Episode Three - Deadly Light BACK
At first Brian’s dreaming mind registered the commotion as thunder, but shouts from around the castle woke him, and alerted him that this was no ordinary storm.
There was a lot of screaming.
Leaping out of bed, he ran to his window and peered out. The whole city was ablaze, and his stomach lurched when he saw the cause. Marching down the stately avenues of Ammuntir, where the nobles were fleeing for their lives, were huge metal monsters, their chrome skins gleaming in the firelight. Brian had no doubt who the invaders were as a thousand legends flowed through his mind of the giant Fomorian creatures that had been on everyone’s minds lately. Some of the attacking creatures looked like huge, metal men, and some of them had huge, round bodies walking on two or three stout legs. Some walked on many legs, like bugs, spitting fire and red beams of starlight at everything their fiery red eyes laid eyes upon.
All Brian could think was, I wish Sir Cenni were here.
For a moment, he could only stare, but finally his body obeyed the commands to move – he slipped on some clothes, grabbed a knife and a few other belongings and put them in a pack, and ran out the door, intending to head for the Duchess’s room.
The hallways were in chaos as everyone scurried along, faces set in grim resignation. No one paid him any heed as he merged into a stream that was headed in the general direction of the Duchess’s chambers. It seemed a lot of people were headed in that direction. Most of them weren’t allowed in, however, and squires were running back and forth from within, consulting with the long line of impatient people that had formed outside her doors. Brian, however, slipped in without question, only to find the Duchess’s salon was as frenzied as the hallway outside her chambers. It seemed like every noble and half the castle was there. The room was choked with people, and all of them were panicked, pushing this way and that. A few of them, dressed in full armor and ready for combat, were trying to keep the crowd in order, but this was no easy task.
The portly noble who’d asked so many questions during the meeting with the bard (in what seemed like an eternity before) now nearly stepped on Brian, and he let out a yelp and poked the noble.
“Lord Regher!” Brian cried out, as the noble started and turned to see what new chaos had ensued. He looked relieved when he saw it was only the boy, however.
“Brian!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
“Trying to get in here!” Brian shouted back.
“Your mother had some guards on their way to your room!”
“Where is the Duchess?” Brian asked, reveling for a moment in the reference.
Lord Regher grabbed Brian’s elbow firmly and pushed through the crowd. Even most of the other nobles parted for him, some of them calling out to him for the answers they were seeking from the Duchess. Lord Regher could only gesture for them to wait as he pushed to the front of the room.
At the front of the crowd was the Duchess’s personal guard, who would normally be under Sir Cenni’s command. Lord Regher approached the guard nearest the door and shouted a greeting, which the guard barely heard over the rest of the rabbling in the room.
“Where is she?” the boy cried out as the guard’s attention turned to him and the noble.
“In there,” he replied, pointing his thumb at the door to the Duchess’s chambers. “We’re awaiting her orders, but she says she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Well I want to see her!”
“No one’s allowed in.”
“Even me?” Brian was about to cry, and Lord Regher leaned in to the guard with a scowl on his face.
“This is the Duchess’s son,” he growled.
The guard gulped, nodded, then discreetly ushered Brian into the room. Brian could hear a great uproar as the door closed behind him, but he didn’t care as he rushed forward into the Duchess’s bedchamber. The room was delicate lavender and lace, with a huge canopy bed, an armoire, a writing desk, and a vanity table, none of which the Duchess was at. At the far end of the room, wide open, were the doors to the balcony, and Brian made for these.
Here, finally, the Duchess stood, watching her city burn, silent tears streaming from her eyes. Brian approached her cautiously, but when she noticed him, she reached a hand out to him, and he ran to her, throwing his arms around her waist and resting his head on her bosom. They stood there for a moment in silence, watching the terrible metal creatures decimate their way slowly through the city.
The Duchess heaved a sigh. “This may be the last time we are together in this lifetime, Brian,” she said sadly.
Brian’s eyes widened and the tears flowed, unbidden. “Why?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
“Because you have to go, and I have to stay here and lead.”
“Go! I don’t want to go! What’s happening?”
The Duchess narrowed her eyes in anger at the monsters approaching the castle. “Because they’ve come for our city now.”
“But we can beat them!” Brian exclaimed. When the Duchess didn’t say anything, he looked up and added, “Can’t we?”
Still, the Duchess remained silent as she stared bitterly into the distance. Brian’s grip loosened and he backed away in horror.
