The Demons Within

The Last Stand (Part One)

The heavy, dark iron doors opened slowly as the golden haired man pushed them forwards, ready to confront his greatest foe. The man- no, the monster who lied and manipulated everything. The one responsible for the deaths of all those poor innocent souls, the one responsible for the crumbling of two once grand empires. He had to succeed, or the gods themselves would perish.

Gripping his silver sword, Íonachta, tightly in his hand, he slowly began to walk into the grand entrance of the so far unnamed enemy's mountain fortress, the heavy snowfall beginning to follow the steps of the man. The room was pitch black, and the man could barely see past the point of Íonachta.

Using the holy magic given to him by the gods, he willed a tiny spark of fire to rush down the blade of the sword, lighting part of the room as if it were a torch. It was a vast empty hallway, it's walls a dark onyx with the floor being made of a solid gleaming layer of gold. The hallway extended far beyond the light of his flame, and the dark shadows of doorways dotted the gleaming walls.

Small careful steps were the only amount of progress the man could reason as being safe. In the very fortress of a monster who caused two great empires to crumble at the same time, traps were practically expected.

But there were none.

Illuminated only by the light of the flaming sword, the man saw that the onyx walls held deep and twisted engravings, but besides that there was nothing. The engravings were interesting, filled with a multitude of strange beasts and two familiar marks repeated over and over. The first was the monster's symbol, an open golden eye with similarly colored eagle wings sprouting from the sides. The second was a shield with four symbols on it, (Including the golden eye) that was the symbol of the Templars before they had changed it to a flaming sword, much like the man's.

The hallway continued on and on, occasionally revealing doorways to rooms that were completely empty, except for the engravings upon the walls. Each room seemed to tell its own story of a different person, seeing how they held a unique image planted in each section of the story and upon the crystalline ceilings.

But right now none of that mattered. The last of his Templar brothers and sisters were fighting the Bháis-Träger. They could retreat no further, and the holiest of shrines was their last bastion of hope. If he did not kill the leader of this menace then they were doomed.

So he pressed on.

The engravings upon the walls slowly shifted to more recognizable images, such as the titanic form of the Dragons and the slender elves. He had pressed so far into the fort that the entrance was barley in sight and the cold gusts of air were almost non-existent.

As he took a few more shuffling steps past the first dragon he felt one final cold gust of wind, chilling him to the bone. Then his sword's supposed eternal fire went out, and the heavy iron doors slammed shut behind him, plunging him into a darkness that seemed to consume everything.

Then the sounds began. The low moans of suffering souls lost for eternity, the deep breathing of some great beast, the whirring of a mechanical horror. His blessed sword could do nothing to such eldritch abominations if he could not see them.

Thankfully for him, the sounds stopped as quickly as they came. A small ball of golden light signaled the silences' return, illuminating the hauntingly beautiful engravings once more. The ball itself simply appeared a foot away from his head, it's surface a slowly shifting collection of lines, each glowing as brightly as the others.