Sarkiades: The Echoes of Resolution
Part 1: The Fall of Piristrus
The walls of the inner keep trembled to the rhythm of the Onguloch's advance, and it almost seemed like the streams of falling debris were the palace's own tears. As if the senseless destruction they'd witnessed could move even the stones to weep.
Sarkiades looked over the last of the desperate defenders gathered here in the heart of the imperial palace. The few remaining members of the royal guard now lined the marble staircase that had once carried awed petitioners up to the throne platform, where King Vatrevian and the last of his Minairoi mages stood with gaunt yet determined faces that provoked images of specters forever bound to this world as they relived their final act of defiance until the end of time.
Below, closer to the trembling double doors that would soon burst open to reveal the hateful monstrosity who'd torn through the city walls like a horse through a spiderweb, a motley collection of officers, advisors, functionaries, and Piristran soldiers gathered for a final stand at the very heart of their empire. They may have come from different walks of life, but in that nightmare haze their faces seemed almost interchangeable, each gaze fixed upon the smoke veiled archway that would soon reveal the hateful eyes of their city's final bane. They were the last survivors of this hellish siege, the marks of their stations fading to insignificance against the uniformity of their cold affects and unfocused stares. Each of them understood that there was no coming back from this one. That the story of the mightiest city of the Velian Plains would end in this very chamber.
“Sarkiades, King Vatrevian wishes to speak with you.”
He had but an instant to reflect on the absurdity of the request: that the King of Piristrus wished to spend his final moments chatting with an envoy from an inconsequential neighboring city-state, and then the dozens of metal beams bolstering the gates began to twist and bend, snapping loose as Arikhe heaved its tremendous body into the chamber.
When he saw the Onguloch smashing through Piristrus' fabled city walls, Arikhe's physical shape and locomotion had reminded Sarkiades of a a toad. Though he hated himself for thinking it, from the heights of the Adricanum Temelrum the battle for the lower city had reminded him of his childhood, when he used to watch the struggle for dominance in the tide pools along the Aedonae Channel. It had almost felt as though those squirming, screaming dots were not human beings with lives and families being devoured gigantic stone-plated monstrosity, but flies senselessly buzzing in every direction as a nearby frog went about the business of sating it's hunger.
He didn't like admitting it, but there may have been a certain truth to his observation. It was often said that the Dark God lacked the spark of true creativity, and was thus forced to shape his Fire Born from models found in the natural world. However, if Saklugz had used the common toad as inspiration for that hoary abomination, then it was obvious that he had taken a great deal of liberty with the execution. While Arikhe's eyes bulged out from its spheroid carapace in a manner not dissimilar to the frogs he used to catch as a boy, there had been something oddly endearing about the eyes of it's smaller kin. The Onguloch's eyes, by contrast, were black as jet, with smoky yellow slats in the place of pupils that conjured images of plague and starvation. He could remember the viscous fluid that coated the bodies of ordinary toads, but he could not recall a single occasion where that strange substance had dissolved the hands of one of his companions. Yet the tarry ichor pouring out from the faults in Arikhe's stone armor seemed to eat through the painstakingly detailed marble tiles as if they were chalk in a rain storm.
There was, however, a single feature that seemed to separate Arikhe from not just frogs, but anything that could be found in the animal kingdom. It was only after Sarkiades had the chance to think about it that he realized the Onguloch's strangely elastic arms, which shot out at impossible speeds to snatch up soldiers five men's length away, had been modeled on the tongue of the common toad, not their limp and nearly useless forelegs. Except that Sarkiades had never seen a toad's tongue tear through a marble column as if it were a mound of ash.
The Piristran Guard fought as well as anyone could expect: rushing towards certain death in neat, geometric formations; standing firm as the Onguloch's ferocious limbs pulverized man and armor into the grotesque forms of poorly made shadow puppets. Despite their bravery, it was obvious that those men of flesh and fluid could do nothing against a creature of living stone.
If there was anyone in this company who had the power to stop Arikhe, it was the Minairoi standing beside King Vatrevian on the throne platform. As the last of the royal guard prepared for a final battle on the stairs, the three mages threw their thoughts into the underlying structure of the room, transforming the well-polished marble into jagged stalagmites that shot up from the ground like geysers, impaling dozens of the Ukni soldiers who came rushing in Arikhe's wake while the beast struggled against its bonds.
