Redemption (26 page)

The King’s army was too thick.
They surrounded the people and outnumbered the rebels by thousands. They moved
through the crowd like a black death…and from the south, the Sun Warrior’s
sister and her Lamia moved over the land like fallen white angels. Above them
all, the King still stood, staring down now at the Sun Warrior, where she was
cutting a path through his Warriors in her attempt to reach him, her Libra
cutting them down right beside her. The Wolves howled at the cloud-hidden moon,
snapping their jaws and tearing open flesh that spilled red out onto the snow
beneath their paws.

Red, red, red. So much red.

The ground seemed to have been
rained with it, stark scarlet meeting stark white and steaming as the fluid
drenched the snow and went cold. Children cried and people tried to run, only
to find that there was nowhere to go; no escape. The battle had begun without
preamble, and now that it was in full swing, there was absolutely nowhere to
go. They had either to fight, or to die.

The Sorceress was not aware of
it, but her black gloved hand was clasped over her mouth, her warm breath
steaming out between the cracks of her fingers as she stared at the orb
floating in front of her. Her purple eyes were wide and watery, and she did not
try to convince herself that it was the wind that was making the tears spring
from her eyes and run coldly down her frigid cheeks. She wanted to stop
watching, and once almost lost concentration and broke the spell, but found
that she was unable to tear her eyes away, like a rubbernecker passing a
particularly devastating scene.

And in all her twelve-hundred
years, Surah had never seen a scene such as this. Not even when the Great War
was going on when she had been just a child. Her parents had moved her to
safety, and no one would speak of the event for what seemed like centuries, but
she was old enough now to have heard the tales, and if the battles of that war
were anything like this, she could understand why.

The worst of it was the people
who were caught in between the opposing sides, most of them Searcher Vampires.
And the children. Even the children were not immune to the destruction. The
King’s Warriors seemed to be cutting down everyone, anyone who got in their
way, whereas the rebels were making an effort to just fight off the King’s
Warriors. And they were losing. They were too greatly outnumbered—even with the
Wolves who were shredding Warriors on the perimeter and being shredded by their
silver weapons in return—the rebels at the center of the chaos were too
outnumbered.

And above them all, that bastard
of a King still stood.

But the Sun Warrior had almost
reached the front of the tower, moving with a speed and deadliness that Surah
had never seen matched. It was no wonder that the Vampires had tried to
exterminate her kind. There wasn’t another creature on earth that moved faster.
Her silver blade seemed to dance through the air in one continuous movement,
drawing blood with every inch. She spun and struck and never missed a target,
her eyes glowing gold and blazing with a fire that burned unfathomably bright
for windows of a single soul. Such determination and fearlessness. Against her
better judgment, Surah found herself rooting for the Sun Warrior to get her
kill. She had never seen anyone who wanted something so bad.

The rebels were falling. Their
bodies and countless others were already scattered about like children’s toys.
They lay in heaps in the snow, red seeping out from under them and staining the
white-covered earth like spilled bottles of paint, faces frozen perpetually in
a state of horror, as if they had no idea what had happened to them, or
why.
The King’s Warriors seemed to be killing at a rate of ten to one, each one
putting a considerable dent in the numbers of the rebels before going down, and
killing several other common people in the process. The bodies of the fallen
Wolves lay on their sides in the snow, their moans of agony and suffering
floating across the land like the cries of wounded angels. The Sorceress’s
gloved hands went from covering her mouth to covering her ears, but she was not
aware of doing this either.

She thought if she breathed
deeply now, she could
smell
the blood on the air, like rusted iron
placed in a small box, and she wanted to be away from this place; far, far away
from this place, but still, she could not move. It was such a scene…

And it was only just getting
started. The Sun Warrior’s sister had reached the edge of the city, and now she
was all but flying over the land, heading toward the action. Her pack of Lamia
had taken up positions all around the city, just outside of the partially
frozen river that ringed around it. They paced back and forth with movements so
smooth that their feet seemed to not even be touching the ground. Their heads
tilted back, and they tested the air and surely smelled the same thing that
Surah did–blood, gallons of it.

When their high-pitched shrieks
rang out across the night, the entire world seemed to shiver beneath the sound.
The Sorceress clamped her hands harder over her ears, the hair on the back of
her neck frozen stiff, and for the smallest, tiniest moment, even those that
were in the heat of battle were struck still.

The Accursed seemed to cry out
their presence for an eternity, like a fork scraping down a cosmically large
plate, setting Surah’s teeth on edge. She was not a girl that scared easily, or
at all, for that matter, but that noise was so terribly hungry that she found
herself readying to leave again, but that orb was still in front of her, and
the images it kept showing were as luring as light to a night bug. She
had
to
see the end of the show, no matter how horrifyingly gruesome it may be.

And now the Accursed
girl—Nellianna, her name was—had arrived at the main event. She came skidding
to a stop, her innocently pretty face drawing down in horror, hazel eyes
growing and growing until they were the size of saucers, her left hand coming
up and covering her mouth, and tears rolling down her cheeks as she took it all
in. It was a look that was very similar to the one that the Sorceress, who was
observing from a far, wore.

So much red. So much death.

Young and old, male and female,
Wolf and Vampire. So many dead, and the number was growing and growing. At this
rate, in under an hour, no one would be left alive.

The King’s Warriors were an
unmerciful force. They had gone from just battling the rebels to killing
literally
everyone
who crossed their paths. They didn’t even have time
between one kill and the next to look into the faces of those from whom they
were stealing life. They moved like terribly efficient black machines. Their
faces dripped blood, their weapons, hands and clothing. And then there was the
Sun Warrior.

