The King's Justice

T’was on a night blacker than a cellar-dweller's boils that Aravel Lightsong, Chief Sub-Warden of the Veil Piercers, found herself amidst the reeking marshes. Her companion, one Satchel-Knight Ross, was a grumbler of the highest order, but even he couldn’t help but be impressed at how efficiently the two had worked: robed bodies surrounded the pair in a loose ring, save for the one who still stood.

"I say, Ross, this cultist seems to have developed a case of the dreaded blade-in-the-back affliction," declared Aravel, twisting her knife to ensure the job was done. She then pulled it free, revealing a blade redder than a beet's blushes.

Ross squinted through the torchlight. "Aye, and you've gone and given him the cure before reciting the knight's sacred charging words. Dreadfully bad form, that."

"Pish posh, the words are merely garnish," Aravel replied, sheathing her knife with a flourish. The robed man toppled forward. "Now then, ahem: 'For heresies 'gainst his High Crown—and for the practicing of forbidden blood magicks—I hereby dispense...the King's justice!'" She gave the freshly stabbed cultist a prod with her boot for emphasis.

Ross tutted. "There’s no theatrics with you… no savoring the moment, just stabbity stab stab. You can hardly say ‘I hereby dispense the King’s justice’ after you’ve already done stabbed the lad.”

Aravel sighed at her oafish companion. “We’ve been over this, Ross. The only order that makes sense is stab, then speech. If you go speechifying first, it tends to kill that oh-so-necessary element of surprise.”

“Just takes a lot out of the moment, s’all. Proclaimin’ all high and mighty that you’re gonna do the thing you already done did…” Ross kicked at the loose rocks in the swamp clearing, as though the toadish man had decided the bloody, stinking bog would look nicer if he’d simply rearranged the stoneware. The upright torches guttered and flickered in the balmy breeze. It was night, and the torches formed an island of light in the stinking mud. The dark surrounding the pair made Aravel’s neck hair stand on end… the sooner she left, the better.

She whistled, and her horse trotted in, clearly disdaining the way its hooves partially sank into the damp. Aravel removed the halberd strapped at her back and held it out at arm’s length.

The Satchel-Knight skittered forward to take it, hooking it to the rest of his burdens slung across his back. Then, after waiting a moment for dramatic emphasis, a grin crooked his face: “I, Saddle-Knight Ross, hereby take the halberd you offer me.”

Aravel rolled her eyes. “Now, if you would please hoist our dearly departed cult leader onto my horse, we can get out of this gods-forsaken swampland. Lord Westlake was very particular about bringing the—”

Aravel cut off as an electric twinge of pain rippled down her right arm. Her body bore many scars, but only the one inflicted by the Blade of Cursed Wards still bore its magical imprint. It throbbed when that magic tainted the air of the mortal plane—a throbbing that now amplified in intensity as the wind stirred.

“The bad pork again?” Satchel-Knight Ross asked.

“Blood magic—powerful, at that,” Aravel said with a wince. “Brace yourself, Satchel-Knight.”

Aravel’s eyes strained in the darkness, but the torches cast their flickering light mere feet into the dense reeds and bubbling bogs. Then, she saw it: it had seemed like an ordinary buzzing of boilflies, but now Aravel saw similar masses crowding just beyond each of the torches, a gathering cloud. Then she noticed the dungroaches skittering across the mud, antennae twitching in the dark. Corpseworms wriggled up from the soil, ends probing blindly in a mad frenzy.

“Why can’t it ever be hummingbirds,” Ross said, practically dancing in place as he hopped left and right, avoiding the streams of skittering terrors.

Aravel’s mount reared as the insects converged onto the mud. “Easy, girl,” she called, but the horse, not speaking English, was not particularly calmed by her words. The bugs merged into a writhing pile of chittering feet and flickering wings. The amorphous mass defined itself like wet clay in a drunk sculptor’s hands: appendages sprouted and narrowed and elongated. The insects seemed to melt into slush, flattening into one cohesive humanoid form, which stood on shambling legs as its body continued to materialize. Its right arm, unprepared for the tug of gravity, detached and toppled to the mud, spilling into a writhing pile of worms. Immediately, more boilflies melded into the stump, liquefying into flexing biceps, to grasping fingers, to a muscled shoulder.

“I… am…. reborn,” Doomspeaker Octrax gasped, and his voice was the drone of a thousand cicadas, a blight of Havencastle’s fields made human. “Fear the power of my—”

“I hereby dispense the King’s justice!” The words were shouted by Satchel-Knight Ross, who charged in on thundering legs with the halberd held out like a great jousting ram.