But there had been over two dozen Minairoi in King Vatrevian's service that morning, and these last three survivors had found their way to that position more from luck than a superior command of the Navarid magic. While there had been rumors that an Onguloch would accompany the expedition, none of the attempts by the Piristran high command to learn anything about the creature had borne fruit. They did not know that Arikhe had been designed from the ground up for the explicit purpose of bringing down fortified positions until it burst through the city walls like a drunk stumbling through a paper screen. The generals, who had believed that the gates would be the only point of ingress into the city, had placed all of their mages and Zonos ballistae around a handful of likely choke points. After the city was breached, there had been a tremendous effort to redeploy their mages, but by then there was so much confusion that the enemy's Korvadun assassins had no trouble picking them off one by one.
The surviving Minairoi knew that they could not slay Arikhe. They focused their efforts on raising jagged stone towers covered in a distorted rendition of the narratives of Piristran glory that had lined the chamber a moment before, funneling the beast towards a choke point at the bottom of the stairs. But the Ukni had planned for this as well, and the moment the Minairoi were immersed in their magic dozens of archers came screaming into the hall, laying down a barrage of arrows as the royal guards struggled to throw up a shield wall around the helpless mages.
It was in that moment that Sarkiades realized he could no longer resist the itch that had been slowly building up since he heard news of the Ukni invasion. After King Telemeus had promoted him from the Lystian army, he had been handed a scroll nearly as thick as his arm detailing the thousands of formal regulations an official diplomat was expected to observe. The document covered everything from the proper titles of the numerous delegates he would be speaking with to the correct procedure for excusing oneself to use the bathroom. Yet if he had to pick a single taboo from that web of esoteric regulations, the one behavior that it was of the gravest importance for an ambassador to adhere to, it would have been the dictum that foreign emissaries should not personally get involved in the military conflicts of their host nation.
Somehow, though, Sarkiades could not imagine King Telemeus begrudging him the chance to die in battle. Like all high officials in the Lystian court, he had been drawn up from the military. Until a year ago, he had been nothing more than a common soldier, and despite the decadent hospitality, at his core he still saw himself as man of the walls. It was certainly a breach of diplomacy for him to join the Piristrans in battle, and doubly so when he was ignoring an audience with the king himself to do so, but he suspected that Telemeus would not be too angry at an old soldier's wish to die with his sword in hand, so he drew out his blade and charged towards the archers at the back of the hall.
As Arikhe threw it's house sized body against the Minairoi's defenses, Sarkiades crashed against a formation of Nashragha infantrymen screening the archers. The thick clouds of smoke blinded him to the enemy until he was nearly on top of them, but the Ukni soldiers were no better equipped to navigate the chaos than he was. Had he advanced on them in a company of soldiers, they would have almost certainly engaged him before he had a chance to react, but with messengers and officers sprinting in every direction, none of them thought to question the lone soldier rushing into their ranks until he'd plunged his blade through the first of their necks.
That moment of stunned confusion may have lasted but an instant, Sarkiades wrung every last drop from his sole advantage, delivering a fatal barrage of puncture wounds to four of the five surviving soldiers as the last man fell back and threw up his shield. Sarkiades rolled low, pivoting to the left as he sprang up and drove his blade up through the gap beneath the soldier's chest plate until he felt the tip scrape against the armor at his back.
The sound his blade was a beacon to the Ukni infantrymen. Like a beautiful singer pouring out gorgeous lies of love and happiness to an audience of lonely drunks, the clashing swords sang of a world where skill and valor decided whether you lived or died even as the arrows and sorcery burst out at random from the smoky confusion, heedless of whether they tore through an unblooded novice or the greatest swordsman in Aios. Two men came screaming out from the murky abyss, their hellish cries dying in their throats as he hacked on and on. But no sooner did they fall gasping than another three were on top of him, driving him back step by step as he made use of his blade's superior reach to keep them from closing in with their short swords.
But the promise of meeting the hated enemy tempted more than just the Ukni. A team of Piristran infantrymen enveloped him from behind, bringing down their shield wall just as four more Nashragha rushed out to encircle him from the front. Having only his sword for protection, Sarkiades fell in behind them, thrusting his blade through the gaps between their shields, killing soldier after soldier as they crashed against the lines. He soon found himself in that familiar, oddly comforting world where big picture matters like the fact that they'd already lost this war and his own inevitable death were subsumed within the moment to moment struggle. He did not even realize that they had been pushed back to the base of the stairs until he felt a tug on his robes and heard someone shouting in his ear:
“King Vatrevian has been struck down. He is not long for the world, and he wishes to speak with you before he departs.”
