After the dragon announced herself with a roar, they came to a clearing in the woods, where sunlight streamed around their massive nemesis. Tiamat had horns above her eyes and below her chin, with silver scales and a long body covered in fins to help her fly. As the dark sisters protected her with magic, she gripped the ground with sharp talons and kept her leathery wingspan folded back. Wolf packs were constantly testing the invisible barrier, and when the Zilants fought through the gargoyles defending her, Tiamat spit globs of clear liquid to melt the serpents with her stomach acid.
Illeana stayed hidden and circled the Mother Goddess until she found an opening, then she leapt onto the dragon’s hind leg with a dagger in each hand and crawled to the nerve center between her shoulders. She sank her blades in and Tiamat spread her wings with a gust of wind that lifted her into the air, leaving the dark witches alone among the ravenous wolves. As the spellcasting women were eaten alive, their stone gargoyles were stripped of magic and crumbled in dissipating clouds.
Erelim tore through both armies on his way back to the Archons, where the giants were throwing boulders into the edge of the forest, knocking Zilants out of the trees before crushing them to death in their hairy arms. The Wikka women were using spells against the wolves by strangling the yelping creatures with vines that came alive at their whim. Xenakis climbed the rock wall and found Nephoros at the lookout point, watching Tiamat fly over the valley with Illeana holding onto her back. As the archer pulled his bowstring, Zalmoxis jumped from the treetops and grabbed onto the dragon’s neck. They careened off the snowy mountain, and while it ripped at her with its teeth, the Mother Goddess flapped her large wings for altitude and scratched the Rebel with her hind talons.
“She’s coming around!” Nephoros yelled.
Tiamat was flying in a wide circle when he fired, but his arrow flew harmlessly over her head. Erelim grabbed a bucket of the Serpent’s blood and poured it over himself. When the dragon passed by the ridge again, he jumped onto her wing, digging his sword in as an anchor against the ferocious wind. The Mother Goddess landed on a suitable perch on the mountain and splashed stomach acid over Zalmoxis until its body was hollowed through. As the Rebel lashed out, her fangs tightened upon its skull and broke it. Tiamat roared in victory after her enemy went limp, and in the midst of her celebration, Xenakis stabbed her with his sword.
The dragon turned her long neck to study the small annoyance. Without hesitation, she grabbed him between her fangs and tipped her head back to swallow him alive. He slid down her greasy tongue and shoved his dagger through the inside of her throat. The Serpent blood that covered him bit into her with a sharp sting and she arched her back as her flesh was fried from within. She became ash so quickly that her skeleton was left burning with outstretched wings.
As Erelim fell into the snow on the Carpathian peaks, Illeana landed on an adjacent cliff, where she waved to him with a proud look. He put away the knowledge of buried treasure and his journey through the Otherworld. Osiris would be angry and another war would come with the ruler of the Underworld’s final attempt to maintain power, but the Templar ignored the future and watched the swirling ash of the dragon dancing in the Sun.
* * * * *
While Xenakis was resting from the Great War, a storm crawled down the mountains and blinded him in a wall of white. He could no longer see Illeana Varsala or the verdant valley in which the battle against the Mother Goddess had been waged. The abrupt wind made him think that he was somehow the cause of it, that it was retaliation by elementals who did not appreciate his intrusion into their affairs. Tiamat was dead, absorbed back into the Pleroma and the light of eternal existence, but some demigods might be jealous of his victory and the intense cold would serve as a manifestation of their envy.
With the blood of the dragon still on his sword, he ate enough ice to slake his thirst before raising his mantle to stop the piercing chill from touching his bare skin. The weather was poking needles into his exposed flesh as he sloshed through knee-deep powder to find the Archons. His frozen chainmail shirt felt almost hot to the touch and he soon lost the ability to form complete thoughts as a result of the disorienting pain.
