#atharian

The rider—Jorvik—crouched down where the gravel-packed road ended abruptly. The earth sloped down from there. Where Castle Tavalos once should have been standing, alien plants now festered at the bottom of this colossal crater. Strange ferns, winding trees with jagged palm leaves that the rider had never in his life seen before, gigantic mushrooms the size of oxen, next to weird purple fruit that sprouted from shivering bushes.

The people in the nearby city had told him such, but even seeing it with his own two eyes, the rider refused to believe it. How could a castle just up and vanish like this? And a tiny piece of forest from another world take its place? The townsfolk swore up and down that Castle Tavalos had been here eighteen moons past, and then vanished in a pillar of brilliant light. An entire army had laid siege to the castle but turned and vanished into the mountains upon witnessing the unnatural disaster.

One drunkard had described it as, “An act of the gods!” A blind seer from far-flung lands claimed, “There are many things we shall never understand, and this is one of them.” A beggar’s rendition said, “The results of some queer magery, no doubt the count had dealings with demons.” The latter lingered in Jorvik’s mind, echoing there with rumors he had heard on his journey here about Count Iacobus of Tavalos.

Lost in thought and absorbed by his own wonder over this strange site, the assassin failed to hear the company that had arrived. However, they drew his attention once they had gotten close enough. Their claws clicked upon stone and scratched at turf, they bared their fangs, and emitted their lupine growls.

He cocked his head and peered at the three wild hounds. The creatures glared at him, snarling and growling. How bold of these beasts to approach him by daylight. Jorvik stared back at them and the darkness underneath his hood turned darker than black. Two tiny red dots glowed where his eyes should have been underneath that hood and he growled back at them. Not like a man, but like a beast.

The hounds whined, turned tail, and fled in terror. They ran into the hills, disappearing into the overgrown vineyards mere moments later while Jorvik watched their escape with a crooked smile.

He made his way back up the path to find his horse and mounted it again. Jorvik whipped its reins and gave it the spurs. The war-trained steed neighed, reared up, and sprung into action, galloping away as he steered it to ride around the crater towards the mountain range.

Over the course of the next hours, the hills grew in height, covered in a deeper and darker green. Whole oceans of weeds sprang up around him, obscuring his view of the distance and the path behind him. The sparse brushes made way to evergreen forests. The mountains drew closer, peeking out over the canopy of trees. The man-hunter spotted an old fortress ruin amidst the crags out there and slowed his steed’s pace down to a trot. Clouds rolled across the sky in a gentle pace, and together with the sun setting fully, he rode through the dusk of early night.

Eventually, he stopped to dismount again, searching the area for tracks. Once he found certainty in the immediate vicinity having been untouched by human feet, he tied his horse to a tree and left a bag of feed there for the creature to eat in his absence.

Jorvik knelt down and laid out his weaponry. With a cold routine and measured speed, he checked his blades and crossbow, sharpening anything on his whetstone that needed maintenance. Finally, he oiled the sharp implements with a rag and returned every single weapon to its place upon his body. He loaded the crossbow and slung it onto his back.

He gave the horse a pat on its neck as he marched past it, and wandered out through the dense forest. Jorvik moved at a brisk pace and his hike took him up up a steep slope. He jogged a stretch and then stopped abruptly. The man in black never broke out into a sweat nor did he audibly breathe.

Squatting down, he listened. His head moved on a swivel until he froze. And sniffed the air.

Springing back into motion, he followed the subtle trickle of a stream which he snuck along for the next minutes. The trail of fur boots along the opposite edge—careless steps that had trampled down yellowed stalks of wild weeds, leaving imprints in patches of mud—tipped him off and let him know he had come to the right place.

His mark must have been close. He could almost taste the gold he would earn himself today. The thirst he felt, welling up to his chapped lips and invading his mind—it, too, would be quenched soon.

A breeze swept through the trees where he waited. In this mild clime so far away from the lands he usually worked in, it carried an unexpectedly cold air. Even so, it did nothing to disturb him. He stared with dark intent into the camp. He observed.

Several figures mulled about between crude tents, situated right outside a crumbling stone fort. Artillery from trebuchets or time itself had torn large holes into walls and thick sheets of foliage had claimed the structure, creeping up along the stacks of stone and betraying a former glory long faded.

