The city of Samsara was not pure chaos -- Chirp thought that was mildly inappropriate. A city with so many people, packed into such a tight area, falling to an invading army should have been a place where chaos was expected and bloodshed was plentiful. But as Chirp walked beside Ejana, the Black Rose, the generalissimo who commanded the Piss Boot Legion and their auxiliaries, they found that the conquest of a city was so far fairly neat and tidy. Part of this was because the citizenry of Samsara, long ground beneath the heel of the Regent and his brutal Regency, were taking to the streets. Buoyed by the words of Ember, the Unconquered, they were self-organizing into their own squadrons, gathering up weapons and taking the fight to the First Legion, whose men were tasked with defending the city.
"I don't like it," Ejana said, shaking her head.
"Wh...you don't...why?" Chirp asked, trying to quash the feelings of being a useless hanger on.
An Infused Knight wearing First Legion colors sprang from behind a cart where he had been hiding. He punched at the air and a snarling bolt of lightning shot from his knuckles, hissing towards the two. Ejana kicked upwards from where she stood, her heel rising above head. Dragged behind her heel was a shimmering wall of rosebuds and thorns, their colors vibrant in the haze and dust of the embattled city. The lightning bolt slammed into the wall of flowers with a smell like charred wood. Ejana shifted on her heel and slammed her palm into the wall -- which collapsed onto the Infused Knight with a groaning, creaking crackling noise.
Dust and wind blew Ejana's rose red hair as she frowned. "This is too easy. Fifteen cruisers, a smattering of antimagic fields?" She shook her head, then turned to one of the runners -- a young woman with short cut white hair and a scarred face. "Go find me the Unconquered."
Chirp gulped. "D-Do you think Ember, uh, is in danger?" they asked.
"I doubt it," Ejana said, frowning. "Unless he ran ahead without the other Lunars."
Chirp felt their stomach knotting with tension and guilt. "I..." Before they could continue, a massive, furred figure slipped past them, grinding against their back. They blinked in time to see the immense brown panther that Ceaith had become moments before a blue haze surrounded the Lapis. When it had faded, Ceaith was standing beside Chirp, scowling at Ejana.
"I thought that Samsara's first and finest would be, you know, less of a fucking pushover," she said.
"Well, um, we are being led by Ember?" Chirp said, their voice soft.
Ceaith looked at them -- and Chirp saw the normally fierce, crackling intensity of Ceaith's eyes (
like a pair of spiky porcupines
had been how Xora had described Ceaith's eyes when she hadn't been listening) soften. Ceaith reached out and ruffled Chirp's hair. "I mean, if you call this being led. I haven't seen hide nor hair of him since we got over the walls."
Chirp felt a slow turning twist in their stomach. Then a flare of golden light sparked out of the corner of their eye. The sounds of battle around them faded -- and she saw the Legionaries that were hurrying to take up positions in the front lines were pausing, slowing. The civilian bands who were moving up to take their positions as well stopped as well. Chirp lifted their head as Xora and the Rose both joined them and Ceaith. The other Lunars had come from an alleyway, and their conversation had faded in the brilliance of that golden blaze. The last of them, Tayar, pressed her hands to Ceaith's shoulders. Ceaith took Xora's hand in theirs, while Ceaith grabbed Chirp's other hand.
Together, they gaped up at the most horrible dawn.
Standing atop the immense golden statue to the Regent was a figure wreathed in a golden bonefire of excess mana.
But it was not Ember.
The Regent stood there, upon his likeness' shoulder. But he was unmasked and terrible, his lips turned down in a frown. Even from a mile or so off, his features were burned into Chirp's eyes -- into the eyes of every soldier fighting for the Unconquered. The magic that burned through him made it possible.
"No..." Ceaith whispered. But Chirp saw the same thing she did.
The Good King Bahul, the Tenth Unconquered, stood upon his own statue, and held the body of Sleepy Ember in one hand, his fingers clenched around Ember's red hair. The sagging, boneless way that Ember hung made Chirp feel as if their ears were filled with a wild roar. Bahul lifted Ember one handed as his anima burned all the brighter. His voice boomed across the city. "The blasphemer known as Ember...the anathema...has
fallen
!" He swung Ember around, gripping the limp form in his hands, holding Ember the same way a carpenter would hold a few cubits of wood. He brought Ember's body down upon his knee and the crack was audible, even from the street.
And with that, Bahul threw Ember forward -- and Chirp could not tear their eyes from the tiny dot that was their husband, their love, their life, plunging towards the city streets. The buildings that arranged themselves between where they stood and there were a mercy. But a thin one.
Beside Bahul, an Infused Knight with marble white skin and hair like stone plates stepped up. He held aloft a war standard for the First Legion and a set of horns blared. The clouds overhead rippled, like water under the pounding of rain. Ejana stepped forward, her face slack with shock. "Oh no," she whispered. "That signal flag -- it means-"
The clouds parted.
