Black Knight - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

~ [The Cathedral] ~

The darkness of night has fallen all around them, the dimly burning candles that line the interior of the cathedral casting a soft glow up along the cold, stone walls. The brickwork was once of an illustrious white hue in generations past. However, time, smoke, and touch have faded the hewn stones to a more muted gray tone. Starfallen light shines in through the colorful, stained glass windows, projecting strange distortions of religious and historic iconography over the cold floors and between and over the empty wooden pews.

“What is the meaning of this?” asks a girl’s voice on the side of the room, over-toning the quiet mumbles of the man who has let go of her. The tall man who kidnapped her, Kaisersgrab, kneels before the altar of the cathedral and prays. Foreign soldiers stand on either side of her, preventing her escape. Acacia looks around the cathedral — the cathedral within the city itself — where she has been taken. She had assumed the enemy would be dragging her out of the city and into the night, but instead they’re still inside its defended and guarded walls. “I will be rescued within short order,” says the princess. “I would advise you to cease this nonsense and leave the continent immediately,” says Acacia, looking out of the side of her eyes at the soldier standing to her right. “Before -”

“- Before it arrives?” asks the man in the center of the room, Fee Videlius Kaisersgrab. Acacia turns her head to look at him, as he rises to his feet. Cupped in his hand is a small candle that he has taken from the altar.

“Before he arrives,” corrects Acacia, looking at the tall man, who maintains a friendly smile, but there is a twitch to his eyebrow that she picks up on. “Mr. Kaisersgrab. I assume you know what will happen here very shortly,” says the pseudo-princess. She looks around herself at the half-dark cathedral and the soldiers of the enemy nation who have somehow managed to sneak inside. “If this is a trap that you are trying to lure him into, it will not work,” she explains. If they have found their way into the central cathedral, it can only mean that they have the Holy-Church’s blessing to operate here.

Is the Holy-Church siding with the enemy nation? This is huge.

The Holy-Church runs all the way from the smallest villages on every continent to the fringes of the royal castle itself. They are a separate, third power that falls not under the flags of any nation but rather under their own banner. The high-priest, as he is called in the other nation, or the bishop, as he is referred to here, is an independent king of his own rights in essence.

This man, Fee Videlius Kaisergrab, is strong. He’s an extremely high level combatant and one who has noble-level training and education. But there’s more to him than that. He’s more than just a man with a pretty sword.

His fighting style, the way he holds himself — she was mistaken. He was raised in the enemy nation, yes. However, he wasn’t raised by enemy nobility. He was raised by the church’s own. This man is a holy ‘man’, if he can be called such a thing given his true nature.

Sir Knight knows what she knows. He feels what she feels. The fact that they’re all here, in the middle of the city, the fact that they’re waiting on him in what appears to be some kind of trap for him, he’s well aware of these things. He’s coming. He’ll be here very soon. “I suggest that you leave immediately, if you wish to see tomorrow,” says Acacia. “Your gods will not protect you, Mr. Kaisergrab.”

He walks toward her, looking down at her. Acacia stares up at him, not losing her nerve.

“Your Majesty,” says the man in a voice that verges between quiet contentment and a strained forcing of such a tone. “May I ask you a personal question?” he asks, holding the candle out before himself in both hands. Acacia nods. “When you were young, were you afraid of the dark?” he asks with a pleasant smile.

Acacia lifts a hand, brushing a strand of her hair out of her way, if only for the show of it. “Ridiculous,” she says. “As if a royal would be so childish as to -”

— He reaches out, harshly grabbing her wrist and interrupting her. Acacia looks in surprise at the wide eyes that are close to hers as he has bent down. They seem oddly bloodshot and dry. His smile is gone, replaced with a deep blankness. “I was.” Fee looks at her with a haunted expression. “I was terrified every single night when I was young,” he explains, the candle burning between them. “And now that I’ve become a man, I still find myself fearful of those very same shadows,” he explains, still not having blinked. “As I age, I change, my body changes, my mind changes, but those shadows, those nightmares, they’ve always been the same,” explains the foreign young man, the candle illuminating his sharp features.

Acacia looks at him coldly, not losing her calm despite his strange twist of presence and emotion. “It is a dog’s role to watch the darkness that his master cannot see, Mr. Kaisersgrab,” remarks Acacia snidely, lifting an eyebrow.

He narrows his eyes. “What do you know?” he asks accusingly. “Princess.”

“Nothing that I cannot smell on your breath,” she explains, switching languages to his own mother tongue, that of the enemy nation. “- Grim. Kirchenhund.” She studies his tense features.

