I find an odd irony in the results of the Eight's struggle. This may be because I've been a military man, but I have found that civic militaristic self-sacrifice has been born out their attempts to snuff out civilization. Inspired by the Eight, if you can believe it. Look at the new Alberion Ranger Corps, or the Tesidium Army. Paragons of rigorous discipline, they are everything the Eight despises.
-The Necromancer's Notes, Codex 55, Vol. 2, Uncategorized.
***
Two Years Ago
***
The other Rangers called it Hell Week. And, to be fair, they were dead-on.
It was a fully-comprehensive examination of every skill they had learned, not just book-knowledge, but in application.
Iako blinked and shook his head as the sea spray woke him. The rocking of the boat made him want to fall asleep, but he had to be vigilant. However, it was easiest to be vigilant when one was well-rested, not when one only had five hours of sleep for the whole week.
There was nine of them in the boat, and no one was talking. Iako studied the horizon and resisted itching his face. The nine of them had a mission, one of the last training exercises, different for each squad. In their case, they had to infiltrate an old castle, apart from the main island, a crumbling wreck.
The strongest three of them were rowing. Laidu, of course, was one of them. His amber eyes were set forward in steely determination. Behind him, an Erinyan named Jain Han, of Qin, worked the middle rows. And behind them, Eikagor, the massive, dark blue Kai'Draen, was the real force behind their craft.
Raddas and Gial sat at the bow, and right behind them, a Vesperati's ears pricked up at any sound. Halech, that was his name.
There was a third human and a Calixa with them. The human, Theophrastus, was an alchemist; the Calixa, whose name was so long and unpronounceable that everyone just called him John for convenience's sake, was a thaumaturgist. They wore the loose tunics and leather armor everyone else had worn on their final trial. But Iako had suggested another small addition to their wardrobe.
War paint.
Iako was used to the war paint he wore, a mix of black, steel grey, and navy blue. He looked back at Laidu. The dragon Changed was mostly covered in steel grey paint, but his eye sockets were colored navy blue, along with a line that extended past his lips, tracing the upper jaw shape of his skull. His horns, normally an off-white color, were colored black. Eikagor merely had to mark his face with lines of grey and black, though he had washed his hair with some herb that took the ash-white to pitch-black. The rest of them were similarly pigmented.
"I heard Denan's going to try something else tonight," Iako said to Laidu.
"Of course he is," Laidu said. "He think's I'm a monster."
"Dislocating his arm a few times over doesn't help with that," Iako advised his friend.
"Well, he shouldn't have tried to mug me in the shower," Laidu said. "What kind of man tries to mug another while they're washing up? It's like challenging a man to a duel when he's naked and unarmed. Which I was. That's just dishonorable."
"That's no excuse for being unprepared. A tribesman challenged me to a duel in a similar situation," Eikagor said absently. "I broke his neck." He shrugged. "And he was dressed and had a spear." He said it dispassionately, the same way one might have talked about swatting a fly.
Iako made a mental note to never get on Eikagor's bad side.
They were getting close. Above them, the castle loomed, staring down at them imperiously, a colossus of ruin and rubble. It was a dark shadow on a dim sky, standing out only by shades of darkness. There were few rocks in the sea, and their boat was small enough to glide over the reefs that were so perilous to the trade ships. Once or twice, Iako heard the oars scrape against the tops of the reef.
Two minutes later, they stopped, and Gial threw the anchor over. "We swim from here, and make sure you have no food on you. Deathmaw eels infest these waters. We don't want them visiting," Raddas said. "Ready?" Gial and Eikagor nodded, as did the Vesperati, Halech. "Go."
With three small splashes (Or rather, two small splashes and a large one), the Ranger trainees slipped in and began to swim towards the island. The boat rocked, still shaken from the weight of them all falling out. It was good Tethyd make, allowing the long canoe to carry everyone.
Iako would go with John the Calixa and Jain Han the Erinyan. Raddas would follow, along with Laidu and Theophrastus. That was the plan, all laid out by Raddas the night before. The man was one marvelous strategist, Iako found out. When the teams had been posted, Raddas had taken one look at the names assigned in his group, and Iako could see the gears spinning and running in Raddas's head. He started coming up with a plan immediately.
And so far, it was going swimmingly, no pun intended.
Iako grabbed the edge ofthe boat, making sure his tail didn't accidentally send Raddas swimming, and watched as the first three made it to shore. "Ready?" Raddas asked. Iako, the Calixa, and the Erinyan nodded. "Go!" Iako pulled off and dove straight into the water.
It wasn't cold, which was a relief. Iako pulled himself through the water. The others would have to stay above water to breathe, but Iako was Tethyd. Iako was born of the water.