Sarkiades had taken Vatrevian's earlier request to be some kind of ritual formality ending the alliance between the two kingdoms, or perhaps some dying regret about the deterioration of Lyst and Piristrus' old alliances, but he had been around the king long enough to know that he would never waste his final words on courtly ceremony. Whatever Vatrevian had to say to him, it must have been pretty fucking important, so he pushed his way through the last of the royal guard, past the two visibly weakened Minairoi throwing the last of their strength into a final protective barrier, to a prone figure surrounded by nobles and attendants.
“Sarkiades...” King Vatrevian gasped. “My men told me you'd gone out to fight. I was worried that I wouldn't have the chance to speak with you before...”
“With all due respect, your grace, why is it that you wished to speak to me of all people. I know that Lyst and Piristrus have had their differences, but nothing to merit spending your final moments away from the company of your kin.” Sarkiades answered.
“I must confess that I have broken the terms of our treaty. If I had only known about the Onguloch, I would have...”
“Save your words. None of us had any clue that the Dark God had fashioned a living siege engine. I can assure you that King Telemeus will not begrudge you for refusing to share whatever scraps of intelligence you were able to gather. None of us could have known what was coming.”
“There is more... reports from spies deep within the Khavasak... a training facility... Telemeus must know...”
“Whatever it is that you wished to tell him, I'm afraid that window has passed.” Sarkiades said.
“There is a passage leading out of the Temelrum. It isn't far. Ampetran knows the way. There's a hidden council chamber within those halls. Go. There is something you must see.”
A young noble gestured to him, leading him through a narrow exit at the rear of the throne room to a network of hallways that were typically used by servants. Ukni soldiers had already begun to fan out through the imperial palace, but their army's decision to tacitly allow the looting of besieged cities as an alternative to paying bonuses meant that they never encountered bands of more than two or three at a time, the vast majority of which were so busy with their armfuls of golden trinkets that they didn't even have the time to draw their swords.
Ampetran led him down what felt like an endless series of spiral stairwells, far outpacing the Ukni looting parties until they made their way deep underground. Yet after a few moments surrounded by nothing but the echo of his feet, Sarkiades was unsure whether he preferred that eerie silence with it's promises of stealth and ambush or the chaos of the upper levels.
Suddenly, Ampetran was stooping down beside a marble sculpture of a young warrior. Even in the midst of battle, the young noble felt the need to explain the notorious appetites of the king who'd built the passage before he reached his hand beneath the soldier's tunic and gave the statue a tug as a false wall swung open behind them.
“This passage will lead you to the King's council room. The reports should still be on the table. When you're done you'll find a painting of the Silipian Forest against the far wall which conceals a lever for another passage that empties out near the Taevitra.”
“Aren't you coming?” Sarkiades asked.
“My fight ends here.” Ampetran replied, and Sarkiades could not help be be awed at the cold determination in his voice as he turned and strode back towards the throne room.
Sarkiades put the thought of Ampetran's fate behind him as he rushed down the corridor. Whatever it was that had inspired King Vatrevian to expend his dying words on a boorish envoy from some rustic backwater, it had to have been pretty fucking important. There had been a time when Lyst truly was the equal of Piristrus or the other great city-states of Naviras, but that was centuries ago. The reason that someone like him was given the same courtesy as the diplomats from Stakalphis or Aegerea had more to do with Piristrus' fervent traditionalism than his homeland's geopolitical relevance. Lyst's location in the middle of the Pythikas Mountains meant that the only exports she had to offer were wool from the rugged pastoralists who tended their herds in her foothills, and while her fortifications were as impressive as any, it had been centuries since she'd had the resources to man her walls at even half strength. There was but a single thing that gave Lyst any standing on the world stage, and that was the fact that those towering battlements happened to be positioned in the middle of the only pass through the Pythikas Mountains in all of western Iores. If the Dark God intended to make a rush on Stakalphis from the north instead of circling around to attempt a landing on the beaches near Boronea, then the only path available to him went straight through the gates of Lyst.
The strategy room was an odd amalgam of the regal debauchery that one would expect from the kind of ruler who hid the lever to a hidden passage under the robes of an anatomically accurate statue and the austere realities that come with keeping such a chamber out of the eyes of enemy spies. Golden busts of previous kings that would have glimmered from the labors of a dozen servants anywhere else in the palace sat caked in helms of dust while heaps of paper were scattered loosely over every available surface. At first, he despaired of ever finding the documents King Vatrevian had mentioned amid that chaotic scene. He found himself nearly laughing aloud at the thought of a band of Ukni raiders coming upon him poring over old troop estimates as the Temelrum burned around him, but then his eyes latched onto an image so terrifyingly familiar that he could have picked it out at a dozen paces: a map of Lyst.