She was covered in the most red
of all. Drops of it flew off of the cloak she was wearing, which was ripped and
torn in several places. It flew from her hair and sword and into the cold air
as she spun around and delivered her death blows to Vampires four times her
size. She was going to make it. She was going to reach the King and kill him
the same as she had the others, even if she died in her efforts.

It was going to end soon, Surah
could tell, and this made a relief flood over her even though she knew that the
outcome couldn’t possibly be even worse. So many things were happening at once.
So many flashes of images that made up a puzzle that no one would ever want to
piece together. Nellianna’s eyes going all black, like ink spilling across
paper. The Sun Warrior climbing over the balcony, her Libra right on her heels.
The King retreating into the tower, where even more of his Warriors waited,
armed and ready to defend him.

They fell on the Sun Warrior and
her Libra like a pack of lions, attacking strategically with their swords and
drawing blood in several places while the King retreated to the corner to
watch. The Sun Warrior’s glowing eyes never seemed to leave him, even though
she was cutting down multiple people at once, and being cut in return. Her
Libra was not quite as fast, but he was plenty deadly, and he was giving her
just the amount of support she needed to reach the King who now was glancing
around him for an exit. The Sun Warrior really would die in her efforts, and by
the look on her red-stained face, it was obvious that she didn’t care. She was
lost completely to the lust of blood and battle.

Now there were a lot less living
Warriors in the room, but enough still.

One of them, the one who hadn’t
left the King’s side until now, stepped in front of his King and moved so fast
that had the Sorceress blinked, she would have missed it, and the blade of his
sword went straight through the meat between the Libra’s wide shoulder blades.
His golden eyes went dull instantly, and he fell to the floor. Dead.

The scream that the Sun Warrior
let out then could have been heard in the highest points of heaven, and the
deepest pits of hell, and it seemed as though everyone in the Silver City
stopped what they were doing and listened to it.

Then the image in the orb was of
two heads flying at once.

One of them belonged to the
Warrior that had killed the Sun Warrior’s lover, and the other belonged to the
King.

And it wasn’t over yet. It should
have been. Surah knew somewhere inside of her that this should have ended it,
but it wasn’t over yet.

Now the Sun Warrior fell to her
knees by her fallen Libra, and waited for the remaining Warriors in the room to
finish the deed. With a sinking in her scarred heart, Surah realized that the young
girl did not want to fight anymore, maybe
could not
fight anymore, and
in an instant, she too would receive her death, joining her Libra in the
afterlife.

But then the image switched to
Nellianna. She shrieked a scream just as blood-curdling as the agony-torn cry
of her sister, as though she felt the Sun Warrior’s pain as a physical thing.
The Accursed girl, her eyes as dark as the sky above, raised her hands over her
head, and Surah watched as she ripped the souls out of the bodies of the
Warriors in the room in the tower where her sister waited for her death, and
where she would no longer find it.

This seemed to flip a switch in
both girls, and though well over a thousand people had died already, and the
King was gone, too. Things went from worse, to worst, to just plain
wrong.

Not remnant nor shred of sanity
could be seen in either the Sun Warrior or her sister. Insane. There was no
other way to describe it. It was as though they had set free from their leashes
some terrible monster that hid inside of them. And those monsters were as
efficient at their work as nuclear war machines.

They worked from their respective
ends, killing and killing and killing. The Sun Warrior had leapt from the
balcony of the tower and down into the crowd, where she began to slice into
pieces every moving thing in her reach. She killed without discretion, showing
no remorse while she cut down comrades and enemies and everyone in between. And
on the other side of the crowd, her sister was ripping throats and tearing
souls free of their vessels the way one might pluck cotton off of a stalk. The
ones that she didn’t kill herself she sent over the river with a flick of her
thin wrist, forcing the people to walk themselves straight into the arms and
jaws of the Lamia waiting there.

It took longer than it should
have for the reality of what was going to happen here to fall over the
Sorceress, and when it did, her stomach flipped up into her throat and bile
spewed out of her mouth. Those two girls were lost to their beasts. Too far gone
to care about anything at all. Too drunk with bloodlust to be able to pull
themselves back together. And together, between the two of them, they weren’t
going to leave a single soul alive.

And then they would kill each
other.

The Sorceress shook her head and
the orb died out and disappeared. Now she could only hear the battle in the
distance, the sounds of the cursed and the damned and the dying, but the things
she had seen would haunt her for as long she would live, and with a snap of her
fingers and a splintering heaviness in her heart, she teleported herself away
from this cold, dead, forsaken land.

Alexa

I was outside myself. I seemed to
be watching the whole scene from somewhere beyond, looking down on it with a separation
that was dreadfully unnatural. My body was not my own. My movements and actions
and thoughts, not my own. And, at the same time, totally my own.

Red. All I could see was red. It
did not ring my vision, but instead filled it and made the world seem to glow
slick and sick with it. Things in front of me being torn apart by my blade were
nothing more than throbbing, beating, pulsing hearts of red, and their pounding
and pumping and pounding and pumping was so loud in my ears that I felt like my
head might explode. With each stroke, the noise lessened, and I knew that I
would not stop until all was silenced.

And, oh, the rush it gave me, to
be free of the chains that had so long been stretched across my soul, growing
tighter around my ankles with each step I’d taken down this road. It had all
been leading up to this, had
always
been leading to this, and it would
end the way that I had known it would. Like that dream I’d kept having just
after this had all begun, where I ended up on a battlefield of slain soldiers
and innocents, the tips of my fingers dripping in red.

I couldn’t stop. Didn’t
want
to
stop. Wasn’t going to. The fire that burned inside me would blaze until there
was no more oxygen left in the world to fuel it. There was no way to keep track
of the body count, but I was certain that no one would escape. The fire in me
would not cease until it had burned everything in this land into ashes and
blackness, like the inside of my heart. Cremation.