The malevolent Lord of Locusts whirled in place to face the voice. He then raised a roach-crusted hand and pointed at Ross. Aravel’s scar twinged with pain; the muds beneath the charging man broiled and bubbled as tentacles surged out, wrapping around Ross’s legs.

The Satchel-Knight toppled over, face-first, and more tentacles wrapped around his body. They pulled him down into the sinking mud with such force and speed that his armor—the finest of the Havencastle Forges—dented in and split. With a slurping sound not unlike what Aravel had heard when the taverns hosted noodle nights, Satchel-Knight Ross was gone, leaving only his split armor and weapons where the man had once been. Frogs croaked and insects chittered as normalcy settled back over the marsh.

“I hadn’t even known he was there,” Doomspeaker Octrax admitted with a chuckle, gesturing at the bubbling mud. “If he hadn’t bellowed like a charging bull—”

Aravel’s knife was silent as it flew. It turned a full revolution in the air in perfect quiet, and then the pointed end thudded into the cultist’s head, piercing bone as easily as it parted cloth.

Aravel screamed as she tackled the cultist. She pulled the blade free and plunged it in again and again, an uncharacteristic fury turning her normal precise blows into wide, sweeping things. Ross had been a faithful, if dull-headed companion… a stalwart ally for years. And in a single flash, he was gone.

At some point, the cultist stopped his twitching. Aravel breathed heavily, still straddling his body. She shook herself from her trance and stood, wiping her trembling, blood-and-mud-stained hands on her cloak.

“Once again, I dispense the King’s justice,” she seethed to the night, voice and breath still trembling.

But again, with the twinge of a scar’s pain, the iron stench of magic pervaded the damp, swampy air:

Jerome was a moth, and he was a good one, by all accounts. After his mate Carla had perished to a cow tail, he’d been forced to raise his large mothy family all on his own. Never once had Jerome complained; he tended to his brood with gentle persistence—it was them versus the world, he knew.

So many proboscises to feed, so Jerome supported them the only way he could. Each night, he flew to the local blacksmithy. There, until the sun cracked the horizon, he worked good, honest moth labor: he threw himself at the overhead lanterns, wondering if his next effort would finally be his breakthrough, his admittance to the glorious light within.

Tap! Tap! Tap! Jerome was close now, he could feel it. Little Carla Jr. the 7^th and Little Carla Jr. the 8^th were still recovering after the mite incident, and Jerome knew they needed him now more than ever. Tap! Tap! Tap!

But then Jerome clocked out early from his shift, something he had never done. He began flitting and flying back into the dark open air of the great outdoors. He homed in on his target without the need for light—the rightness he could feel guided him. He no longer could remember the wing patterns of his children; he no longer could remember Carla’s name. Gone, too, was the comfortable under-bark nest he’d called home for all of his moth life… the writhing mass of bugs was his home now. If some random brood of moths under a layer of bark starved tomorrow, that was hardly his problem... He crashed into the goo and melted, becoming one with it—becoming part of something greater.

“For crying out loud,” Aravel shouted, watching the shambling cultist yet again reconstruct himself from writhing insects. “This is starting to get tiresome.”

She ran toward where Satchel-Knight Ross had vanished and pried the halberd free of the muck’s sucking grip. She then drove it into Doomspeaker Octrax’s gut, pinning him down with all of her bodyweight. Wearied, and still reeling from the loss of her companion, she hadn’t the energy for a whole speech. Instead, she breathed “The King’s justice” and held the blade down against the writhing cultist until the insects stopped surging in. For the third time in so many minutes, Doomspeaker Octrax died to Aravel’s hand.

Aravel’s scar twinged. Bugs poured into a shambling mound.

“I live again,” Octrax declared.

Aravel’s horse kicked his skull in unceremoniously.

Again, Aravel’s scar twinged. Again, bugs surged into a shambling mound.

“I live again,” Octrax announced.

Aravel chopped his head off with the halberd.

“Please stop wasting so many of my insects—"

Her knife plunged into the heart of the next one.

“Surely we can eugh… aghhh…”

A rope strangled the following, and then she twisted the head clean off the neck of the next.

“…think of the local insect ecology,” the decapitated head wheezed before crumbling back into writhing worms.

Aravel yelled as she drove a knife into the eye socket of the next; with a scream, she burned with torches the one after that; with streaming tears for Satchel-Knight Ross, she stomped the next batch of bugs until her boots gummed to the mud and she had to take the damn things off.

When Doomspeaker Octrax reformed for the fifteenth time in one evening, he noted, to his surprise, he was not immediately murdered. Instead, he found the woman kneeling over the patch of mud with the dented armor and scattered weapons.