Only it wasn't the land of his birth depicted in that strange diagram. The city layout seemed astonishingly similar to Lyst, with the defensive walls and outbuildings positioned nearly identically to his homeland, but the surrounding landscape was completely different, labeled with rivers and mountain ranges located deep within the Dark God's empire. It was only when he began reading some of the scribbled marginal notes that he was able to make any sense of it at all.
The Ukni had built a full scale mock-up of Lyst deep in the inner Khavasak. Not just some dingy wooden facsimile but a painstakingly detailed stone recreation of the exact layout of Lyst's defenses. The fact that Saklugz undertook such an exorbitant expense suggested not only that he never intended to invade along the coastal plains to begin with, but that the destruction of his homeland was essential to the success of the his military campaign.
Sarkiades' horror only grew as the pieces fit themselves together in his mind. Growing up, he'd heard the same stories as any other child of the Naviras: that, for the kingdoms and city-states who continued to resist the Dark God's tyranny, there was no such thing as peace. That even centuries of silence from the dread tower of Dissak was nothing more than an armistice: a reluctant acknowledgment that, while those lands were rightfully nothing more than provinces of Saklugz' continent-spanning empire, the act of enforcing that dominion was not immediately feasible. Every officer in the free cities had a speech like that on hand for days when it seemed impossible to wring any work from his soldiers, but despite all that there had always been a part of him that held out hope that it would be someone else who'd bear the brunt of the next Ukni invasion. Even the fall of Piristrus couldn't silence that voice, it merely changed the language. Soothing lies about another generation or two of peace were quickly replaced by soothing lies about Lyst's irrelevance in the coming war. It was only now that Sarkiades realized that, even as the Onguloch was tearing through the walls of the Temelrum, he had still sincerely believed that his well fortified, politically useless homeland could last indefinitely as the shadows of war blotted out the light of Naviras.
But now the screen was removed; the guyropes of ignorance and delusion that held it in place snapping loose like cornered vipers. The enemy had constructed a full scale facsimile of Lyst for the purpose of training an elite group of soldiers to take possession of the pass. There was no way to look beyond a thing like that. And then there was Arikhe. An Onguloch that specialized in siege warfare, and the walls of Lyst were the only real barrier between it and the gates of Stakalphis. From the start, the enemy had intended to use Arikhe in coordination with those strike forces to quickly clear a path through the Gates of Menneas, at which point they could use Lyst as a landing site to bring the rest of the army straight into the heart of Iores without having to worry about contested beach landings.
Sarkiades now understood King Vatrevian's guilt, and he understood why King Telemeus needed to hear of this. A moment earlier he'd been resigned to his fate, basking in that strange calm that comes to fill the void once occupied by self preservation. He had listened to Ampetran's explanation of a hidden passage out of the city the way a mother might patiently listen to her child's naively simple solutions to the complex problems of human existence. Now, however, he knew that he needed to survive this. There was no other path but a desperate drive out of Piristrus and south to the Aedonae channel with the dogs of war howling at his heels. While Lyst was no longer a great power, one vestige of her former glory that still remained were the Ourosai bolts that could draw the blood of even an Arkuloch, and with his intelligence about how the Arikhe dismantled the Piristran walls, his countrymen could maximize the effectiveness of those ballistae. It would not be enough to stand up against the full Ukni host, but it could buy them the time for Stakalphis to realize that the cost of maintaining a centuries-old rivalry with a city long past its prime paled in comparison to giving their most hated enemy a back door to the Darygian Plains.
The reawakening of purpose brought with it that old, familiar fear. He found his hands trembling for the first time in years as he grabbed the relevant documents and set fire to the rest, pausing only long enough to make sure the secret passage had sealed shut before charging into the darkness. Each turn down that labyrinthine passageway carried visions of enemies laying in ambush, every skittering rat a Korvadun spy with his dagger at the ready. But, true to King Vatrevian's word, the Piristrans had gone to great lengths to keep this passage a secret. His only company through that terrifying journey were the darting, skittering sounds of whatever creatures had made this tunnel their home. In time, he found himself before a gate covered in dozens of heavy latches.