“Mama?” he breathed. The Duchess turned in shock; he hadn’t uttered this nomenclature in many years. She knelt down, having to now look up at him.
“I don’t know what I can say to you in the short time we have left,” she said, her voice panicked. “I love you, Brian, and I want you to be the best man you can be. This…” She glanced back at the city. “I wish this wasn’t happening to you. It’ll be a long time before you understand it. You have to go, Brian.”
“But – I want to stay here with you! And play with Megan and Rory, and have festivals, and go to the Greatmarket – “
“Oh, Brian.” She put one hand on his cheek. “The world’s not going to be like that anymore.”
He looked up at those striking blue eyes on that regal face, fighting the tears that blurred his vision, and the Duchess’s flowed more freely now as she pulled him close and held him tightly.
“Why do you have to stay, though?” he pleaded when she finally let him go.
“Because I’m the Duchess.” Tera Daly stood her full height, which was only a little taller than five feet, but seemed taller than ever as she cast one last glance over her falling city. “I’m the leader, and it’s my job to direct people in times like these.”
Brian sniffed, and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Okay, but why can’t I stay with you?”
“Brian, it’s too dangerous. If you stay with me, you could get hurt, or even killed.”
Brian’s eyes widened. “What about you?” he demanded, a hint of anger mixed with fear in his voice.
“I will try and rejoin you if I can.”
“Well… why wouldn’t you?”
She tried to say something, then gulped it back, and took his hand instead.
“Come on, Brian, they’re getting close. We have to get you out of here.”
An explosion landed close enough to shake the ground, punctuating her statement, and Brian allowed himself to be led back through her chamber and out to the salon. Her appearance caused quite an uproar, but she handed Brian back to the guard that had let him in.
“Take him – keep him safe! Your best men!” she commanded, and the guard scrambled to obey.
As he and five other guards were quickly assembled to escort Brian to safety, Duchess Tera now took command of the room, signaling her heralds to cry for silence. She consulted quietly for a few minutes with the other commanders of her guard before addressing the room. Her face was grim, but her voice strong as she stood before the nobles of Ammuntir.
“The city has been taken, and they are advancing on the castle,” she said. “If you evacuate now, my guards tell me you may escape by the river, while there still may be time. We will do our best to hold them back long enough for you to escape. Prefects all over the city have been trying to fight off the threat, with moderate success. Our mono-blades do seem to pierce their armor.” She paused and cast a glimpse over the room, allowing the effects of her words to be absorbed.
A few of the nobles pushed forward, to the front of the crowd.
“I will help you fight, Your Grace!” the first of them cried, as they all knelt before her. She smiled at them sadly.
“I feel I must caution you – the odds of survival are quite low,” she said. There was a pause, but one of the men drew his sword and held it before him, point to the ground, hilt next to his head as he pledged, “I swear my sword to Ammuntir, like my father before me.” A few at a time, the others did the same.
The Duchess smiled – the group was large, full of hardy and experienced warriors, and as Brian was led out the door, his last look at her through the crowd emblazoned itself on his mind like the flash-powder used to make pictures. She looked emboldened, her blue eyes blazing and her jaw firmly set as she instructed the others on the evacuation plan.
Then he was whisked down the hallway to a winding staircase that continued down three floors to the other side of the castle from the Great Hall, a section dominated by store rooms and servant’s quarters, deserted now except for Brian and his entourage. Seeing such familiar surroundings thus deserted only increased the sick feeling in Brian’s stomach. The only lights were those strapped to the guards’ helms and crossbows. Brian wished he had a light. He stopped to reach into his pack for his knife, which only made him feel a little better.
As he slung his pack back on, a shout came from the front of the guard and the sound of bolts firing from crossbows echoed up and down the hallway. Brian stood, frozen in fear, straining through the darkness to see what was going on. He was hit in the face with some kind of warm liquid, and for a moment his whole body went cold in contrast as he realized the lights ahead had gone still. In the shadows they cast, he could see the gleam of metallic tentacles as they squeezed the life out of the last of his entourage.
Then something in the back of his mind took over, and he ran. He could hear the sound of metal on stone behind him as he frantically dashed right back the way he came. He wasn’t sure what to do, or how, only that he had to escape them. His feet barely touched the ground as he raced past the Great Hall and toward the staircase. Contrarily, they skidded across the tile floor at the foot of the stairs as one of the monsters reared up right in his path.