He wandered through the snow, searching for the warriors who would be praising the glory of that day, but he quickly became lost and found himself alone. Erelim gripped his sword as tight as any cross and moved west, believing that the wind would abate when he left the high elevation. His legs began to ache as he escaped the turbulence of the storm and tried to gauge the direction of the Sun. Through the ubiquitous glow across the sky, he continued forward in the hope of discovering whether he had come back to the land of humanity or if he was still lost in the realm of spirits.
He caught a glimpse of the horizon. A few steps in front of him, the ground dropped suddenly off a sheer cliff, and beyond the edge stretched the vast forests of Eastern Europe. Xenakis was looking for a way down when piles of snow nearby grew into Frost Giants, who blocked his escape with barely distinguishable features carved into their glassy heads. They lumbered towards the intruder with arms hanging low enough to drag their knuckles.
The titans that owned the Carpathians wanted him dead, and after the cold itself had failed, they sent their frozen minions to finish it. As the giants raised their heavy arms into the sky, he rolled away before their fists slammed down, then he hacked into one of their legs and chipped off a chunk of ice. With poor balance, its heavy frame collapsed and it went sliding over the cliff.
The second tried to flatten him under its huge palm, so he ran up its arm and struck its head. The block fractured with a crack that spread and shattered its skull with a burst of icicles that scratched the Templar’s face. He reveled briefly in his accomplishment before the headless creature threw him to the ground. As he landed in the powder, he chided himself for thinking that it needed a brain.
He picked up his sword and goaded the headless behemoth to take a swing, but it missed him entirely and crushed the other in a hailstorm that buried Xenakis underneath. After he crawled from the pile left behind, the ground trembled and he looked up the hillside to see an avalanche closing in. The last Frost Giant had no concept of self-preservation and was still pursuing him when they were hit by a wall of snow.
Xenakis felt the ground leave him and his stomach lifted in the violent freefall. He said a final prayer in a desire to see his family once again, but he landed in freezing water and the sensation shocked him back to life. The Templar sank quickly in his chainmail, and while holding his sword he sat in the depths, watching the surface of the water distort the sky beyond. He imagined that the dazzling play of light was an angel reaching down for him, breaking the barrier between worlds. To avoid offending their efforts, he raised his hand and was pulled into the open.
Saved by a log that was drifting by on the current, he choked in the fresh air near the thrashing Frost Giant as it melted. Erelim floated to the side of the Danube and dragged himself up the pebbles of the west bank. He strained for breath and tried to regain his bearings while searching for signs of the supernatural. There was smoke rising from a village burning in the distance and he smelled the stench of flaming corpses with the sickening disappointment that he was back in the real world.
He sheathed his sword and walked closer to discover that the men of the small town had tried to defend their families when they were butchered in the muddy streets. With twisted faces frozen upon their final moment, they seemed to call to him from the afterlife. He tried his best to ignore their torment until he stepped over a young girl in the soil, her light hair draped over a flower dress stained in blood. The knight pushed back visions of his own children and looked to the church, still blazing bright against the soot-filled sky.
Near a bridge crossing the river, he heard rustling sounds coming from a wooden hut, where a large dog sat calmly at the door of a storehouse. A tall warrior with black hair and a beard came out with his arms f
ull of loot. He wore chainmail beneath his Order’s identification, a white mantle with a black cross down the center.
As the Teutonic knight was busy claiming the plunder, he failed to see Xenakis standing by the fence. When the Great Dane gave the Templar a non-threatening woof hello, the German looked up and laid eyes upon the unexpected presence of the fellow soldier of God. He reached for the sword on his belt, but since Erelim didn’t seem threatening, he left his weapon in its scabbard and nodded.
He introduced himself in his native tongue, a gruff and unpolished language without subtlety or tact. While his pronounced but halted speech continued as if Xenakis understood what he was saying, his gestures seemed to indicate the horrible atrocity of the rampage. He didn’t seem to be responsible for it, in fact he looked a little disheartened, even if his sympathy was allayed by the pile of stolen goods.
“Do you speak Latin?” Erelim wondered, and the Teutonic knight responded that he knew a little. “Who did this?”
