by Essence » Mon May 23, 2005 1:53 am
The chamber was a mess of horrors that the corpses of the guards without had only been the most minute of heralds for. They were the ravens from an aviary devoid of doves, and the message inside this room they bore was even shades darker than their wings. Loret - he of the strongest House in the realm, Demonspear of Renloth's armies - staggered through the doorway, and fell to his knees in front of a charred bed, collapsed from the damage that had been done it.
Outside, a clear day reigned. On warm drafts a hundred paces above the battlements and towers of men, an eagle climbed her way lazily across the sky. Up here the harvest sun would make no impression upon any creature, for any eyes would be drawn to the earth, and any heat from its rays would have to contend with the rushing air. Up here anything could be forgotten, except for hunger. The eagle knew the skies to be her friend for that, but at the moment she wasn't looking to feed.
She watched the activity of the city just north of her, taking in sights that a foreign mind was processing. A moment's flight would take her above the peasant markets erected outside the southern outer wall of
Querth
she knew. She swung about in a half circle while her attention was focused on the roughshod streets and dull pavilions and worn wooden buildings clustered outside the open gates. There where people aplenty there who she could see plainly, but not hear. People were noisy, however. Querth's Berthing. She watched a mild stream of humanity, oxflesh and horseflesh flow up a large road into Querth's Berthing, some finding destinations there, some continuing on to the huge city gates for other business. There were many villages and farms to be had along the road south of her, some of which could be spied from her vantage now.
Her eyes traveled beyond the walls, where she was
more interested.
She tipped her wings in and dove a dozen paces before catching another draft, and rode that one for awhile. The part of Querth she had her eyes on now was full of tall grey buildings of stone and others of a murky red brick, and a large market. Not the oldest section of the city, and not the newest. The oldest section of the city was north and east of this area, spread alongside the river, and was what she needed to be watching. Her eyes moved in that direction, and her body gradually followed.
A great number of shining metal men astride horseflesh were leaving the courtyards of the tallest building of them all, an immense structure of deep grey stone surrounded by walls of its own. A forest of spires rose from the bulk of its mass, and of these towers several stabbed boldly into the great heights. This place was the dwelling place of countless such men, as the eagle had noted a few times before in her life.
As she drew closer, passing the city walls below her, she could see that the men and horseflesh were moving rapidly. There was a smaller group ahead of them in the street that they were just entering from beyond the gates of the largest building, and the square in front of those. The group was breaking up and fanning out, away from one of the largest buildings on the street. The street was wide and not crowded, and the buildings here where surrounded by small walls, gardens and courtyards. The building she was realizing she needed to watch had more of the men around it, dismounted from the horseflesh, waiting at the doors and striding around the grounds. A few came out, and a few went in.
She dove some more to catch a different draft, and in this one she began to rise, not far from the structure with the activity. A glance told the foreign mind that the rest of the city looked as it usually would on any day, and she returned her gaze below her.
A tremendous explosion of noise took her by surprise. She shrieked and dipped back south, watching a great bout of fire consume half the building. What was left after the cloud of fire climbed its way upward out of existence began crumbling to the earth, in flames. The stone was cracking away and searing, and seemed to be on fire itself. She hadn't been able to hear anything of the men, but she could see some, the ones who hadn't been thrown in the explosion, darting about in confusion. The dead lay scattered in some places, slain by the initial explosion, or by the debris flung from it. Downed horses screamed, which even she could hear very faintly at this height. People in nearby parts of the city milled in confusion as well.
A second explosion sounded, louder, and she shrieked again. This time, the largest structure of the city was going up in flames. A large section of the western wall was blown violently outward, and many of the spires on the western portion of the castle were crumbling into a terrific cloud of smoke and debris. Two or three on the other side of the building began falling from the shock.
There was no order among the men anymore. People in the streets began running, almost in any direction but the explosions. The shining metal men, most of them, were racing back to the huge building beyond the square. Fires from both explosions were taking their toll on some of the nearby buildings, anywhere a fire could be caught among the stone masses. The occasional wooden structure was engulfed in flames at a terrible speed.
The eagle feared fire as an instinct, and continued flying herself south. Before long, she felt a small tension on her mind release, and she cared no longer for the activities of the city stretching behind her.
Downriver, just beyond the horizon of the eagle's sight, two men in robes entered a large inn with a dock jutting a small way into the water. Finding the common room and kitchens devoid of people, one of the two pulled a jar full of black liquid from a pocket, and sat it on a counter. It burst over the two men and splattered its contents everywhere. Cursing, the men began to draw in the air, and very shortly the wooden innards of the inn were aflame. They left hastily, mounting two horses outside of an empty stable, and rode into the woods, avoiding the path that lead to the main road.
Deep underground, in a maze of catacombs several layers down, a man who did not know that the inn above him was ceasing to exist walked the length of the last corridor. He was well-dressed, of noble stature as well as birth, and held a beautiful longsword of finely-tempered steel. His march took him past rooms much older than those even a level above him, full of dust, fragile bones, and battalions of spiders and their armies of prey.
He had been down here once before, and had had to search every room for what he needed to come to now. The second left door from the ending of the hallway. He stopped before it, squeezed the grip of his sword once, and pushed the door open. Torches lit the scene inside. An old man and an old woman in brown robes stood at either end of a large stone table, the man at the head and the woman at the feet of the two women upon it. Another young woman garbed in a plain white dress stood against the far wall, and a man in a metallic-red armor stood just inside the door.
The women on the table were both unclothed. The one on the left was in childbirth, the bulge of her stomach horrendously large for any normal birth. Her breaths were coming sharp, and her legs were spread in angular arches. Her hands pushed against the stone beneath them. She was pale of hair and skin, and had seen no more than twenty summers.
The one on the right could have been her twin to behold, but she radiated a beauty that the other did not have. She writhed mildly on the table in what seemed to be the motions of childbirth, but her stomach was flat without baby. Still, her legs where also arched, and heavy breasts heaved with labored breathing. One hand traveled down her side, around the curve of her hip, and around her thigh. She brought it between her legs and slipped fingers inside herself, beginning to scream in short bursts of breath. The old woman raised a hand and closed her eyes, and muttered something to herself. The beauty's hand snapped back to the table, and her back arched. Her mouth strained open as wide as it could be, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
The young man in the armor beyond the door was turning and unsheathing his own sword, in one flawless motion. The man outside the door moved to meet him, stepping past the threshold of the room.
Immediately the room went still. Frozen were the men with drawn swords, the woman by the far wall, the Eralcs in their robes. Frozen were the torches, and the women upon the table bearing a pain as fiery as flames that had given the scene its light. But light is nothing without movement, and so the sheen of sweat upon the women glistened no more, and the glint of drawn steel dissipated into the blackness. In here, time skipped a heartbeat - and a heartbeat in time is a thousand years of the world, and a thousand years marks the rise and fall of mountains and empires.