He inhaled. Well, it wasn't inhaling per se, but it felt like it. Instead of feeling the air rush through his mough and down his throat, he felt something wet course inside his neck, and felt the same invigorating air inflate his chest. Gills. They only kicked in when he tried to breathe underwater.
Iako swam through the murky darkness, his claws scratching at the seafloor. While the others used their feet to propel them through the water, Iako's tail did the work for him, swishing from side to side. He sped through the water, though he didn't see much. The moonlight, beautiful as it was, did not have the raw strength and force of sunlight, and couldn't penetrate the choppy seawater. All Iako saw was dark blotches in a slightly less dark field.
It was enough for him to navigate, and that was the important part. Iako was fine on swimming; he was a Tethyd through and through. He was worried about the others. They limped through the water, tugging themselves forward instead of gliding through with the grace and style of a sea-born creature. Like Iako, for example.
But ten seconds later, that didn't matter. Iako got his feet under him and ran through the surf, breaking onto the shore in a mess of white sea foam and brine. The other two followed. Iako said a quick prayer of thanks under his breath that he didn't have to deal with the deathmaw eels. They weren't poisonous like some eels, and they only really got excited at the scent of blood, but occasionally they bit out of the blue.
Something wet fell onto the sand next to him, and Iako looked up just in time to see something fly into the water. It looked like a pail, a bucket. It made a tiny splash as the bucket (and its contents) fell through the water.
He leaned down and picked up the thing that fell next to him. It was wet and squishy. He felt it for a moment, rolled it between his fingers. Fish guts.
Well, they had said Denan was going to try to sabotage their final trial. Now Iako knew how.
He had just thrown a pail of fish guts into the ocean. It was a lure for every deathmaw eel. And the worst part about it, the thing that infuriated Iako, was that he couldn't call out and warn his comrades. To do so would jeopardize the mission. There were actual scouts and Rangers acting as guards in this castle, and any sound would alert them to their presence.
Iako did the only thing he could do. He prayed and hoped.
He heard a cry from one of the last of the men as the final three swam to shore. Who was it? Who was hurt? The answer to that question was revealed rather quickly. Laidu stormed up, rushing out of the surf, something dangling on his upper arm. He grabbed, pulled the squirming deathmaw eel off of his arm, and slammed the fish's head into a rock. "I thought you said they only attack bleeding victims?" He glared at Iako.
"Yeah. I think that was Denan. He threw a bucket of fish guts into the water," Iako said.
"Figures," Laidu snapped. "Who has the first aid? I don't want to be bleeding out!" Halech the Vesperati had that, and he immediately went to work, bandaging Laidu's arm, wrapping the crisp white linen over the Ranger trainee's black uniform. Immediately, the white became stained with drops of red, dots that formed a crescent shape.
"Can you still use your arm?" Raddas asked.
Laidu tested it, shifting around his arm, pushing , flexing. "I might be a bit weakened with my arm, but other than that, it is fine." He grimaced ever so slightly as the bite wound hurt, as it caused more pain.
"Now, onto the next part," Radas said. "Theo, you have the alchemic paste?" Theophrastus patted the bag he wore on his back, identical to the ones everyone else wore. Iako's bag had lockpicking gear and various other tools and weapons. "Good. The drain's supposed to be right this way. Stay low."
The nine of them crept, low to the ground, across the surf and sand. Their mission, as laid out by the Ranger Corps commanding officer, was to figure out who a mock general was and assassinate them without raising an alarm. They were to expect the difficulties of a normal mission, without any outside influence. Of course, seeing as someone tried to get them mauled by deathmaw eels, they were expecting anything.
They reached the drain. Stabbed into the side of the rocky shore, it was a giant metal pipe, large enough to fit even Eikagor. In the front of the grate, large metal bars prevented access. And that was why they had the alchemic paste.
Theophrastus opened a small clay jar sealed with wax, scooped out some strange gooey paste, and smeared it on the top and base of the bars. The smaller Ranger trainee immediately wiped his hands off with sand, using the abrasive grit to scrape off the alchemic paste. "Why do you do that?" Gial asked Theophrastus after he finished.
"That's why," Theophrastus said. He pointed to the bars, and all of them stared. Where the gooey, slightly green paste had been smeared, acidic-smelling, foul, greasy smoke poured out, thick as liquid. "It does that when exposed to metal. I don't want any of that stuff drying on my hands so I forget about it," he explained. "It'd start burning the next time I tried to pick up a sword or touch anything metal," Theophrastus said.