“He loved when it rained… he’d never learned to swim, and he said that rained on was the closest he’d ever get—let him feel like the Lake Priests of his home village.”

Doomspeaker Octrax shrugged.

“He could finish a bowl of rabbit stew in ten heartbeats… sometimes in his sleep, he’d roll over enough to take his whole tent down, stakes and all.” Aravel laughed, a thing as brittle as dried mud. “Now he’s gone. More than a servant, he was my friend—he was a good man.”

More insects began surging into the clearing—they clumped and clotted into new forms that grasped and groaned as they rose from the ground. The Doomspeaker’s cult had fallen quickly to Aravel’s blades, but apparently their stilling had been no more permanent than sleep.

“All thirteen men and women before you—each member of my flock was once quite like you, Veil Piercer.”

Aravel swallowed, not bothering to grip her blade—her training taught her well enough to recognize an impossible fight when she saw one. “Defeated?”

Doomspeaker Octrax smiled wistfully. “Bereaved.”

“By your hand,” Aravel countered.

“A hand that may also fix that very wrong,” Octrax cooed. “The stuffy lords of Havencastle act as though my magic is an abomination, but they are wrong. Our lives are the most precious things we have; my studies are the path to mastering it.”

“To dominating it,” Aravel corrected.

“To return it from whence it has fled,” Doomspeaker Octrax countered.

Aravel’s throat felt tight, the spit too thick for her mouth.

“I can save him, Veil Piercer—return him to you, and allow you two to be on your way.”

“And the price of such a bargain?”

Doomspeaker Octrax bent over a stump that might have been a ceremonial altar. “Blood, of course; blood is the vessel of life, the carrier of strength.” The knife was hard to see in the flickering torchlight, but it seemed a simple thing, as unadorned as a scribe’s quill—and the bargain it represented would be just as binding.

Through all the lumbering sound of the reanimating cultists, Aravel hadn’t even heard Doomspeaker Octrax close the distance between them. He stood, looming above the still-kneeling Aravel. Her eyes were glued to the dented armor, remembering the man that had once worn it.

“You bring him back, all for the bite of your blade?”

“For its kiss,” the Doomspeaker answered.

Aravel felt a set of hands grip to her arm, but they weren’t restraining… they were reassuring.

True to his word, Octrax’s blade merely glided across the crook of her arm, tracing a clean line as a welling of red dribbled to the mud.

“It is done,” Octrax said, and the mud beneath that blood began to bubble and stir.

That night, as the two made camp, a wedge of silence had driven between the pair.

“S’like a night of heavy drinking,” Satchel-Knight Ross complained. “All headache, and no memory to go with it—just a godawful taste in my mouth, like dirt stew.”

Aravel chewed at the inside of her lip. “And as I’ve said, it’s no tale to tell in a tavern—in the reeds, we were, when an errant bolt of lightning set our mounts rearing. You fell and struck your head—and in the time it took to tend to your wounds, the blood cultists packed and moved camp. The trail was cold.”

Satchel-Knight Ross prodded at his head, feeling for a tender spot. “And your arm?” Ross eyed the thick bandaging, which already began to blot deep red again.

“I, too, fell—a bush left its mark, and deep. But ‘tis no worry. You need your recovery rest, Satchel-Knight. I’ll take first watch.”

Aravel watched the grumbling man return to his tent, and as he did, she felt the fiery pain of her new scar on her arm, a heat that radiated outward from the blade’s smooth path. And mere inches away from that scar, the jagged line etched by the Blade of Cursed Wards—the scar that once twinged and shocked in the presence of blood magic—merely throbbed with a dull cold, a sensation that was quickly retreating to empty numbness.

T’was on a night lonelier than the moon itself that Aravel Lightsong, Chief Sub-Warden of the Veil Piercers, found herself staring at the new scar that represented the violation of her most sacred oaths… well she knew there was no charity in this world. What would Doomspeaker Octrax’s price be, and when would he exact it?

What use is a debt when the debtor is gone? Aravel mused. I am a Veil Piercer. I am the shadow that does the King’s bidding. When I set my mind to disappearing, what hope could Octrax ever have to find me?

It was a question that brought Aravel comfort, and that was comfort she clung to like a warm blanket on this chilly, windy night… and even though she was on watch, the stresses of the day and the firm tree at her back soon had her drifting off to sleep.

In the calm of that sleep, Aravel did not wake—or even flinch—when a moth landed on her cheek…

…nor did she for the second moth, the third, the fourth.