The great creature was the size of at least ten of Brian, a monster of shining silver chrome and encrusted with human charnel, tentacles waving was it surveyed the boy for just a moment. Brian looked up at its face, its huge black, beady eye staring down at him…. His feet skidded across the tile, found purchase, and he ran for the courtyard, heading through the Great Hall. The monster reared its head back and let out a sinister wail, a metallic screeching sound that seemed to pierce even the stone walls of the castle.
Brian ran in the door of the Great Hall but then skidded to a halt again as his eye caught the lamp above. The back of his mind realized with a grim humor that he’d never paid much heed to the huge silver contraptions before, and now one of them swung dangerously over the center of the Great Hall, blazing with blue fire from the wires which had fed it.
The creature behind him scurried through the door, and reared up again over Brian’s head. The boy turned and looked up in terror at the huge monster, its solid metallic underbelly exposed. It engulfed his sight, waving its tentacles wildly as another one of its screams echoed around the chamber. It caught one of its tentacles in the wildly contorting wires and its whole body was engulfed in the crackling blue fire that hissed from its ragged end. Brian watched in shock as the monster’s triumph turned to shock and pain, and it erupted in spasms, the electrical blue flame quickly spreading throughout its entire body. Its face bent down low, and Brian could make out the outlines of a hideous screaming face in that one black eye. Then the great beast fell, and Brian dodged out of the way as the wires still tangled in the monster’s tentacle started collapsing huge chunks of ceiling, more ends of loose wire, and all the other overhead lights.
The entire system came crashing down. Brian, and everything that had followed him into the room, crouched to protect themselves from the debris. Dense smoke began to fill the room as its furniture caught fire, and there was disarray amongst the attackers as some of them were consumed by the electricity that came from the huge cables that had just fallen on them.
Brian stayed in fetal position with his eyes closed, his mind frozen in terror. He wasn’t sure how long he remained like that, but when he finally opened his eyes, he could see smoke, and fire, and the blue electrical fire spitting from the wires, and the hulks of monsters as they moved through the smoke. The room was a chaos of hissing, smoke, burning wood and flesh, and the tortured piercing metallic screams of the monsters being electrocuted. And then, something else, a wail that overcame them all, a blaring klaxon bit into the air.
Brian’s eyes snapped open as flashing red lights added themselves to the bedlam, and he turned his head as a flicker of flame behind him began to eat one of the banners. He watched for a moment in horrid fascination as the lion that adorned the Regher coat of arms seemed to writhe in agony as the blaze engulfed it. His panicked gaze turned to the Daly standard at the head of the room, the Ammuntir standard, which was, at the moment, prevailing even through these ruined environs. The stately sun and elegant moon shone in the red light from the alarms, and its serene impassiveness to the chaos around it emblazoned a passage through the darkness in his mind. Through the haze and the mist and the cacophony, it filled his body with an electricity of its own, and he burst up, racing toward the courtyard. He hurled his full weight – admittedly, not much – at the huge doors, dimly noticing that his knife was still in his hand. His whole body jolted at the impact, from his teeth to his toes, but the door opened and he spilled out and down the courtyard steps into the courtyard proper. The room behind him exploded with electricity as sprinklers began to attempt to douse the fires.
There was a swarm of creatures in the courtyard, which was handily beating the Duchess’s Guard in combat. The group following Brian was small in comparison, and only served to reinforce what was already there. The scared boy could only stand and watch as the creatures’ tentacles slashed, tore, and squeezed at everything in sight. Down went the statue of the first Brian Daly, his head rolling across the courtyard, his austere face coming to a rest before his namesake.
The two Brian Dalys looked at one another for a moment. Then, a cold, distant part of the boy Brian stepped carefully around the head of the statue and knelt down to take a sword from the lifeless hand of one of the Ammuntirian regimen. It was a short-sword, the sword of a squire. He turned back to the head of the statue and saluted it with the sword.
“I promise you, Brian Daly, if I die, it will be fighting!”
With a mighty cry, he charged the rest of the way through the chaos in the courtyard, his mind in one place in the castle, his body dodging debris and attacks he barely registered. He ran for the stairs leading into the other side of the castle. He had to reach her.
