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Chapter 1217: The Doomsday (I)

Snow Reflection Castle, Kingdom of Everwinter.

“Your lordship — the Army of Graycastle has retreated!”

The guard was still breathing hard when he burst through the hall doors. Every noble in the room turned to stare.

“Are you certain?” Earl Marwayne rose from his chair.

“More than one scout confirmed it, my lord.” The guard nodded hard. “They struck camp overnight and left food behind. A great deal of it.”

“They’re gone!” The earl’s laugh came from somewhere deep in his chest — relief breaking loose after weeks of pressure. A month ago, Graycastle soldiers had materialized inside the Kingdom of Everwinter without warning, seizing port city after port city. They had refused surrender, refused gifts, and immediately begun pushing civilians toward the roads. Behavior more outrageous than the church’s had ever been; at least the church negotiated. What the Graycastle men offered instead was a single, preposterous explanation: the Bloody Moon was coming, destruction was swift, everyone must leave. This land was passed down by blood and generation. No king, no church, no wandering army would take it.

“My lord,” said the old scholar Zac, his voice smooth as oil on still water, “a full moon, a sickle moon, a dark moon — astronomical phenomena, nothing more. They recur. If the Graycastle men wish to fear them, let them. Your lordship holds this land. That is all that matters.”

“The castle walls alone will stop any army,” another man said.

“We need not yield,” said a third. “The church threatened us first and ended up making you bishop.”

The room was full of agreement. Easy, self-flattering agreement.

Marwayne gazed through the window at the sinister Bloody Moon that had appeared three days ago. Where he had felt dread, gratitude now pressed in behind it. That moon had arrived at precisely the right moment — the Graycastle advance had halted, and his Snow Reflection Castle still stood. The barbarians rarely attacked a city a noble ruled directly, but they had been stripping his surrounding towns of their people with no concern for what that meant come the Months of Demons.

The castle itself was nearly unassailable. It sat north of the king’s city, lodged among cliffs and precipices, the gaps between rock faces varying from a few miles to only hundreds of meters, all connected by suspension bridges. His ancestors had chosen this ground carefully. Even the Church of Hermes, which had devoured the rest of Everwinter in short order, had never put soldiers inside these walls — they had sent an ambassador and offered him his title in exchange for fealty, and he had accepted, as any sensible man would.

He had held out now, waiting for the best price. But Wimbledon’s terms were not acceptable.

He didn’t believe the demons the Graycastle men warned about would scale these cliffs. What worried him was something more mundane: without the surrounding towns, his stockpile would run dry.

Fortunately, those soldiers had fled at the sight of a moon.

“Mr. Zac,” the earl said, “what should we do now?”

The old scholar stroked his long beard. “Attack.”

Marwayne stiffened. Attacking Graycastle directly was another matter entirely — he had only refused to yield because of the terrain.

Zac raised a hand. “Not the Graycastle men directly. But the territories they abandoned. The scouts say their units are scattered — perhaps a hundred men each. How much can a hundred men carry away? The people who left with them must have abandoned their heavier possessions. If we move quickly, we can recover what they could not take. Food, especially.”

The earl’s eyes lit up. He sent for his Chief Knight.

He was still forming the order in his mind when a different guard crashed through the doors, white-faced, voice stripped hollow.

“Your lordship — there’s a demon. Outside the castle.”

Marwayne scoffed. “You believe the nonsense those Graycastle men were selling?”

“Pray forgive me, my lord.” The guard’s voice barely carried. “But it isn’t human.”

Not human.

The hall went quiet. Everyone looked at everyone else.

The earl’s heart climbed toward his throat, but he was lord here. He kept his face composed.

“Take me there,” he said. “I want to see what creatures from hell actually look like.”

That said, Marwayne still put on his best armor before he climbed the wall. He chose the largest God’s Stone of Retaliation he owned, and a dozen guards arranged themselves into a wall of shields in front of him.

He felt better the moment he saw the demon. It was alone.

It stood on a protruding rock a little higher than the battlements — not on the wall itself — with the fathomless abyss directly below. The patrolling knights had already positioned catapults and notched their arrows.

The demon was nothing like a man. It had hands, feet, a shape that echoed the human form, but its build was massive, its skin the color of a bruise with veins running dark and raised beneath the surface. Tentacles sprouted from its cheeks, from its chin, from its elbows — they moved constantly, a slow and independent writhing that made the stomach turn.

Its eyes were closed. It might have been sleeping.

The sight of it did not frighten Marwayne. One creature, standing still, eyes shut. The Graycastle men had used this thing to terrify uneducated villagers into leaving their homes. A pretext. A prop. He would have it shot full of arrows, and then he would have a story to tell for the rest of his life.

He drew himself up and bellowed across the abyss: “Listen, you filthy creature! I am Marwayne Caso, lord of the Snow Reflection Castle. You have entered my territory without leave. Kneel and surrender — that is your only choice. Otherwise, the ice at the bottom of this abyss will be your grave!”

He didn’t expect the demon to understand him. The declaration was for his own men as much as anything. If he frightened off a monster that had sent an entire army running, his name would be spoken with awe from here to the coast.

“My patience is short. I’ll count to five — five, four!”

He signaled his soldiers to draw.

“Three—”

The demon’s eyes opened.

“Enough!”

Its voice came like a thunder crack detonated between the cliff faces. Stone answered stone — icicles sheared from the precipice walls and fell spinning into the dark below. Marwayne felt the battlement shudder under his boots. The silence that followed was absolute.

He took two steps backward. His legs buckled. He sat down hard on the stone.

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