Sarkiades shut his eyes as he kicked open the door, squinting just enough that he might have a half a second's warning before the blade of an Ukni infantryman ran him through, and finding himself walled off in a tiny alcove nestled against a large cliff face, completely screened from view. He pricked his ears to his surroundings, seeking out the usual sounds made by restless soldiers and hearing only deep, rhythmic thuds somewhere in the distance. At first, he couldn't quite place it, but as it grew closer and closer, it's tremors shaking the earth and sending birds scampering for cover, he knew that there was but one creature who could have authored such a cacophony.
There was nowhere to run. Nothing to do but to hide and wait for death to come pounding through the tree line. He had been foolish to believe that the Ukni would not use every tool at their disposal to stop those documents from leaving Piristrus. In all likelihood they'd scouted out this location long before the day of battle, or else they'd captured Vatrevian, Ampetran, or one of the other generals alive and made unusually quick work of the interrogation. Either way, it would be up to Telemeus to put the pieces together himself.
The thuds rushed towards him, each impact louder than the last, moving inexorably towards his tiny hiding place. Then, just when he was certain that the Onguloch was no more than a few men's length away, just on the other side of that tiny stone nook, Arikhe tore past, cutting a course straight for the Taevitra River. His first thought was that it was simply hunting for the exit to his tunnel, and so he dashed out from the cliff face and dove into a waist high bush, crawling forward at an angle to the Onguloch's course until the sound of voices in conversation caught his attention. It was Ka'inulz Hoshrak, the high priest responsible for controlling Arikhe, speaking with someone whose voice he didn't recognize. Only Hoshrak's words lacked the nauseating arrogance that had possessed them as he strode into the throne room behind his Onguloch. Gone was the cruel, mocking taunts King Vatrevian and the other Piristrans. Gone was that sickening laughter. Fear now rode upon his voice.
Every rational part of Sarkiades' body screamed for him to use this chaos to cover his escape, but the curiosity was too much to bear. Someone had drawn the Ukni's most powerful weapon away from the city it was supposed to be demolishing and out to this overgrown riverbank, and whoever it was, he seemed to have the Ka'inulz ready to shit himself. Sarkiades told himself that whatever was happening out there would surely be of interest to King Telemeus as he clawed forward through the underbrush.
What he saw strained the limits of his imagination. An old man, nearly as old as Telemeus, shooting through the air like a falcon, alighting on branches that shouldn't have supported a tenth of his weight only to kick off into a barrage of diving attacks, striking Arikhe with what appeared to be nothing more than a flimsy branch. And somehow, he was winning. The boiling, tarry substance that the Onguloch used to digest its prey now poured from its every orifice, frothing and hissing as it ate through the forest floor. Every time Arikhe went in for the attack, the old man would jump halfway across the clearing faster than his eyes could follow. The Onguloch's own digestive fluid was now eating through its body, and being a beast of little more than size and hatred, Arikhe could do nothing but grow more crazed and desperate until it's own insatiable anger ate through it's muscle and ligament and all the life was thrashed loose from its body.
It was only then that Sarkiades got a good look at the old man's robes. Black with widened sleeves and a pleated lower section, white frills around the chest and neck lines and an all white belt. It seemed almost impossible to believe, that a member of that ancient order of mages who played such a role in the stories of his childhood, who'd done more than any other school or kingdom to keep Saklugz' power in check, could be standing before him. Yet who else but a Shugatyad could have single-handedly brought down an Onguloch with nothing more than a stick from the forest floor?
The Shugatyad turned towards two men in Ukni armor who'd taken advantage of the chaos to pepper the Ka'inulz with throwing knives. He spoke a handful of terse words and then turned and walked in the direction of the Silipian Forest with the other two falling in behind. Sarkiades wondered what it all could mean. What had the Shugatyad done to lure Arikhe out here? Who were those two soldiers? Had the mages managed to infiltrate the Ukni? If so, why would they wait until Piristrus had fallen before springing whatever trap they'd used to lure Arikhe out into the open? If that old man really did have a network of spies inside the Nalburz, would it not have been better to turn them loose, before they had a chance to take possession of the city? He wanted to get up and follow them, but he could not risk letting the documents stuffed into his jacket fall back into enemy hands. The more Sarkiades thought about what he saw, the less any of it made sense, but there was a single thing that he knew with absolute certainty: that King Telemeus needed to hear this.
"Sarkiades: The Echoes of Resolution" has been published freely online in order to introduce readers to the world of the "Under the Burning Tower" series. Because of this, hiring an editor for the project simply isn't feasible. If you happen across any typographical or grammatical errors while reading, especially if you see something that looks like a missing paragraph, please feel free to reach out and let me know.