The first bar fell off, hitting the sand with a dull thump. Eikagor grabbed it in the middle, far enough away from the smoking ends. He grabbed the next one, and the next, and the next as they fell. He set them all aside, and climbed in, taking care to avoid the smoking stumps that used to be the bars.
Laidu stepped through, taking Eikagor's hand to steady himself. "So we climb up this plumbing shaft?" he asked.
Raddas nodded. "It leads to a dry cistern inside the walls," he said. "Eikagor should have the climbing equipment. Jain Han and Halech will climb up on opposite sides of the stone cistern, secure the climbing lines, and the rest of us climb out."
"Alright then," Jain Han said. "After that?"
"We split up. I'll go with Eikagor and you. Theophrastus, Halech, and Laidu, stick together. Gial, John, Iako, you guys are a team. Eikagor's team goes to lock the guardhouses, keep the soldiers inside. Shove something inside the doors. Iako, you get the watchtowers, so your team will go up first. After you take out the guards in the towers, take out the ones on the ground. Laidu, your team will break into the records room, find the identity of the commander. Once the other teams finish their tasks, they'll meet at the records room. There, I'll come up with a plan to get the commanding officer." Raddas said. "Now, we move."
They climbed through the drain, and after a dozen yards, they had to guide themselves through by touch, by feeling. Iako flinched when the pipe shifted from rusted, pitted metal to hard, rough stone. It was a tactile shock, the sensation akin to walking from a dark room into a bright light. It didn't sting, but it was jarring. Iako knew they were close to the original cistern.
And then, suddenly, they were there.
The cistern itself was a large, round pit, maybe six or seven yards in diameter, made of small stone brick. The bottom three inches were full of water, water that splashed when they stepped through. Once everyone stopped moving, it became still, settling into a mirror of the stars. "Climbing rope?" Halech asked Eikagor. The Kai'Draen yanked his backpack off, threw the Vesperati a coil of rope and a grappling hook.
Now, the fun began.
Halech wasted no time in climbing out of the cistern. He used his fingernails -talons, really- to hoist himself out of the pit. And then, after tying the rope off, he jumped, unfurled his wings, and took off.
Iako climbed, and John was right under him. The Calixa was a capable warrior, gifted in both hand-to-hand combat, and acrobatic maneuvers. Gial, similarly, was capable of stealth and good with hand-to-hand combat. The three of them -Iako, John, and Gial- needed the cowardly tools of assassins for this mission, the tools of shadow and misdirection. The fortress was their enemy, and this team of nine, instead of throwing down a gauntlet and agreeing on a place and weapons, was blinding their enemy and smothering him with a pillow.
But that was the Ranger's duty, sometimes. It was a knight's duty to obey the laws of chivalry, to be a shining paragon of virtue, gleaming in his plate. It was a soldier's duty to die for his banner and country, to lay his life down for those defenseless, precious lives that would be destroyed if not for his noble sacrifice. It was the Ranger's duty to keep those noble sacrifices to a minimum, to snuff out rebellions and foreign threats before they bore their bloody fruit.
Now, Iako, John, and Gial went about blinding the fortress.
There were three watchtowers, with clear views of the entire fortress. The first one, to the north, would be their first target. His team rushed through the courtyard, keeping low, their feet making whispers on the cobblestones. They stopped underneath a small ledge, just out of sight.
Iako withdrew a bow from his pack, strung it, and looked at John. "You have the choke arrows?" John nodded, slung his pack off his shoulder, and withdrew a metal cylindrical canister. That had been freakishly expensive just to rent out. Thaumaturgy did wonders, but to work it, you needed gold. Lots of gold. Thaumaturgic runes could be written in less costly metals, sure, but they would not have gold's effectiveness, or gold's permanence.
He undid the top of the canister and gently handed Iako the choke arrow. It was fletched like a normal arrow, but instead of a stone or metal arrowhead, it had what looked like a small cloth sack tied at the end. "Guys," Iako whispered, "get ready. We'll use that ladder," he said, indicating a ladder maybe a dozen yards from them, at the base of the first watchtower. Iako backed up a bit, getting the angle so he could see into the tower, see the top of the roof. He yanked a bandanna over his muzzle. "Masks on," he commanded.
And then, he shot the arrow.
It flew straight and true, missing the watchmen entirely and hitting the ceiling. With a quiet pop, the tower was filled with thick, throat-clogging smoke. Perfect.
"Now!" Iako hissed. Gial and John rushed to the ladder, climbing faster and faster. Time was of the essence. The quicker they acted, the higher their chances of success. The higher their chances of success, the higher everyone else's chances of success. That, and a brisk wind was blowing. The choke dust would blind the men for a short while, but wind would dispel it.