The castle was worse on the other side of the courtyard. The monsters had breached the gates and the majority of the fighters and squires still living had already been pressed in the courtyard. Brian took a stunned moment to glaze around at the carnage that was the entrance hall of the castle. While his mind recoiled in terror, that cold part of it remained focused on getting back upstairs, getting to Mama, to the Duchess, to the Mother of Ammuntir. His eyes saw the gore – the lifeless and mostly dismembered bodies of men and women he knew, saw every day – but his mind merely filed it away for later nightmares. He continued on, ducking up a flight of stairs that would let out near his room – and closer to the Duchess.
He charged up as fast as he could, only looking up when he hear the hiss of metal tentacles before him. For a moment, he froze, gazing into that lifeless black hole that was the creature’s eye. Then, he held up the short sword he’d acquired, and charged.
The monster reared back and lashed out with its tentacles, but Brian kept running and was small and quick enough to be missed by inches. He lashed out wildly with the sword and one tentacle that had gotten too close fell to the ground next to him with a clang.
Brian wanted to just keep running – he had an opening – but he knew this thing would just grab him from behind. Even in this confined space the monster was having no trouble maneuvering, and even turning its body to follow his progress, lashing at him again with its tentacles. Brian decided that the best idea was to keep close to it and slash as much as he could. He didn’t have much hope for success. Dodging the swift tentacles was rapidly draining his strength, and the thicker ones were harder to dismember. He could do nothing to the metal thorax of the huge creature, except hack away uselessly, not knowing he should be thankful that mono-carbon did not dull.
With a crash, the wall on the outside of the castle, on Brian’s left, exploded inward, knocking the monster through the inward wall. The stairs crumbled as the creature fell through the wall and down to the floors below. Brian looked to see the starry night interrupted by mechs, laying siege to the battlements, desperate knights trying to fend them off with weapons that were just too primitive to do any good. Even the explosives they were firing at the monsters did little to even slow them down, barely even scuffing their chrome.
For Brian, there was a long drop to the right and in front, or the battlements to the left. Gulping, and slipping his knife and sword into his belt, he took a timid step out to the parapet, then leaped to the battlements.
The knights – and their squires – were in chaos, firing ballista and cannon as quickly as they could. The mechs were coming up on them, their red eyes blazing, shaking the sides of the castle and swiping away or even grabbing the fighters of Ammuntir.
Brian heard his name in the tumult, and turned to see that Rory was one of those manning the ballista nearest him. Brian ran over to his friend and helped the squire nock the giant explosive arrow; the squire then began to turn a crank that would aim the projectile, as futile as the rest of them seemed to be.
“What are you doing here, Brian!” Rory demanded. “The Duchess sent you away!”
“The invaders got in first,” Brian replied, having to shout to be heard.
“Then we’re all doomed,” Rory replied, nevertheless cranking the ballista to aim the missile at one of the mechs.
Right in front of them, the hulking form of another mech rose and smashed down at the ballista, tipping it but smashing everyone on its right side into broken remnants of men. Brian looked in shock as Rory, just manning the crank, was now among these bodies. His friend’s eyes were as blank as the marbles they’d played with only this past summer, piercing a shaft through Brian’s soul.
Black malice rose up in him as he looked back at the mech. He noticed that, like the tentacled ones, it had a great glass eye in the middle of its face, surrounded by the two red ones. He recalled the horrid, screaming face he’d seen in the eye of the creature in the Great Hall.
Without another thought, Brian pulled the lever on the ballista, and the mech’s head exploded in a ball of flame. To Brian’s astonishment, a flaming man leaped from within the glass eye to his death; Brian caught a look only at flailing limbs and wildly-burning hair.
Lord Hartswood was at his side in an instant.
“The black space – that’s what you hit?” he cried out. Brian nodded, and Lord Hartswood scurried off to deliver this news to his knights and squires. Brian took one last look at Rory’s dead eyes, then leaned forward and closed them. Rory still felt warm, the only indication that he wouldn’t wake up being the broken state of his body.
Brian stood and ran for the other end of the battlement. Reaching the doorway, his feet were shaken from beneath him by an explosion which wracked the entire battlement. Brian turned to see that one of the mechs had punched it hard enough to collapse a huge section; several knights, ballista, and commanders fell to their deaths. Brian shook his head and ran inside.
He was only down the hallway from the Duchess’s chambers, so he made straight for them. He turned the knob to her door and entered all in one panicked motion. Locking it behind him, he panted, looking around at the most elite fighters and nobles left in Ammuntir.
Bruce Regher approached Brian first.
“Son, you shouldn’t be here!”
