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Chapter 1218: Doomsday (II)

The monster spoke human language.

A guard hauled the earl to his feet. Marwayne’s face burned to the temples. He had staged this confrontation to demonstrate authority — to stand on the ramparts and project lordly courage while his men watched — and a single word had stripped the performance to nothing. One word, from a creature that stood alone on a rock. The humiliation was thorough.

“Kill it,” he said, teeth pressed together. He raised his hand toward the archers.

The old scholar Zac caught his arm and blinked twice. His lips shaped three soundless words: hold your position.

The earl stood still for a moment, letting the blood cool in his face. Zac was right. The demon could speak, and that changed the calculation. A creature that spoke might be reasoned with. The situation was still uncertain, and it was too early to commit to force. The Graycastle men’s warnings had clouded his thinking — he had been treating this thing as an enemy on instinct, the way a farmer treats anything that clears the fence line. But perhaps it had come as an ambassador.

Why had it not moved? Why stand on that rock and do nothing? If it were ferocious as advertised, it would have raided the undefended villages below the cliff wall long before now. The more he considered it, the clearer it became: had he killed an ambassador, he would have made an enemy out of thin air — which was precisely what Graycastle wanted.

The difficulty was that he had just ordered this creature to kneel. Pivoting to civil discourse would require a certain grace he didn’t currently possess.

Fortunately, Zac understood without being told. He stepped forward and addressed the demon crisply. “Impertinent creature. If you have the power of speech, why waste our time with silence? Our lord grants you another opportunity. State your purpose.”

Marwayne praised the man internally. Ten gold royals a month, and worth every coin.

“Before I answer that,” the demon said, its voice quiet now, stripped of its earlier thunder, “I have a question. What is your relationship with the human beings of the Fertile Plains?”

The Fertile Plains. The name meant nothing to anyone on the wall. Confused glances passed between the nobles.

But Marwayne was now quite sure this was an ambassador.

“I don’t know a place by that name,” Zac replied evenly. “Different kingdoms call the same land different things. We are different races, and naming conventions differ widely. If you show me a map, I may be able to place it.”

“No — you humans coined that name. I’m merely borrowing it.” The demon tilted its head, studied the men arrayed on the wall, and let out a slow exhalation. “I see. You haven’t changed at all. Still the same as hundreds of years ago: each lord walled inside his own territory, ignorant of the wider world. I expected to find you terrified. Yielding in disbelief and despair.” A pause. “I was wrong.”

What was it saying? The earl frowned. But somewhere behind the demon’s grotesque face, he caught a fleeting suggestion of disappointment.

“Are you referring to the Graycastle men?” the Chief Knight asked.

The demon turned toward him. “Yes?”

“They’ve been announcing that demons would come when the Bloody Moon rose,” the knight said, his contempt audible. “They’ve already gone. If you leave now, you may catch them at the eastern port.”

“Perhaps,” the demon said. It glanced east, then back. “I’ll go there. But not yet.” Its posture settled. “Since you know nothing of the Fertile Plains, I’ll be brief.

“I am the Sky Lord, commander of the Western Front Army. Thousands of years ago, your race and mine made an agreement to wage war against the witches and their servants. Your ancestors swore to serve us. In exchange, I granted them land, power, and wealth. That contract has not been terminated. It will not terminate until the war ends. You are your ancestors’ descendants. The obligation passes to you. I command you to surrender this city as the contract requires, and enter my service.”

The hall behind Marwayne might as well have been empty. His own voice, when it came, sounded thin against the cliffs. A contract from a thousand years ago. He wouldn’t honor a contract two years old without fresh negotiation. What kind of commander arrived alone with nothing but words? The creature was deranged.

“And if I refuse?” he said.

“Death will persuade you,” the Sky Lord said. “Look.”

Marwayne looked up. The distant mountains had vanished behind a mist — but not the ordinary grey mist that settled in the Impassable Mountain Range. This was crimson. Thick and deep-colored, moving unlike any fog he had seen. It did not rise from the valleys or drift on the wind. It poured down the slopes in a slow, smooth cascade, a waterfall of red vapor descending toward the foothills.

Had the demon been waiting for this?

Unease took root in the pit of Marwayne’s stomach. He looked sideways at his knights and saw it mirrored in their faces. Whatever this was, waiting would not help.

“With you alone?” the earl said. He gestured to his soldiers. “I’ve given you your chance. Kill it.”

The knights and guards lunged from their paralysis. Arrows screamed through the air toward the rock.

Not one struck.

Every man on the wall stared. The demon had slipped into a black aperture that swallowed it whole, and the aperture had closed.

“It has some kind of power,” the Chief Knight said quietly. “Like a witch.”

“We’re all wearing God’s Stones.” Marwayne clutched the pendant at his chest. “Magic won’t touch us. Find it and kill it!”

“There!” a guard screamed.

The demon stood in the street behind the city wall. It had crossed the abyss in an instant, without a sound, as though the precipice and the open air between meant nothing to it.

That settled the matter for Marwayne. Ambassador or not, something that could bypass these cliffs at will was too dangerous to leave alive. It was alone. It would die here.

“God’s Stone arrows! Treat it as a witch! A hundred gold royals to whoever kills it!”

The knights and guards charged. The demon raised both arms.

A black wall materialized behind it — hundreds of meters wide, solid and absolute, cutting off the street and the houses beyond like a curtain dropped across the world.

Then the Red Mist hit the curtain and flooded through.

Monsters poured out of the black screen and crashed into the charging knights before the men had time to slow. The God’s Stones did nothing. The knights were launched off their feet as though struck by a battering ram, landing five meters back, their chests collapsed. They did not rise.

More creatures followed — dozens, then more, each one bowing briefly to the Sky Lord before joining the slaughter. Every one of them dwarfed an ordinary man. The soldiers on the walls were torn apart where they stood. Blood and broken armor scattered across the stones.

In seven or eight minutes, the cries of the wounded filled every corner of the castle. People ran for the city gates and found the abyss waiting.

Marwayne’s legs gave. He went down and stayed down. No one came to help him up this time. The guard who had steadied him before had already been ripped apart.

His Snow Reflection Castle — the unconquered fortress, the ancestral ground, the unassailable pride of generations — was gone.

The Red Mist hung heavy and rank in the air. Through it, the Bloody Moon looked like a wound that would not close.

Now he understood what doomsday actually looked like.

The end of Volume II: The Battle of Doomsday

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