Iako grabbed the ladder and hauled his way up. John was nearly at the top of the watchtower, ready to spring into action. The watchtower was open at the top, stone with a wooden pavilion-roof designed to keep out the rain and treated so that the small brazier in the middle of the tower didn't light the roof on fire. It was to provide protection from the elements, not from enemy fire.
John was up, and Gial. Iako could hear the men choking and gagging on the thick, sulfurous clouds. The masks they wore would filter out most of the poisons. Well, poison was a strong word. A mild vaporous irritant was a more apt description. It made the throat itch so horribly that the body tried to scratch that itch, mostly by making the person breathing in the choke dust gag, hack, cough, and make sounds that normal people's throats shouldn't be capable of making. Of course, the choke dust was oily, too oily to be removed, so hacking and coughing didn't work. That didn't mean you stopped hacking and coughing. It just meant it had no effect.
Iako threw himself off the final rung of the ladder and into the smoky air. In this air, no one could see, no one could breathe, even the watch fires. The brazier was reduced to a smoldering heap of half-asleep coals.
The men, however, were still struggling. Two stumbled their way past Iako, completely oblivious to them. Well, their loss. He grabbed one, and before he could cough out a cry for help, was busy choking what little breath the soldier still had out of him. The other, he wrapped his shark tail around, pulling him to the ground.
The man in his arms struggled, trying to weakly punch Iako, before fainting, limp. The Tethyd kept choking for a few more seconds, before releasing him. The other man, choked out by Iako's tail, slumped over, unconscious. Perfect.
Gial and John let their guards slump down to the ground. "Bind and gag them," Iako ordered them, opening his pack and fishing out a coil of rope. "Don't use all of it. We need some for the others," he hissed under his breath.
Gial nodded. "On it." He wadded a few bandages together, stuffed them in the unconscious guards' mouths, and then pulled each one towards one of the posts holding up the roof and tied them there. "That should hold them for long enough," Gial assured Iako. The angle their arms were bent at looked painful, the kind of position that would induce severe muscle cramps.
Iako turned to look out. Two more watchtowers remained. Iako sighed, and readied another arrow. Time to get to work.
***
They had just finished blinding the third watchtower when Laidu was thrown out of a window.
He didn't have far to fall. The window was situated right by a walkway, and the dragon Changed slammed into that walkway. Iako stared, stunned and shocked, before Laidu rolled over, onto his hands and knees, and practically threw himself back in there. "Come on!" Iako hissed. "Let's haul tail and get in there! Looks like they need some support!" he ordered.
The three of them slid down the ladder, ran across the same walkway that Laidu had landed on, and leaped through the window. In the back of Iako's mind, he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Not wrong in the moral sense, but wrong tactically. He shouldn't have been charging into an unknown situation. But he did.
They landed in what appeared to be a record room. Tallow candles cast yellow illumination over old weathered shelves full of files, books, and ledgers. A single table dominated the room. Oh, and it was snowing inside. There was that little detail, too.
Laidu flew past them, and Iako's robe shook in a fierce gale-wind that threw cold, powdery snow on them and made the candles dangerously flicker. "Magician!" Gial shouted, pointing. Iako whirled around and saw him. Terrem, his name was. He was their instructor in magical theory, and he had a mage scroll in his hands.
Mage scrolls were a weaponized form of mage circles. Terrem had lectured them on mage circles before; he had explained the fundamental function. The symbols and sigils within dictated how the forces of the universe would act. It could be likened to a form of thaumaturgy, but expressed differently. Thaumaturgy was math-based, requiring equations and ratios. Mage circles were poetry and art. Only problem was, they couldn't be carried like thaumaturgy plates. Something had to host the circle, be it a piece of paper, a medallion, or a book.
A mage scroll allowed the magician to hold dozens, if not hundreds, of circles. Doubtless, that explained the fact that there was snow inside the records room.
At the moment, Terrem was furiously rolling his scroll, hunting down the specific mage circle he wanted. Iako rushed him, jumped over the snow-covered table, slipped, and slammed into Terrem and his scroll.
Immediately, he felt the sting of ice, the burn of fire, and the bite of... something at his stomach. He flew backwards; Terrem flew back; the scroll didn't really move that much.
Laidu grabbed the scroll and hastily rolled it up. "Get him bound up," he ordered Halech. The Vesperati nodded and grabbed a coil of rope lying next to a shelf, and started cinching it around the dazed magus.
"Where's Theophrastus?" Iako asked. There were five of them in the room, Halech, who had been excavating himself from behind a fallen bookshelf during the fight, Iako, Gial, John, and Laidu.