Kaisersgrab stands back upright and walks back toward the altar, looking over his shoulder at her. “You should be afraid of the dark, Your Majesty,” he explains, not engaging with her provocation.

“And why is that, Mr. Kaisergrab?” asks Acacia, watching him leave. Her probing has borne fruit. The man has a bit of an edge to him, but he won’t let himself be provoked into any misdeeds unfit for noble behavior. He’s been raised well. Whoever in the church he answers to is someone in a very high, very dignified position that requires strict social adherence from his inferiors. Kaisersgrab works for a big fish, not just any random priest.

For her, this confirms it. The Holy-Church has sided with the enemy.

He turns away, walking to the altar to set the candle back down in the midst of a dozen others. “There are things in the darkness that humans can’t see,” he explains. “But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.”

Acacia lifts her gaze, looking up at the inner balcony of the cathedral. Priests and priestesses of the Holy-Church line it and look down toward the ground floor, as if waiting for something. They’re not enemy troops. They’re the holy people of this very city.

— Acacia’s view is interrupted as she lets out a hacking cough, clutching her chest as she falls down to her knees, wheezing for air as the coughing fit, born of her illness, overtakes her strength. Very likely, it was brought on by the stress of the situation.

“Prepare yourselves,” instructs Fee, lighting another candle. “It’s almost here.”

One of the soldiers helps her up, handing her a vial he has ready.

Acacia lifts her eyes, her fingers covering her mouth, as she holds the medicine in her other hand. “Incorrect, Mr. Kaisergrab,” remarks the girl, stopping her coughing fit. Black smoke ekes out from between her fingers, held over her lips. Kaisersgrab looks her way, the candles all around the cathedral flickering as a breeze moves through it, pulled toward her as if all the air in the room were being drawn to one singular point. “- He already is.”

A thousand flames die immediately. The cathedral goes dark. The pictures of saints of the faith, the sacred iconography, and the house of the most pious are lost to the nothingness. For an instant, not even moonlight reaches into the place, as if it were banished to stay out from within its walls.

— Acacia quickly jumps to her feet as she smashes a small fist against the other soldier’s visor to daze him before sprinting off into the darkness. People mutter incantations all around the room — the soldiers, the priests. Spells begin glowing in the nothingness, creating pinpricks of light like glowing stars in the night above. Yet the darkness is so heavy and dense that their faint auras never meld into one another to create a greater light. Instead, it is as if a hundred fireflies were flying through the air apart from one another, their glows never coming together to create a full brightness that could illuminate the space between heaven and the world below. She runs, downing the medicine before her illness stops her plan.

Something heavy suddenly hits her from behind, and Acacia falls to the floor, tumbling a few times. A firm boot presses down on her back, keeping her there as a voice comes from above. The girl reaches out, grabbing the mostly empty vial of medicine.

“Where are you?” asks Kaisersgrab, his sole resting below the back of her neck as he stares around the darkness, his form hidden by the lack of light in the cathedral. “Herr Ritter,” says the man, staring around the darkness with the paranoid gaze of an animal unsure of its status as a hunter.

Candles begin to glow again as the priests above and below slowly begin to relight them, returning a faint shine to the darkest corners of the cathedral little by little. Islands of light emerge, yet other corners remain dark, as if something had happened to the holy people who had ventured into them. The inside of the cathedral is pockmarked by such gaps — faint islands of firelight within a sea of nothing.

Acacia lets out a pained noise as he presses down with his boot below her neck. “Show yourself, monster!” he calls into the darkness.

“I’m right here,” says a heavy voice from behind them. Kaisersgrab hisses, turning around in a quick motion, his long arms practically swiping through the air, staring at the massive silhouette only steps away from him, the imposing giant made of black metal standing on the precipice of the faintest glow of the distant candles. He’s as present and as real as a night terror is for a child in the darkness. “Behind you,” says Sir Knight. “Like I’ve always been.”

“Now!” yells a voice from above. Several dozen hands begin to glow in unison as holy people of all manners begin to cast their spells together. A weave of holy magic spans the upper balcony, threading from one person to the next like a string being pulled through the loop of two dozen needles. An instant later, the projection blasts down toward the ground floor, toward the space where Sir Knight is standing. From the stones below grow several glassy, prismatic walls that are made up of pure, radiant holy magic. A glass cage forms around the shadowy entity, boxing it inside a container of pure light.

“Sir Knight!” shouts Acacia from the ground.

Kaisersgrab looks, his paranoid eyes never softening, as the suit of armor is trapped in the sigil and seal covered walls, the holy barriers trapping der Schwarze Ritter from above, below, left, and right.