Unlike the gentry from the Tavalonian city he had just visited, the men here garbed themselves in furs. Only one of them wore roughshod iron armor. Their inventory appeared to be a hodgepodge of stolen goods and cobbled-together tools and weapons.

“Ravagers,” the gentry of the city had called them. Savages worse than the Easterners, menaces who had attacked the borderlands and the castle itself, abducting children and people from the hamlets throughout the county. However, their name and nature did not matter to Jorvik. His employers cared not about their role in the larger scheme of things either, judging by the nature of his mission.

Hidden between the leaves like a beast of prey, Jorvik waited. Silently watching. Still as a statue, with no sign of humanity about his air. More hours passed. He watched the men of this camp go about their dreary lives. Some sparred with staffs. They all cooked, ate, talked, and sang. They urinated in the bushes nearby.

They never noticed Jorvik.

He waited longer yet, letting more hours pass. The clouds shifted, allowing silver moonlight to shine upon the camp and its few sources of light where its bonfires glowed. Finally, his target among the group—their leader who wore a helmet with stag horns and a dark cape made of bear’s fur—grabbed a burning torch from a fire and headed into the crumbling fortress.

None of the others ever ventured deeper inside that decrepit structure. He had only seen two of them enter, and no farther than its front courtyard. The leader, however, wandered beyond that. Jorvik’s deathly stare followed after the glimmer of the leader’s torch, tracing his every step. From the corners of his eyes, the assassin noted how all but a few of the other men retreated into their tents to rest for the night.

The torch’s glow ascended a tower within the fortress ruin, visible both through arrow slits in the walls and holes where the stone had crumbled and fallen from in centuries past. The torchlight went up a spiraling staircase, turning round and round, until it disappeared in the top floor of the tower where the mark placed it behind some obstruction, rather than snuffing it out.

Clouds rolled up again, blotting out the moonlight. What perfect timing, Jorvik thought.

Once the first shift of the barbarian guards changed, Jorvik rose to his feet. Moving with an eerie silence, he glided from shadow to shadow, never allowing the night watch to spot his stealthy approach. He sidled between two tents and moved right behind the back of a lookout as that “Ravager” turned. And with that, he slipped into the dark ruins of the fortress.

Taking only a brief pause to take in his environment, his eyes had fully adapted to the darkness here. The warriors had stashed satchels and crates of supplies under the rotting wooden roofs of stabling within the main courtyard. Nobody appeared to maintain any sleeping quarters here.

Looking over his shoulder to ensure no pursuers, he traversed the open space and entered the tower. He took each step here with added care, climbing the stairs while making sure to not disrupt even the slightest pebble during his ascent.

The clouds parted halfway, shedding thin beams of silver light through the arrow slits and holes of the tower walls. He moved past the openings whenever he felt certain that nobody would be looking at the fortress, though each glance told him that the warriors only paid attention to the front of their camp, not to the fortress behind them. Jorvik drew his blade, prepared to make his kill immediate and sudden.

Finally, he reached the top level. Before walking up the final steps, he peered over the edge of the floor and saw the leader kneeling in front of a grisly altar. Keepsakes and mementos and jewelry stolen from numerous families made of bronze and gold sat in its center, resting on a red cloth, encircled by severed human fingers and tongues. Painted in black upon the red cloth hanging above this shrine, the sign of an eye with serpents emerging from it stared back at Jorvik.

The assassin feared few things and held very few superstitions, but that unholy symbol unsettled him.

He shrugged it off and focused on his mark. The leader still knelt there in silence, slouched forward with his head hanging low. Judging by his breathing and occasional twitching, he was not asleep, but well awake, perhaps in meditation.

Without a sound, Jorvik took the final steps up the stairs.

“I awaited you,” the man by the altar growled in a gravelly voice. He did not turn, he did not look up, nor did he budge in any way.

Jorvik held his tongue. This had caught him off-guard. He suspected magick at work here. Some sorcery that had warned him of the assassin’s arrival.

“I fear no man, and I fear not death,” the leader said to Jorvik after a long pause.