"He's working on a distraction," Laidu said. "Something to draw the guards away from us while we hunt down the identity of the commanding officer. Something to give us a little more time." He turned and dusted off a part of the table, his hand lit with glowing, molten heat. Steam hissed at his touch.
"What kind of distraction is he-" A huge, deafening bang and a brilliant red fireball answered his half-formed question. "Oh. An alchemic distraction." Alchemic distractions tended to involve explosions. Or acid. Or acidic explosions.
"Exactly." Laidu grabbed a dozen ledgers off the shelves. "Nothing's labeled. They really made this difficult, didn't they?" He looked at Iako's group. "Start searching for anything recently dated."
They sat down all except for John, who kept a nervous guard, as the rest of them thumbed through the ledgers.
"Nope, got nothing," Halech said. "Though, turns out you can import pickled deathmaw eel by the ton."
"They're like rats," Laidu said, rubbing his bite wound.
"Huh," Gial said, "there's something here. Fine wine imported for a ...Commander Farhill."
"Farhill?" They turned. Eikagor stalked into the room, with Jain Han and Raddas. "I heard that name. Some of the soldiers mentioned a blue-flamed Erinyan named that." He shrugged. "Before I choked them out, that is."
"How did you manage to sneak up on them?" Halech asked. "Out of curiosity."
"Oh. I can be quiet if I want to," Eikagor assured. "From the sound of what they said, he's a drunkard and glutton."
"So... storeroom?" LAidu asked.
Eikagor nodded. "Storeroom." He turned to Raddas. "So, the plan?"
Raddas shrugged. "Crush him with a barrel. Preferably an empty one. He is a comrade of ours, after all," he said.
"Crush him with a barrel?" Eikagor smiled. "I like that plan."
***
The storeroom was filled with an echo, the echo of what sounded like a pig devouring something disgusting. That was probably the commander stuffing his face.
Iako smiled a toothy, sharklike grin (Well, any face that he made was sharklike, seeing as he was a shark). This would make it so much easier for them to sneak up on the commander and neutralize him.
They had split up into their original triads, and Gial, John, and Iako were lurking behind a shelf full of grain sacks. "Ready?" Iako breathed.
"Ready," Raddas said in a voice barely a whisper. Eikagor held an empty barrel, and Laidu had swung a bag of grain over his shoulder.
"Now!" Laidu shouted.
They swung from their hiding spot. In one second, in the slivers of time to small to be counted, Iako saw the commander. He was an Erinyan, with charcoal skin, and the cracks that framed his face and crawled their way down his chest and arms glowed with blue flame. His hair was white-hot, like strands of molten metal.
He was also on the chubby side, and his armor fit poorly, hardly commander material. Iako recognized him; he was one of the more scholarly-inclined Rangers. Combat was something this Erinyan had to learn.
But the two men accompanying him weren't strangers to combat.
The first one was a Calixa from the empire far off. He was tall, registering in the upper half of six feet. But that was the last time he had seen this Calixa. Iako had heard of acclimation, how the barklike skin of a Calixa smooths and softens when exposed to races like humans and Kai'Draen. He also heard rumors that they grew in height. Apparently, that was true. Iako was pushing seven and a half feet, and this Calixa was only an inch shorter than him.
The second one was a Kai'Draen, a Stoneborn. Unlike Eikagor, a Tuskborn, the Stoneborn was shorter, stouter, with more fat on his body, fat to absorb blows. This one had purple skin, and towered over Iako.
Iako ducked the Calixa's wild haymaker, before shoving the man into a shelf. His head bounced off the hard wood, and he crumpled into a heap.
Laidu, however, was having less success with the Kai'Draen. He swung the sack of grain like a flail, like an extension of his arm. The Kai'Draen ducked the first blow, but the second one hit him square on the jaw. He wobbled, but didn't fall.
"I got him," Iako said. He whirled about, his tail cracking like a whip. One strike, then another, and his fin left several shallow cuts on the Stoneborn's back. A kick sent him flying down. "Alright," Iako said, turning to the Erinyan. "Your turn."
There was a slow clap. "Bravo," Adran said, stepping out from behind a shelf. "Impressive, and only one wound," he said, poking Laidu's bandaged arm.
"Someone baited deathmaw eels in the water," Laidu explained.
"Ah," Adran said. "Well, there are a few more formalities that have to be observed, but to a dozen hells with formalities. Form ranks!" Everyone looked at him blankly. "I said form ranks!"
Immediately, their training kicked in. They snapped to attention, forming a straight line. "Salute!" All of them snapped a crisp salute to their senior officers. "Well, congratulations are in order, Rangers." Those words sent a chill up his spine. Rangers. It was official.
He was a Ranger. They all were.