Short Story

The Warrior Reawakens

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The Empress of the Terran Alliance, Queen of Mars, and cult proclaimed goddess of the Milky Way, opened her eyes after her morning prayers and supplications. Despite what the outlaw cult leaders might tell you, the great Empress herself was created by an even more powerful and creative God of the universe. Who better to serve than the creator of all things? Her prayers that morning, as they were every morning, were for wisdom, clarity of thought, and strength. Being Empress was not nearly as easy or as fun as what she had been before. Hundreds of years ago, before her reluctant Accession to the Throne of Power, Sally was just a college student studying art at the University of Arizona. Now, if she looked at a map, she wasn’t even sure if she could point to Arizona. The old nations have all been dissolved and reformulated under her rule, at least those of Terra Prima. The student loans, the boy troubles, the test anxiety, she would have it all back if it meant she did not need to worry about her Empire.

She collected herself, donning her royal robes, and stepped from her chambers in the Palace of Grace. The Palace was located upon Atlantis, the newly raised eighth continent and seat of power for the Empire. If one were to look at a map from when Sal was a girl, they would more than likely find it incomprehensible in those latter days. The Empress moved from her Palace to her Chambers just outside the Hall of the Chosen, where she would preside over the proceedings between her ten chosen councilors and the people’s ten councilors. Sal had set up this system only six years after she ascended to Empress. This took much burden off of her as the sole arbiter of justice, and instead left her to be a simple tie breaker should it be needed, which hardly ever occurred. In the six hundred years she has presided, and across the hundreds of councilors, she had to break a tie four times, if she remembered properly.

In her chambers awaited her “three daughters,” the highest rank attainable in the Terran Government by those of the low-blooded Terra Secondari, the underclass on Terra. Sal allowed their women to become her personal entourage as a show of unity between the two great sections of the world. The women fawned over Sal, believing her to be a goddess. After they had their chance to doll her up and make sure she was the most attractive being in the galaxy, even without her powers, Sal stepped out into the Council chambers.

The chambers were shaped as an oval; the party addressing the council stood in the center of the oval, having entered from the opposite side of the oval from where the Empress sat. Ten Councilors, five from each house, sat on either side of the addresser, lifted above them by about five feet on the platforms. The oval, at its widest, was twenty feet across, and its depth was three times that at sixty feet deep. The space from the ground to the ceiling, however, was around fifty-five feet. The entire room was imposing, not without purpose. The grandeur of the highest court in the Empire was nothing to be considered trife.

Sal had heard the murmurings among the council members as they awaited her arrival, and the sudden hush and dead silence was pierced only by the soft clopping of her heels on the darkened marble floor, which made up the ground she trod across to take her place behind the ceremonial veil. Laurana Tash took her place just outside the veil, where she could declare the court in session by introducing the Empress. “All rise,” Sal heard more than saw her councilors rise and bow. “The Queen of Atlantis, Queen of Terra Secondaria, Queen of Terra Prima, Queen of Mars, Empress of the Great Terran Alliance, Lady of the Day, and Daughter of the Creator, Sal Unborn, presides, this day, over all the Great Light touches. Council is now in session.”

Most of the issues and queries made by the people that day were handled by the councilors with almost no input from the throne. What little input there was came by way of Laurana the Empress’ Mouth. Laurana had served Sal for over one hundred years now. The Empress found herself bored to the point of exhaustion just as she had every day for those last hundred years. Nothing exciting ever happened anymore. The last addresser of the Council to call for military aid had stood before them nearly two hundred years ago. The rebellions were crushed, the world was at peace and bathed in prosperity, and even the stars were being colonized as they spoke. Sal almost begged for something to happen. As if He heard her cries, the Creator decided today was the day.

The quiet of deliberation was suddenly broken by the doors to the Council Chamber being slammed open. The Empress made no sudden move, but instead slowly sat upright as if she was more insulted by the interruption than startled. Sal opened her mouth, and Laurana spoke. “Who enters into the presence of her Grace without appointment?” Looking through Laurana’s eyes, Sal could see the disheveled man who had barged in.

The old man was bloodied and broken, hobbling on one leg, dragging the other behind before tripping and slamming into the dias that held the great sigil of the Council. “My Empress, they are here, Atlantis’ shield has been compromised, the Herrium have sent an advance force of… of humans! Empress, save us, save your people!”

