Realm Raiders – Chapter 8

The glare of Azrani torchlight died as the temple doors slammed shut with an earth-shattering boom. Rhen threw a hand across her face, eyes screwed shut against the darkness and stinging dust that engulfed the team. Greton’s coughing pushed through the last echoes of the doors’ thunder, somewhere off to her side.

‘Fuck… me.’ Hoji hawked and spat somewhere behind, the splatter echoing fivefold through the dark. ‘Greton – get us a bastard light going, will you?’

Rhen turned her back on the doors, scrubbing grit from her eyes as a blurry light flickered into being at her side, arcing a gritty wad of her own over Hoji’s huge silhouette. He jumped as the glob sailed past, a wet plap echoing morosely back toward the team. Hoji grumbled to himself, wiping the hand he combed through his hair on his pants. ‘Thanks, boss.’

Rhen ignored him, her eyes roving over what little she could see of the temple. Greton’s light was weak, barely dusting the sharp edges and corners of stone some twenty feet ahead of them. ‘More light,’ she snapped, her impatience getting the best of her.

‘I’m not a fucking beacon, Rhen,’ Greton panted, ‘give me a minute, would you?’

‘I said: more light.’

Greton sighed. Ruined arm clutched gingerly to his chest, he raised the other overhead, the fistful of light in his palm detaching, wavering as it rose. Light pulsed through the darkness in pale waves, growing brighter, rising to the sound of the sorcerer’s straining. Rhen turned away with a hiss as a blinding flash tore through the shadows, riding the crescendo of Greton’s pain.

‘Prick!’ Rhen saw Hoji bent double before her as she blinked back searing afterimages, the warrior clawing at his eyes and shaking his head. ‘You’ve blinded me, you half-spell shitstain!’

‘Shame…’ Greton wheezed. ‘Won’t… be able to see me… clap your sister’s cheeks again, eh?’

‘Little fucking fairground trickstering, smartmouthed, arsebuggering, shitworm…’ Sparks bounced from the ground as Hoji lifted his hammer and stepped toward the fallen mage. Greton raised his hand toward the warrior, a crackle of malign power forming around it.

‘Stow it, the pair of you, before I stick a sword up both your arses,’ Rhen spat, stepping through the middle of their impending scrap, the pair’s grumbling following her. She paused a step or two past them, squinting through the glare from above to scan the temple. 

They were in a sprawling vestibule, so vast that Greton’s blazing light lit up a hundred-foot half-circle of mouldering stone floor around them. The temple darkness lay impenetrable beyond it, shrouding whatever lay in wait within its depths. Ahead, though, near the edge of the light, great statues towered upon crumbling plinths, their grim features weathered and steeped in lingering shadow. A broad path ran between their sandalled feet, littered with rubble and flaked in patches with faded gold paint, stretching onward into the murk.

‘It’s the Nine,’ Rhen said, stepping closer, unable to keep the strain from her voice as she took in one likeness after another. She pointed to the statue on her left as Hoji and Greton appeared either side of her, the head of its long weapon lost to the darkness that lurked above. ‘Tharafuil, the Spearstorm.’ Her finger moved to the one on the right, its open hands raised before it, fingers clawed as if clutching something unseen between them. ‘Zulog, the Wandering Flame.’

Hoji took a step forward, hammer hefted over his shoulder, sniffing the air loudly as they gazed up at the team’s legendary forebears. He hawked loudly, and spat again, the glob arcing with a faint whistle before landing silently somewhere amidst a pile of rubble twelve feet away. ‘Place stinks like a sack of Azrani arseholes,’ he grunted. Greton sniffed the air in kind.

‘Cuntface is right,’ he said, a small flame bursting into life as he thrust his hand out to his side. ‘For once. Something’s not right with this place. It’s been defiled.’

Rhen stepped forward, her swords screeching from their scabbards. ‘Vouring.’ She spat again herself as she stepped over the rubble in her way, the taste of the god’s name like shit upon her tongue. ‘You two, take point on our flanks, and stay sharp-sharp. Let’s make this job quick and get the fuck out of here.’

The team passed between the fading forms of the Nine, following the path onward with Greton’s light trailing after them. The likenesses of those that had bested the Devourer of Light before should have been grand – imposing. Instead, they crumbled, rotted like propped-up corpses. Worse, the further they went, what should have been the majesty of Kaegan, the Bane of Fellgods, was but a pair of broken feet amid a pile of decaying rubble.

Rhen raised a sword out at her side and called a halt. The silence that followed their footsteps more dreadful than the ruin brought upon this sacred place by Vouring’s evil. Her eyes hardened as they skimmed over Kaegan’s remains, sliding quickly onwards into darker shadows.

‘There,’ she said, pointing ahead with the sword in her left hand. Faded lines were just visible in the darkness, carved into a sprawling, arching relief. A yawning void opened up in the midst of it, refusing Greton’s light.

‘It’s a depiction of the Nine’s War,’ Rhen breathed, climbing the rubble with her sword-dancer’s grace. She paused at the top, poised upon the balls of her feet, Greton and Hoji making a damnable racket as they scrambled up beside her. Her sword-point traced the worn flow of the carving, faded and rotted images of the Nine mid-charge, her weapon pausing upon the monstrosity at its apex. Vouring – the only part of the relief that had withstood the god’s corruption.

Lip curling at the beast’s passive arrogance, she jabbed a blade toward the opening. ‘We’re headed the right way for the altar. Greton – get your light in there.’

The mage waved his light forward with a pained grunt, back arched, hunching over his wounded arm. Rhen chewed her lip as the light drifted forth, ducking into the darkened passageway. Something told her the mage’s wound from the fight with the yixtal was worse than he’d made out. He wouldn’t last much longer, and they’d be fucked in this place without him.

‘Arsehole to nowhere,’ Hoji muttered, as the light failed to show anything beyond more darkness in the passage.

‘Had a few of those, Hoji and me,’ Greton creaked.

‘Plenty more of ‘em to come,’ said Hoji.

Rhen rolled her eyes. ‘Not if you two don’t shut up, and get a fucking move on,’ she snarled, hopping down the rubble toward the passage with the sound of the pair’s idiotic snickering following her.

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