Jorvik shot a glance over his shoulder to see if anybody had followed him up into the tower. His curiosity now got the better of him.

In a voice so silky that it never failed to astonish strangers, he asked, “What happened at that crater?”

The mark picked up one of the severed fingers from the awful altar. It must have been decaying there for days now. He turned it in his hand and then guided the stump of it to his face. He rubbed it there, almost as if painting his cheeks and forehead with the coagulated blood that clung to the finger.

“We accomplished what we needed to,” the leader replied.

“And what would that be?” Jorvik’s hand tightened around the grip of his sword.

“All those who mattered—perished. Atharian won that day.”

That strange name delivered onto Jorvik the same unsettling chill that the sign of the medusa-like eye on the banner did before. It bore no familiarity in his mind, but the ring of it sounded all wrong.

Like the name of a demon prince.

“Who won?” Leaving little room for an answer, he asked, “Won what?”

“Atharian won. We won against the devils,” the leader said. He gingerly set the severed finger back down onto the altar, ensuring it was laid out just right. “I am prepared to die now, if that is what you came for. I—we—have served our purpose.”

Jorvik nodded, although the man could not see it as he still stood behind him. Finally, something that added up. His employers were in league with devils.

“The Empire sends their regards,” Jorvik said with a grim conviction.

He lunged forward and chopped down into the man’s shoulder with one swift blow, followed by another strike down into the other shoulder. He did not scream. He grunted after the first hit, but emitted not another peep. With one final stroke of the blade, Jorvik cut his head off with a precision that only executioners displayed.

The lifeless body of the leader of these “Ravagers” slumped onto the ground. Jorvik knelt and drew his hood back. He stared at the blood pumping, gushing out from the dead man’s neck. A fiery hunger clouded Jorvik’s mind, and a glint of a red glow flared up in his eyes. His lips parted, baring sharp fangs, and he sank them into the flesh of his mark. He drank from this fresh blood at the dead man’s neck, quenching a thirst that had lingered for a long time now. He drank and drank and drank, for he had not done so in a long time.

A shout erupted from the bottom of the tower. Jorvik moved to the stairs and leaned over. He saw torchlight nearing the fort’s courtyard.

Blood still dripped from his chin, his face a horrifying and gory mess. Hastily, he produced a scroll from a slender case upon his belt. He unraveled it and tossed it away from himself, letting it flutter to the ground.

“Treacherous conjurers of daemons and foul fiends are punished with death. Let this be a lesson to all that they will be vanquished with steel and cleansed from this plane of existence with infernal fire. Those who oppose the Empire shall fall, and those who lead these damned will be shortened by the length of their head,” the scroll read in harsh capital lettering.

Boots thumped and thundered at the base of the tower.

Wasting no time, Jorvik jammed a grappling hook into the corner of a window. He tossed the thin rope over the edge and climbed outside, clambering down the length of the tower. At the end of it, he redoubled his grip and pushed himself across the tower’s face, back and forth, until he gained enough momentum to swing across towards the fortress wall nearby. He bounced off of it like a cat and tumbled down, grabbing hold of some roots and dropping down the rest of the distance.

Like this, they would ill get to him in time. He scrambled up a slope, slid down between some rocks to the side of the old fort, and rolled down past the stream after bypassing the camp entirely. More shouts and commotion echoed out from the fortress tower, a sudden shriek escaped from its top. All the barbarians in the camp were awake, alert now, judging by the following shouts and trampling about. Jorvik jogged down another slope, darting between the trees, running the rest of the distance towards where he had left his horse behind.

When he paused to look back, he knew he had gained so much distance to afford such a brief moment. He peered up at the moonlight and wiped the blood from his face with the back of his glove.

Jorvik untied his horse from the tree and returned the feed bag to the back of the saddle where he fastened it. He mounted the beast and gave it the spurs, riding away.

What had Atharian won? At what price?

These savages were a husk of whatever army they supposedly had once formed. Perhaps the gentry had exaggerated their numbers to begin with. And given how easy it had been to murder their leader, they could be no match for any organized effort of royal troops to smoke them out of the mountains.

Whatever Atharian had won—to Jorvik, it seemed to be a hollow victory.