When the German waved his hand by his lips as if to say that the name could not be uttered, Xenakis assumed that he wasn’t free of the land of myth just yet. “Do you care if I take what I want?” asked the knight.
“If God doesn’t mind, how can I protest?” Erelim replied, in no mood for a quarrel like the one he and Tetricus had faced with the Bulgars. “And the dead seem unconcerned.”
The Teuton gave him a strange chuckle. “You’ve not seen what I have seen.”
The dog stood up and was big enough for a child to ride like a horse. With a long, square snout pointed in the direction of the burning church, he appeared to sense something that the humans could not.
“What’s wrong?” asked Xenakis, but the knight waved his behavior away.
“He does that sometimes,” he said with a wry glance at his pet. The Templar started to walk towards the town, intending to pass through on his way further north, but the German grabbed his arm. “Where are you headed?”
“Wherever God takes me,” the Templar responded.
“Not in that direction. Infection is spreading by the magic of Loki.”
“A disease of body or spirit?”
“One affects the other,” the man replied, with palpable hesitation despite his immense size. At almost six and a half feet, it didn’t seem logical that he would have anything to be afraid of.
“Well, the gods fear me more than I fear them,” Xenakis declared. “If you let terror inhabit you, it will bring the Demiurge with it.”
“Then after you are killed, Crusader, I will bury you with your legs crossed,” said the German. “All Templars want to die like Jesus, after all.”
Erelim heard the Teuton’s voice change and turned to the odd comment. “What did you say?”
The large man’s appearance seemed distorted and his mannerisms altered. He stood as if he was unaccustomed to his own flesh, uncoordinated and barely able to balance himself. His eyes had a shadow over them as well, with a sullied reflection as the Great Dane looked at his master like a stranger newly born. When the dog walked into the forest, for some reason the knight didn’t bother calling him back.
Xenakis watched the animal leave, taking his eyes off the foreigner. He used his metal sheath to watch the German stare at him behind his back, but after the man pulled a dagger from his sleeve, Erelim turned and locked his forearm. With a rough jerk he broke the bones, forcing him to drop the knife. The stranger lifted the Crusader off his feet and threw him against the door of the storehouse, then he came hobbling forward with the awkward movements of a child learning to walk.
The German grabbed Xenakis by the throat and slammed his head back until the wooden slats broke. As the oak panels cracked and gave way, they tumbled inside. Through the clogged and musty air, Erelim saw stacks of unused weapons that the townspeople had been unable to reach before the slaughter. While the foreign knight was getting to his knees, he knocked over a quiver of arrows and shoved a handful into the man’s chest. The Teuton examined the wooden shafts digging into his ribs before reaching for a steel gauntlet, which he used to hit Xenakis and splash blood across the wall.
The Templar picked a bow off the floor and wrapped the string against the back of his enemy’s neck, then he let it straighten and smash against the knight’s face, kicking him backwards into the daylight. The tall man fumbled around as if on stilts and fell at the riverbank. Erelim reached for the biggest stone he could find and pummeled the foreigner until his head split open. The German gave off an angry breath with the spirit that controlled him and Xenakis exhaled in the cool air, smelling the fire take the town to embers with the rotting dead.
The pain of the torn flesh on his scalp was intrusive, so he dipped his head into the Danube and washed it clean. As the cut continued to bleed into the river, he scanned his reflection and was relieved that he could see his own image. When the injury suddenly healed and a gleam sparked his attention, he turned to see a woman standing above him who seemed to have arrived with a pack of wolves feeding upon the dead. She wore a helmet of gold, along with a breastplate that shined like the magnificence of the northern lights.
“I have healed you, good warrior,” she said in a sweet voice, graceful but intense. She looked at him with pride and he assumed that she was benevolent.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Athena?”
She smiled. “She’s the guardian of democracy, I’m glad that I don’t have her responsibility.”
“Then you were conjured by the Norse,” he guessed. “A Valkyrie.”
She bowed. “My current task is to hunt the trickster, the demigod of mischief.”
