bottom. A dead-end alley of damp, cold stone, lit only by a solitary, dying torch. The smell of mold and old earth.

  They were cornered. The sound of the slaughter above was a dull murmur, a reminder there was no way out.

  Then, the ceiling above their heads rumbled.

  Dust and small bits of mortar fell on them.

  BOOM!

  The Executioner hadn't used the stairs. He had chosen the direct route.

  He came through the floor.

  Massive stone blocks, the size of tombs, fell into the corridor, completely blocking the stairs they had descended. And from the cloud of dust and rubble filling the space, the monster fell. It landed with a seismic weight that shook the foundations and cracked the walls around it.

  It rose slowly, shaking off the dust like a wet dog. Now it blocked the only exit with its immense mass. The black visor seemed to scan them in the gloom.

  Elara, cornered, unsheathed her sword. Terror froze her blood, seeing the giant that had just turned three men into a red mist.

  The Executioner, without haste, launched a horizontal slash toward her, a movement that spanned the entire corridor.

  Elara, in a reflexive act of pure survival, raised her slender sword, the blade of House Vane, to try to block.

  It was a beginner's mistake. A fatal mistake.

  The black steel, loaded with the force of an avalanche, collided with her delicate blade.

  The force of the impact was monstrous. It dislocated her left shoulder with a nauseating crack she felt before hearing. The violence of the blow slammed her violently against the stone wall at her back. Elara screamed, a sharp sound of pain and surprise, and fell to the ground, rolling, with her left arm hanging uselessly at her side and the sword slipping from her numb fingers.

  She was finished. Wounded, disarmed on the cold stone floor.

  The Executioner raised the greatsword, slowly, to finish her off. A deliberate, almost ritual motion.

  —WATCH OUT! —shouted Vael.

  Vael didn't have a shield. He grabbed the only thing nearby: a dented, half-melted metal shield that had fallen with the rubble, probably from some vaporized defender above. He lunged. He interposed himself between Elara and the weapon just as it descended.

  CLANG!

  The blow was dry, brutal, final. The shield folded over Vael's arm like tin foil, and the kinetic impact, uncontained, smashed him against the stone wall to the side with the force of a catapult.

  Vael fell to the ground, inert. He rolled onto his side and vomited a thick, dark gush of blood, lying still, eyes closed, a red and black stain in the dust.

  —VAEL! —Elara's cry was heartrending.

  Horror struck her with the force of a maul. Irina was broken against the wall, gasping blood. Vael had sacrificed himself, shattered by a blow meant for her. And she was lying on the ground, wounded, useless, her family's sword out of reach.

  Despair, cold and absolute, drowned her. She felt small, insignificant. She was going to die here, in a hole in the earth, and no one would ever know how.

  —No…! —she sobbed, tears mixing with the dust on her face.

  She looked at her sword, lying a meter away. The sun pommel gleamed weakly in the light of the dying torch.

  It wasn't valor. It wasn't courage. It was absolute panic. It was hysteria turned into action.

  With her only good hand, she crawled toward it. She grabbed the sword with fingers she couldn't feel, squeezing the hilt until it hurt, until she thought the bones would break.

  —Oh, my light! —she screamed, her voice broken by weeping, rage, and a fear so deep it transcended thought—. Guide me and fall upon my enemies! GIVE ME YOUR FURY! PLEASE!

  The sword answered her terror, her desperate plea.

  CRACK!

  It wasn't a flash. It was a golden lightning bolt that erupted from the center of the blade, wild, uncontrolled, an illegitimate child of pure desperation.

  It struck the Executioner in the center of the chest.

  The explosion vaporized its right arm, half its torso, and part of the wall behind it, leaving a smoking hole to the night. The air smelled of ozone and charred flesh.

  Elara fell onto her back, exhausted, emptied, the sword falling from her hand.

  But the Executioner was still standing.

  Mutilated, with black, twisted entrails dangling in the air, with half its body gone… but standing. And from within its shattered mass, a sound emerged: a laugh. A wet, metallic, broken gurgle that bubbled up from perforated lungs. It took a staggering step toward her, to crush her with its remaining fist.

  And then, the ceiling, weakened by the lightning and previous impacts, gave way.

  A solid block of stone, a piece of the vault, broke loose.

  SPLAT!

  The rock, the size of a small cart, crushed the monster against the floor.

  The black blood and entrails shot out under pressure, bathing Elara, hot and repulsive. The laugh was cut off instantly.

  But the horror didn't end. Underneath the stone, the crushed mass kept moving. A spasm, then another. The laugh had turned into a choked gurgle, a nauseating sucking sound that continued for a few eternal seconds as the blood finished gushing out, until finally, with one last shudder, it went still.

  Silence returned to the cellar, broken only by Irina's wheezing, agonizing breath and Elara's choked sobs.

  Irina pushed away from the wall, a movement that cost her a stifled scream. Clutching her shattered side, every movement torture, she limped toward Vael and fell to her knees beside him.

  —Vael… —she whispered, searching for a pulse in his neck with trembling fingers stained with her own blood.

  Vael didn't move. He seemed dead.

  Irina looked at Elara, unconscious amid the blood and rubble. They were alive by a perverse miracle, but trapped, buried with a dead giant.

  It was then she noticed the light.

  It wasn't torchlight. It was different. A faint, cold glow seeping from the end of the corridor, from where the lightning explosion had opened a hole in the wall.

  A wall that shouldn't be there.

  Irina, coughing blood, got to her feet with difficulty. She had to find a way out. She had to get them out of there. She had to…

  She approached the hole and entered a secret chamber.

  It was small, circular. The air was still and smelled of old earth and dry parchment. In the center, on a pedestal of smooth black stone, rested a book.

  It was a thick tome, bound in dark leather, so ancient it seemed part of the pedestal. It had no gold markings, no visible symbols. It looked like a mundane, forgotten object. But the air around it felt dense, charged, as if the silence of centuries had accumulated at that point.

  —What is this…? —Irina gasped, her hand reaching out, almost against her will.

  Back in the dark corridor, Vael's inert body moved.

  The boy opened his eyes.

  He slowly sat up among the rubble, completely ignoring the crushed body of the Executioner on one side and Elara, unconscious, on the other.

  He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, a casual gesture. His face was a mask of absolute boredom. There was no trace of fear, pain, relief. Only a deep, ancient fatigue.

  Vael looked up at the ruined ceiling, then toward Irina, who was distracted by the book in the hidden chamber. His green eyes, without the mask of clumsiness, were quiet, cold lakes.

  He sighed. A long, weary sound that seemed to consume the little air left in the cellar.

  —This is so complicated to do —he said, in a flat voice, empty of all emotion, as if commenting on the weather.