Arranged over the city, concealed until this moment, was the aerial detachments of the First, the Second, the Fourth and the Eighth Legions. A hundred and twenty eight battleships. Their mana cannons twinkled and flared, sparkling across the sky.
For a moment, there was beauty.
And then, Armeggedon.
***
The first thing he felt was the heat.
Then the smell.
And then the laughter.
"Well, well, well. Someone's off the wheel."
He groaned, slowly, and opened his eyes. "I was awake..." He mumbled. "I was awake, just...resting my eyes..." He pushed himself onto his palms and felt the rough, jagged stone under his palms and he knew, instantly, that he was
not
in Rataka Village.
Ember's eyes snapped open and he saw the demons kneeling before him. They were green skinned and covered in short, spiny protrusions. Their muzzles -- long and doglike -- dripped with bile. Their eyes bugged out of their stubby skulls and their bilious black pupils fixed onto his face as they leered at him with exaggerated delight.
"He's awake, is he?" one of the demons cackled.
"Oh, I bet he wishes he wasn't," the other said.
Ember tried to scramble to his feet. But his body felt sluggish and slow -- and then one of the demons, moving faster than he had ever seen anything move in his life was upon him. Their clawed hand closed around Ember's throat and them the demon twisted and flung him against the hard wall of the roughhewn cave that they stood in. Ember felt his head ring as he collapsed to his palms, gasping as the demons laughed. Ember shook his head, trying to focus, trying to let his mana flow through him. There was just one problem.
He didn't have any.
His hand went to his forehead, and he felt it was bare. He didn't have his soulgem.
"None of those here, Unconquered," the demon cackled before pulling out a leather collar from behind its back. It snapped it around Ember's throat with a single cruel twist of its hand, before dragging him to his feet on the leash. "Come on. Lets give the
hero
his tour."
"W-Where am I?" Ember hissed.
"Isn't it obvious?" the other demon asked.
The two of them pushed him to the jagged opening of the cave. It looked like it was opening towards an infinite drop towards a swirling sea of madness -- but then Ember was shoved through and felt his center of gravity spinning wildly. His arms flailed and he tried to keep himself standing -- and he was standing. He had just walked from the lip of a cave to the wall underneath it. But now the wall was the floor, and the cave he had been in looked like a hole in the ground behind him. The wild chaos that he had seen as something that was
outwards
now hung above him.
It looked as if he was standing at the bottom of an immense cyclone...or maybe the eye of a hurricane would be a better description. But rather than wind and water, the eye was made of
souls
. They didn't scream, or howl, or wail. Instead, they looked as if they were slumbering as they whirled around and around and around overhead, shimmering like a red froth. Occasionally, a purple-blue arc of lightning would reach across the center of the eye and rush outwards, towards where it opened into the more familiar red chaos of the Sunder.
However, the cyclone was merely the chimney. It started half a mile up, capping a long set of terraced walls, which themselves formed an immense amphitheater. Those terraces, each one large enough to hold the city of Samsara itself in its entirety, ringed around the pock-marked plain that Ember stood upon. Those terraces held cities. But they were made not of stone and wood...rather, they were made of brass and blackened soulcidian. Devils and demons flew from rooftop to rooftop, while the wailing screams of the tormented filled the air. Towers, made of stacked cauldrons filled with bubbling water and capped with heavy cages, thrust into the air throughout the cities, and he could see arms sticking out past the cages, reaching desperately for salvation as devils snapped and cut at the arms, laughing and cackling.
"I'm in Hell," Ember whispered.
"Wow, got a real smart one here," the demon beside him said, laughing. "Yes, you're in
Hell
, Ember. An express ticket, courtesy of a knife tipped with devil venom."
Ember shook his head, numbly.
"Come on!" The demon said, tugging him forward on the leash. "The boss was told to expect you
special
."
Ember, his eyes widening further, started to walk forward. Without the power of the Unconquered flowing through his veins, a thousand things that he had forgotten about began to make themselves known. The blazing heat of Hell caused sweat to bead on his body. The sharp rocks and uneven ground that he walked upon tried to trip him and send him stumbling to his knees. His big toe nail cracked on one impact and began to bleed sluggishly, and still the demons jerked him to his feet and kept marching him forward. Time seemed to stretch and compress without rhyme of reason. Ember felt as if he had been walking for centuries -- but then he blinked and they had moved from the plains that stretched around the hole he had woken in to the ramp leading into one of the devil cities. Here, more devils eyed him as he walked by. Leering. Laughing. Jeering. A few of them threw rotting fruit at him, which splattered against his shoulders.
Ember saw other people like him. Humans who had been sent or dragged to Hell. Many of them were being whipped or boiled alive or, in one horrible case, eaten alive. But some of them were walking mostly free about the city. He saw a man in a green robe with glowing black eyes, who strode past demons as they bowed to him. He held, in one hand, a folded piece of paper scrawled with the word
Sorcerer,
which he flashed at any devil that wasn't quick enough to suit him. The last Ember saw of the sorcerer was him slicing a hole in the air with the card, then stepping through it.