Sal suddenly felt odd; the world paused before her eyes. She had not personally entered Slip-time since she was a girl. Something about this man slammed into those warrior instincts as if a gong from another life was being rung loudly in her mind. Sal stepped from her veil and began levitating up and eventually passed through the skylight in the chamber’s ceiling. Outside the Palace of Grace, she looked up and saw what the man was talking about. An invasion fleet flooded out of the side of an orbiting dreadnought. Was that Bohdi’s Bismarck? It couldn’t be. 

Either way, the empress stretched her neck and felt a deep crack as if something finally snapped back into place after hundreds of years. Her royal robes burned off her body, and she felt the gust of wind clothe her in her old hero garments from the before times.  A red body-length coat wrapped around her waist, forcing an hourglass figure she had not known for many, many years. Her legs were covered in black leather boots that went up to her knee, and her face cast aside all the glamorous makeup done by her daughters that morning, replaced by a simple foundation, blush, and lipstick combination she had been known for. The lipstick, of course, was poisonous. That was truly a relic. Being from the days before her heroics. Sal sighed as she had to mentally adjust the fit; she was not twenty years old anymore, even if her joints didn’t know it.

Bodhi, a once loyal bodyguard to the Empress, had told her many times she should spend even an hour a week sparring with other Gifted warriors, to keep herself in pique condition for an eventuality such as this. Now, she supposed, she would go and tell Bodhi he was right, in person.

A Young Man’s Nightmare

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A Short Story by: A.B. Timothy

Claes ran. The stone walls of Kalmar Castle kept elongating further and further. There, up ahead, was a door, and under the door some light. The sword in Claes’ hand grew heavy and awkward as he also felt his stature shrink. He rammed his shoulder into the door, and after he got through it, he saw, in the torchlight, King Sigismund laughing with a wicked smile on his face as he held a bejeweled dagger over a female. Claes threw his sword in front of him to try and cut down the man, but his blade, like smoke, passed around the man. Claes looked at the woman, no, girl tied up in the chair. It was his beautiful Margaret, “Claes, run!” She screamed even as the bejeweled dagger was plunged into her heart.”

Claes blinked as he fell back in shock, rather than landing on his backside, like he expected to, his back was propped up by the stone wall of the hallway. He straightened and began running again. As fast as he could, his gait returned to normal, and the sword no longer felt awkward in his hands.

Over and over, every door his wife, young, old, how he knew her that day, dying over and over. Each time being killed by that traitor! Immolated, defenestrated, hung, blown to kingdom-come, all by the hand of that… that king who would dare call himself a Swede! All but one. Or so Claes remembers it. The last image he beheld before screaming himself awake, in a peaceful fluttering of eyelids, was this:

Margaret’s lightless eyes stared at him in horror as he held the pike that had run her through. The only evidence of the king’s presence was his wicked laughter somewhere in the distance. Her eyes stared into his, piercing his soul, as he screamed bloody murder.

His eyes fluttered open to the sound of peaceful birds chirping outside, somewhere in the distant trees, his beautiful wife lying peacefully, in her fullness of child, right next to him. Whole, and more importantly, hundreds of miles from the influence of that traitorous king.

Claes felt the sweat drip down his brow. He still could not escape that kind of dream unscathed. He looked down at his hands and saw blood. The old soldier shoved down a scream of terror, swallowed, blinked, and the blood was gone. “God is my refuge and strength.” He murmured to himself, as a tightly held breath left his lungs.

The Battle of Johanna Valley

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A Short Story by: A.B. Timothy

The armies of Farthia and the armies of Horatia gathered on either side of the great valley of Johanna to do battle therein. The light of heaven besieged both sides before a sword could be drawn; according to the alchemists, it was over one hundred and twenty degrees that day. Zennith, a man of age from one of the great Farthian cities, stood watch over the battlefield yet to be battled in. The bird of prey that floated above his head gave his graying hair some much-needed relief from the blistering sun. Zennith’s breastplate of iron weighed heavily on the old, rusted, and reluctantly patriotic man’s chest. He stood watch to warn his people in the event of an attack by the Horatians. The last time Zennith had held a sword, his wife and child burned for it.

Though he was only a mere carpenter for many years, Zennith had been pressed into service by the desperate Council of Farthian Lords. After he first refused, claiming his lack of interest in fighting a war and his desire to teach, the Lords breathed a convenient sigh of relief when a Horatian arson burned half of Zennith’s city. Zennith had come home that day to find his daughter burned alive in his blackened workshop and his wife half naked with a split throat, surrounded by her own blood.

