Chapter 949: Chaos
As an Inquisitor, Diarmuid had witnessed countless horrors over the course of his life. He had seen the depths of depravity n and even won could descend to when they were driven by both real and perceived injustice. More than once, he’d been summoned to investigate scenes of unspeakable cruelty attributed to ’demons’ only to find a bitter, jealous, or greedy person hiding behind a carefully maintained mask of civility, even as their hands dripped with blood.
Recently, he’d also fought real demons. He ca to understand their cunning, their ruthlessness, and the lengths to which they would go in their fight against his people and his faith. Diarmuid might have railed against his superiors in the Holy City when they declared that they would do nothing to Owain Lothian for the cri of magnicide so long as they were able to use him to slay demons in the upcoming Holy War, but after seeing the demons up close, he could at least understand why his superiors valued a man like Owain so highly.
He had seen cruelty, savagery, and a relentless drive to achieve victory at all costs, but never before had he seen anything like the abattoir that greeted his eyes when he finally managed to cut the impaled acolyte free of the icy forest that trapped him and pull his broken body out onto the town walls.
"rciful Lord of Light, how..." one of the acolytes behind Diarmuid said as he stared at the carnage of shattered stone and torn bodies that littered the wall. Everywhere he looked, the snow was dyed red as if buckets of paint had been flung about with wild abandon. Worse than that, however, were the piles of dead and dying n who lay at the end of each trail of red.
Two-thirds of the Hanrahan soldiers had been ordered to the walls to form the first line of defense, which ant that there were more than two hundred soldiers who had either taken up bows and arrows or stood ready with spears to defend the archers atop the walls. Now, it seed like at least half of those n were dead or soon would be, and dozens more clutched at wounds that ranged from minor cuts to shattered bones.
"Focus," Diarmuid said as he tried to drown out the sound of pained cries, whispered prayers, and behind it all, the echoing, endless drumming that ca from the demons in the wilderness. "First, we save a life, so join your faith with mine," he said as he knelt next to the bleeding acolyte and began to pray.
"We offer our prayers and devotion to You, Lord of Light.
In this mont of suffering, we call upon Your infinite compassion.
Where hope seems dim and lost, we beg for Your Holy might.
Transform our small and shallow faith into Your healing power."
"My life is a candle fla in the night," the acolytes responded when Diarmuid finished his prayer. "Together, our flas beco one light."
No sooner had they spoken than a feeling of bone-deep fatigue washed over their bodies, bringing with it the aches and pains of an entire day’s worth of hard labor and the ravenous hunger of a week of pious fasting as the Holy Lord of Light took their offering and used it to bathe the wounded acolyte in sacred golden flas.
In the light of those golden flas, the faint lines at the edges of Diarmuid’s eyes and the corners of his lips looked deeper and the weight of the world seed to way heavily on his shoulders, but all of that weight and strain fell away when he washed torn, frostburned flesh knitting itself back together and the faint flush of health returning to the flresh of the young acolyte’s face.
"N-now what, your Worship?" one of the acolytes asked weakly as he slumped against the cold stones of the gatehouse. "There are too many injured people to heal like that," he said as one of his legs began to shake uncontrollably and his hands clenched involuntarily in the aftermath of making an offering to the Holy Lord of Light to pray for healing.
Suddenly, before Diarmuid could think of a response, the stars in the sky seed to grow brighter as a shining light atop Hanrahan Keep twinkled in the darkness. A few heartbeats later, dozens of sacred, luminous arrows poured down from the sky as if the Heavens themselves had co to their aid.
"Loman," Diarmuid breathed in relief as he crawled to the inner edge of the wall, carefully keeping himself low to avoid detection by the demon giants outside the walls as he peered out on the west gate plaza.
"No... rciful Light, no..." Diarmuid whispered as his eyes finally beheld what had transpired while he was trapped by the forest of ice in the gatehouse.
Sir Tommin’s figure was unmistakable with the pristine white tabard and gleaming armor of one of the Church’s most celebrated Templars. Only that armor was anything but pristine, as it looked crumpled and torn, nearly as broken as the man it was supposed to protect. But in place of the pious, quiet, and capable knight that Tommin had once been, only the sobbing, broken wreckage of a man remained as he clutched his head and wept.
Tommin’s state was shocking enough, but as Diarmuid’s eyes flicked about the battlefield, the scope of the tragedy only grew greater. Three of the four templars lay dead or dying, and the fourth was using all his might just to keep the Crimson Knight at bay for even a mont longer. Already, the Templar’s tabard was stained red from his wounds, and blood flowed freely from the arm that was weighed down by the shattered remains of a shield.
Fully half of the Temple Guard lay dead or dying in the snow with only a scattering of demons around them suffering a similar fate, but it was the cause of many of their deaths that brought a strangled cry to the Inquisitor’s lips.
Loman’s rain of radiant arrows was rciless and relentless as they fell from the Heavens, and they claid the lives of n and demons alike as they fell. At first glance, it seed like there were more demons than n who were struck down by the holy arrows, but even as he watched, that changed dramatically.
"I??kuíla. ??k??a. Il??ala-nn??!"
Diarmuid had never seen a demon like the white-furred, horned figure wielding a glowing sword of ice, but when it shouted and held its sword aloft, a soft, crystalline tinkling sound filled the air above them before a glittering do began to form above the center of the plaza.
The do wasn’t a perfect hemisphere, Diarmuid realized in shock as he watched it shimr into existence. Rather, it resembled one of the gilded rotundas that covered fountains in plazas throughout the Holy City, supported by a dozen icy pillars that stretched up from the cobblestones of the west gate plaza to support the crystalline do.
In any other context, Diarmuid would have stopped to stare in admiration at sothing so beautiful. The crystalline rotunda transcended simple architecture, resembling a piece of art that caught the light of the stars above, the golden glow of the Temple in the distance, and even the shimring blue-green ribbons of demonic light in the sky to create a dazzling display of rainbow hues that rippled across its multifaceted surface.
It should have been a thing of pure beauty that any servant of the light could admire, but it had been conjured by a demon, and its purpose was heresy of the highest order.
The luminous arrows pierced through the armor of friend and foe alike, dispassionately slaying anyone who the Holy Lord of Light deed worthy of death, and even the shields of demons or temple guards were useless to block the radiant arrows, but the crystalline do was different. When a glowing arrow struck the do, it bent, twisted, and dissipated before it could pass all the way through the ice!
It was a sight that shook Diarmuid’s faith to the core. The rain of arrows Loman had summoned with his Bow of Stars, if they were the sa ones that Exemplar Domas was famous for calling down from the Heavens, were a declaration of the fate the Holy Lord of Light wrote in the stars for everyone on the battlefield. If a man’s death tonight was written in the stars, then nothing could thwart the Holy Lord of Light’s will.
And yet, this demon could, and dozens of demons were retreating back under the shelter of his glittering do, which ant that the only people the rain of arrows was falling on... were the mbers of the Temple Guard and the Lothian soldiers with them.
But even the appearance of the glittering do of ice that bent and twisted Loman’s arrows into nothingness couldn’t have prepared Diarmuid for the words he heard next when the diminutive figure of a horned demon wearing the wide-brimd hat of a witch turned to stare directly at the place where he crouched behind the wall.
"Inquisitor!" Heila shouted over the din of battle. "Help
save your people! They will not listen to anyone else, but they may listen to you. Tell them. Lay down their weapons and we can save their lives!"
Reviews
All reviews (0)