“Loki?”
“Yes, but he travels ahead of me, raising the dead with his magic. He’s a servant of Seth, a useful enemy whose violence helps to create a barrier to greater chaos. You just destroyed the temple he was residing within,” she said, referring to the dead German. She stared through the ravaged town. “They will soon be reanimated by his power. In his attempts to regain favor with his brother, Osiris, he works with Arca Anjety to conscript dead warriors not chosen for Valhalla to defend Odin at Ragnarok, or the Great Hall of Freya to listen to love songs eternally. His undead soldiers attack village after village, building an army worthy of the Demiurge.”
“What do you need me to do?” Xenakis said without pause.
“Live long enough to serve the Goddess Athena. You’ll have to carry a weight uncommon to most mortals.”
“In what way?”
“Don’t accept being a slave to anyone, not even the gods,” she said with deep respect. “Your life is more important than you know, you will help defeat the son of Satan.”
“If I do this, will my reward be with my family in Heaven?”
“Of course, but you first have to wash the blood from your hands.” She offered him a cup that she said contained water from the Well of Fate. “You’re a hellrunner, someone who must enter the Otherworld to gain wisdom to heal your people. By the fires of Muspelheim, the time of Ragnarok has arrived. After the demise of Seth’s daughter Tiamat, the golden age has begun and all nine worlds have been opened during the rebirth of humanity as your own creator. The twilight of the gods has come, soon you will choose your own destiny.”
Erelim’s soul needed to be cleansed after his time in war, and absolution was only received through service to something higher than the self. He knew that the Valkyrie had disappeared before he confirmed it, but he saw a shadow from the corner of his eye and turned to witness the corpses stirring, just as she had predicted. The women and children were either given to Paradise directly or by the cleansing of minor sin through the pain they faced upon their deaths. Most of the men, however, were not chosen for a seat with the Norse deities, and by the curse of Seth they stood with mortal wounds intact. From what Xenakis had seen, the unnatural occurrence wasn’t that surprising.
There were voices upriver in a flowing, watery dialect, but their speech beca
me the warcries of men the size of bears riding a longboat. The Viking vessel had a curved dragon head at the front to pierce the settling mist, and despite being surrounded by the risen dead, the sight of Northmen from centuries past was an unbelievable spectacle. The Scandinavians ran adrift in their shallow-keel wooden ship, seafarers on a ley line from the past still seeking gold and women through the towns of Europe that their forefathers had long since settled. In clothes made from the skin of animals and finely crafted decorations made by their wives, they jumped onto the riverbank at the edge of the farming village with weapons of basic fashion.
Carrying battle-axes heavy enough to take a man apart at the waist, they cut into the middle of town with their eyes on the valuables left behind by the trickster and his Otherworldly minions. Erelim was shocked by their arrival until arrows started landing around him, then he was jolted from his disbelief with the sudden realization that he was about to become their slave or die trying to avoid it. He could not win a battle against a dozen Vikings, and if he protested he might be rewarded with the Blood Eagle, a form of execution where the ribcage was broken open from behind and the lungs exposed to flap with every dying breath.
When a tall blonde with sharp features ran towards him and yelled with his ethereal tongue, the Crusader stuck his sword into the ground and signaled his defeat. Betraying the advice given to him by the Valkyrie, he let himself get tied up and pulled to the longboat with the rest of their supplies. He was placed in the corner with other valuable objects while the warriors made snide comments about his clothes.
When the zombies in the village were finally dispatched, the Northmen realized that their Chieftain was injured. His arm had been gnawed upon and an artery was severed. Without an adequate remedy, he asked for his sword, believing that it was shameful for a man to die without a weapon in his hands, even if he wasn’t in battle. After he passed on, his men set up a funeral pyre and declared Hagbard their new leader. Then one of the slave girls had intercourse with several of the strongest warriors before being ritually strangled and set ablaze with their dead Chieftain, hoping that she would be promoted to his wife in Asgard by bringing him the life-force of his best soldiers.