“My squad was killed. Everyone in the castle – almost everyone is dead!”
“Does the Duchess know this?”
Brian didn’t bother to point out what a stupid question that was. He just wrested himself free from Lord Regher’s concerned grasp and ran for the Duchess’s room.
However, she emerged, dressed in the full armor of the city-state, bearing in one hand the sword of her family, and in the other a pink heart brooch. Her eyes widened when she saw Brian.
“What – “
“Everyone’s dead, Mama!” Brian cried. “Everyone! But – the Fomor die if their heads explode. And electricity can kill them, too.”
The nobles exchanged a glance at this.
“There’s a way to destroy them?” one of them asked hopefully.
“I don’t think they’re big monsters at all,” Brian replied. “I think they’re giant carriages, and… I think people drive them.”
“People,” spat the Duchess. “What kind of people would do this to a peaceful province?”
“We’re going to die,” one of the knights said, very solemnly. “All of us.”
“Then we’ll kill as many of them as we can,” the Duchess had a chance to say, before the walls crumbled in and the whole room was surrounded by the horrible caterpillar creatures with the tentacles. Almost immediately, four of the knights found themselves in pieces. Brian ran for the Duchess’s chamber, but stopped at the door to watch the fight ensue, knowing that their loss meant his death. A frightening fire had started in the pit of his belly as he slashed at anything that came near him. Shouts of shock were exchanged between the knights as their swords clanged dully against the bodies of the monsters.
Duchess Tera, her face smoldering with quietly raging anger, shouted, “Their eyes!” With a feral cry, she pulled back her sword and thrust it with all her might into the eye of one of the monsters. It spasmed, and its scream filled the room, mingling with the cries of another knight as he was caught by the strong and deadly tentacles. One of his comrades followed Duchess Tera’s example, the monster’s body pinning another of the monsters to the ground. Another of the knights sent it to his death before forcefully joining it at the tentacles of another of the monster.
Desperately, Brian slashed at anything that would move with his pilfered sword, but soon found himself surrounded, not by monsters, but by the Duchess and Lord Regher. The last of the knights fell and three of the creatures remained, advancing on the two nobles.
Lord Regher stepped in front of the Duchess and was promptly rewarded by being shredded to pieces by the tentacles on all three monsters.
“Brian – run!” the Duchess insisted… and she stepped in front of Brian, giving him a shove toward the doorway of the bedroom. Brian took a step… then looked up dully into the single gleaming black eye of one of the creatures. In the failing light from the fires of the city, he could see that the room was a shredded mess of feathers, fluff, and shattered glass, but his mind merely registered these as niceties. There was only the single black eye, targeting him as it drew back its tentacles to strike.
It seemed to happen in slow motion – several of the steel tentacles aimed themselves right for him. Everything had gone silent, and he just stood and watched as the tentacles came to rip his life from his body. He wondered if it would hurt.
The Duchess swooped in, catching the full brunt of the monster’s attack. Her sword flashed, piercing through the eye of the creature, the tentacles’ embrace ripping her body and causing her to cry out in pain. The eye exploded in a flash of yellow light, blowing the Duchess, the tentacles, the boy all back against the wall next to the door. Brian wiggled into a sitting position, only barely noticing the pain from bruises, burns, and cuts all accumulated in the short time since he’d awakened. It seemed like an eternity had passed him by, and in that eternity all of Ammuntir had fallen.
He clutched the Duchess closer to him.
“Mama,” he whispered, as he looked down at her face. Her mouth moved, as if to say something, words that never found air. She settled for a smile, and even with the sharp metal tentacles protruding from her body, even with the helm sternly surrounding her face, her smile was as bright as ever, for the last moment it burned. It winked out a moment later as she seemed to heave a heavy sigh, as though the weight of the metal pulled her down.
“No,” Brian said quietly, his eyes wide with shock.
The creatures remaining from the front chamber poked their heads into the doorway, glancing around and seeing Brain. He narrowed his eyes as he rose to face them down as they entered the bedroom. Angrily, he stood over the Duchess’s body and cried out again, “NO!”
They prepared to attack, and sharp steel seem to fly at him from everywhere. Crying out one final time – this time more of a primal scream than an actual word - his world was engulfed by a bright silver light, brighter than anything he’d ever seen. It drowned out everything else in the room – the monsters, the Duchess, the pain of what was surely his death. Within moments, the light even engulfed his consciousness.