He is a being of pure emptiness, of void. It cannot be destroyed. However, emptiness can be contained. An empty space can have walls built around it.

“I thought you were afraid of monsters?” asks Sir Knight’s voice, not losing much of its cadence, given the situation.

“I am,” replies Kaisergrab, staring at the creature, studying it, observing it, now that he has seen what he was afraid of for his entire life. “And that is why I hunt them.” He looks at the suit of armor, standing there and not moving all that much. “But it seems that every monster has a weakness,” he remarks. “Dragons have loose scales,” says Kaisersgrab. “Goblins can be blinded by bright lights, and you, Kreatur -” Acacia lets out a sharp yelp as he kicks her away to the side. She rolls off, hitting a sparsely illuminated pillar. “- You are bound to your useless master, as you always have been.” His expression from before is back, and the wideness of his eyes is returning. “You killed my ancestors,” explains Kaisersgrab, looking at the armor. “You ruined our family name.”

The armor doesn’t move. “Oh. That’s rough. Sorry,” replies Sir Knight. “Why not just move and start over somewhere new?”

His cold eyes narrow in the growing lights of the cathedral, now that a sense of calm has returned to the enemy forces. “I can’t kill you,” remarks Kaisersgrab. “But I can keep you trapped here long enough for us to break your connection to her,” he explains. Kaisersgrab shakes his head. “I’m almost let down,” says the man, turning away. “After all of the years, all of the nightmares, all of the legends…” He looks over his shoulder. “And there you are, just caged like a wild dog, lured in with cheap meat.” He lifts a hand, walking away to grab Acacia. “Begin the ritual.”

Acacia is standing upright, holding one hand against the pillar to brace herself. The other hand, still holding the medicine, is clutching her hurt ribs. “Mr. Kaisersgrab,” says Acacia as he walks back toward her. She stands upright, looking at him with a solid gaze. “I will have you know that I am anything but cheap,” says the girl of extravagant preferences, who quite likes to live up to the status of her title at someone else’s expense, as all princesses do.

She lifts the empty bottle of medicine, inside of which swirls a black, radiating shadow.

Kaisersgrab’s eyes shoot open as far as they can as he sees the bottle in her hand, a container that had been emptied and then, consequently, refilled with absolutely nothing. “No…” He looks over his shoulder, back at the suit of armor inside the barrier-cage.

— As if given a dramatic signal, the helmet falls off of the shoulders, and then the shin armor gives way, and all of it falls apart together in an empty heap. There was never nothing inside of it to begin with; it was just placed there and sparsely held together by shadow magic. “NO!” yells Kaisersgrab, spinning to run towards her.

He was in the bottle the whole time.

“Sir Knight!” yells Acacia, popping the lid off the glass bottle of her medicine in her hand a second time. The shadow blasts out of it, releasing itself from it with violent force like an erupting geyser of poison smoke, pressing free from the deepest, most forgotten crevices of the world. The mantle, draped over her shoulders billows back behind her as if she were standing in the face of a soul crushing storm. The black clouds eject out of the glass, rising up into the air as an omen of what is to come.

“Yes, Your Majesty?” asks a voice that harrows throughout the entire cathedral, the stained glass windows shaking and rattling, the threads of the magic spell ripping apart and fraying as the priests try in vain to redirect their prison toward the new, nebulous entity that has formed above them all. However, it is impossible to contain, their barriers are impossible to align in any way that could trap the indistinguishable presence, especially given their panic. There are always gaps and openings; it is as if they had thrown ten panes of glass into the ocean. None of them ever connects or aligns enough in any meaningful way to trap it.

Acacia narrows her eyes, glaring at the tall man with a disdain she saves only for a few special people in this world. “Make sure that Mr. Kaisergrab stays afraid of the dark,” she orders in a tone to match her words.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” affirms Sir Knight.

[New Ability {SCHATTENJAGD}]

• Allows you to transform any space that is perceived as being empty, such as dark places, into whatever a targeted person might imagine to actually be there within their terrified hearts.

The cathedral begins to fall into darkness. People scream from up in the upper area, where the light fails first, as a flood of shadows rains down over the entire space.

A hand grabs Acacia’s arm. She turns to look in surprise at a human priestess, whom she recognizes. It’s the priestess belonging to the adventuring party that Sir Knight has helped in the dungeon a few times. The woman pulls on her arm. “Come on!” she hisses. “I’m on your side,” says the priestess, pulling her away behind the pillar as the black curtain falls over the hallowed ground.