Zennith had once been a Captain of the armies of Farthia, but that was a lifetime ago. Now he had joined the military as a mentor, training young men in the best way to die and to kill. The old man taught them how to use their Warp Lances, their Jump Crossbows, and their Air Daggers to the greatest effect in battle. Now the day had finally come, the armies, too massive to number on either side, would soon turn this beautiful, lush, green, and yellow valley into a field of air-holes, craters, and streams of blood. Just like his younger days as the mentor of great adventurers, Zennith would again watch as most, if not all, of his proteges die. The man was callous; who could blame him? Seeing so many proteges come up and die under your watch did something to a man. He’d never trained a Koran the Great or a Hapthro the Destroyer. He was always the one to train the heroes no one wrote about.

This was all his past, however. On that day, he stood and watched the battlefield with a horn of violet glass dangling at his side. “Korin!” He called up to the bird of prey above him.

“Yes, Captain Zennith?” The bird replied. “Have your eyes spotted something beyond my perception?”

“No, my friend, but is it not time for you to move to the next guard post?” Zennith wanted to keep his schedule as best he could. The cold-blooded bird might freeze if kept so stationary for so long.

“Yes, perhaps it is, but I do enjoy watching over you,” Korin said.

“I understand, I am quite the conversationalist.” Zennith’s words were dry and matter-of-fact.

“That is exactly right.” Korin laughed. “Everyone else is too busy asking everything there is to ask about me and not watching the enemy; you are stalwart.” The great winged beast rolled his shoulders and jumped off the resting pole. “I’ll be off then, until we meet again, Captain.”

“In this life, or the next,” Zennith called. The bird leaving his pole let the sun beat down on Zennith again. His already grey-blonde hair began bleaching even whiter, immediately.

Minutes stretched into hours. Finally, at the setting of the sun, Zennith could, along with his fellow guards, put that violet horn to his lips and give a single long and loud note. Horatia had begun to move, and the men of Farthia would meet them. But Horatia was too fast… with a unspoken word passed between the men of the guard towers, the foreguards, each stepped up to a platform that protruded from his guard tower, a railless balcony of sorts, and threw himself therefrom in a leap. Zennith reached up and snatched the legs of his giant transport. The bird, a different bird than he had spoken with before, which he grabbed, floated him down to the middle of the valley before any of the main troop could begin their march. There he stood with the other foreguards’ spear now slung off his back and planted into the ground.

The line he made with his fellow foreguards quickly burned blue when they began to sing a song. A song of protection and deliverance. The space between each guard and his spear exploded in a line of blue energy from the earth. Their grand song made manifest in the world. Almost as soon as the mile-long wall had sprung up, it began to falter under the barrage of cannon shot, boulder droppings, and spell lobbings. The spearhead of the Horatian forces was held at bay, to their great dismay. The deceitful speed of the Horatian horde, now brought to a screeching halt. Tens of thousands, brought to a standstill by the efforts of one hundred guardsmen. The ground shook, and Zennith smiled as he knew the march of the great Farthian hosts had finally commenced. Beasts, Men, Winged Beasts, and Giants all now descended on the field of Johanna.

The foreguard’s song now rang like a gong in the midst of a screaming horde. The Horatians tried, and failed, to drown out their songs with their war cries, and while the cries gave their speakers a strengthening red hue—made purple by the blue of the shield wall—it was not enough to beat the shield song.

At the climax of their song, the foreguard cried out in a sound that shocked the earth, sending a wave of blue energy out in front of them. This wave washed over the Horatian forces, shoving them back, allowing the surge of the Farthians to meet their enemy. Now the battle had begun in earnest.

Over the next seven hours, the armies surged back and forth, great swathes of both dying in fire, water, blood, or air. Zennith left his post in the foreguard after slaying his dozens and took command of a battalion of cavalry. He led his battalion in the Great Counter Surge of the West Valley, a maneuver that, despite costing nearly three hundred men, almost certainly won Farthia the day. Three hundred more fallen heroes, never to be written about by name. Oh, the historians will laud their brave charge, but their names will be quickly forgotten. Zennith knew them all by name; however, he had trained them after all. Perhaps he would ensure their names are remembered… or perhaps that was too much for one man. Either way, he would visit each of their families and tell them how their boys—No, he thought to himself, their men—fought and died there that day. Once again, the old man was left alive by a cruel act of fate, only to stew in his own regret and guilt.

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