Black Knight - Chapter 13 (Patreon)

Screams.

The void consumes everything. It takes into itself the eyes of men, the bones of dogs, and the claws of rats. The true darkness that lies beyond the material world may consume everything from the last falling coin of a robbed merchant’s purse to the first breath exhaled by a freshly born infant. Yet there are things born of the immaterial world that are, in and of themselves, intangible.

The printing of words creates books, but the meaning extracted when reading those words is intangible. It is not a physical thing. The same can be said of a song. The flesh of a body allows the movement of air, but the rearranging of these exhalations allows the creation of something greater than its origins. These are the things that the darkness has learned that it too can consume — and far more endlessly. Material things end. They are finite. However, as long as there are material things around the world, then the darkness may consume their infinite creations.

Men and women can be killed. However, as long as men and women continue to exist, the number of songs, stories, and screams in the world is infinite. The number of things that can be consumed by the darkness, by the representative of all that is less than one, is boundless.

— Screams reverberate around the darkness of the cathedral as shadows waver, ripple, and tear apart. The woven illusion of Sir Knight’s Schattenjagd breaks and rips like the seams of a garment stretched too far and too roughly by bulging, swelling flesh. Visions of a false reality blend with the dark cathedral, with segments of the illusionary forest and castle corridors merging with the stone structure. Church pews twist, rising into the air as trees sprout from the stones. The stained glass windows of the cathedral rattle from the howl, the scream that fills the air, and the colorful depictions dripping and melting as if they were made of ice on a summer’s day. The inner roof of the cathedral warps, shifting between patches of open sky and concealing ancient, regal brickwork. Flickering holy magic sparks in and out on the darkened upper balcony above, like manufacturing lanterns, stemming from the hands of dozens of priests and priestesses who lie laid out over banisters and railings, strewn over the stonework and gargoyles. Most are fully incapacitated, having lost their stamina to the individual illusions, which they were trapped in themselves.

In the midst of it all stands Sir Knight down below in his suit of armor, his large hands held out, wrestling with the grip of the Church’s soldier, Kaisersgrab, whose scream is the one breaking the spell and filling the empty night. Wild, cascading magical energy is streaming out of his body in all directions in bright, vivid streaks, whipping like uncontrolled tendrils against the walls of the cathedral, like the tentacles of a newborn kraken, furiously breaching its shell.

The unnatural scream shakes the walls, shakes the glass, and shakes the church bell high up in the midnight-tower, sending weak strokes of its gong out all around the city like the chirp of birdsong in an exploding warzone.

The man standing across from Sir Knight with outstretched arms, their palms locked as they press against one another, bulges and shakes, his legs losing footing as his flesh rips and breaks just the same as the fabric covering. Seams rip — both of flesh and fabric. His head writhes, his face twisting and mangling as the magic of his body rips out through from inside of him as he changes. His fingers, locked within the gaps between Sir Knight’s, press down so tightly from the pain alone that the thick metal begins to buckle, and the ends of his own fingers break from the intensity of his grip, surpassing his own mind’s filters for his body’s limits as his howl continues, froth dripping from his mouth.

“MONSTER!” screams the man through the froth, his teeth falling out of his mouth and clattering to the floor, blood oozing down his jaw as it cracks, his shoulders spasming.

“WOLF!” screams a voice from the top of the cathedral. Tendrils of energy rip and break through the ornate stonework, breaking banisters and walkways far, far away from the man as his uncontrolled magic runs amok. Several priests fall from the ledges or are hit by falling debris. “WOLF! EVACUATE!” yells the priest, grabbing a hold of the others near him as they run toward the upper doors.

— The doorways crash in as the whipping cascade stemming from Kaisersgrab breaks the stonework around them, sealing the exits.

An instant later, as deeply unusual as the sensation is, Sir Knight finds himself flying through the air. The giant crashes against a massive column, breaking through it. The stonework collapses, tumbling gargoyles fall, and the walkway above fails as a section of the cathedral is destroyed. Lanterns crash, shattering. Fire spreads, eating its way through the debris and through the questionably real trees that have begun to grow all around the cathedral.

The illusionary spell cast by Sir Knight mixes deeper with Kaisersgrab’s uncontrolled release, with the trees withering and blackening, their boughs turning sharp and cruel as they come to mimic the forest of Kaisersgrab’s childhood as the transformation completes.

Sir Knight rises back to his feet, pulling a priestess out from beneath a burning beam that had collapsed onto her. He sets her against the wall, looking back behind himself and staring at the monstrosity that crashes his way.

______________________________________

~[Acacia]~

Lycanthropy, the werewolf disease, is a very rare illness that can only be acquired in one of two ways. Either a person is born with it or a person catches it by being infected later on. The former is survivable, the latter is not.

If her own illness, the Consumption, causes a total blockage of her soul’s connection to magic, then Lycanthropy is something close to the opposite. Under specific conditions, a person’s seal, the barrier between their physical body and the spirit world, opens to an unbearable width. The full flow of the spirit world may enter the sufferer during these times, resulting in inhuman madness and a change of body. The flesh sunders, unable to contain this much raw power within itself. Bones break and snap, meat rips and pulls, and organs swell and burst over and over again as the sufferer grows in shape and size and becomes a body fully adapted to surviving this much raw magical power.

If a child is born with this illness, their body is still able to adapt and overcome it with luck. Most die, but some make it to their adult years, but only ever with great horror and pain, as it is likely that they, in their rages, will have killed and hurt everything around them throughout their lives. A child may only be born with this illness if their mother has it, either through being bitten before or during her term, or if she is herself a natural born lycanthrope.

In the former case, the mother will always die during childbirth. Babies born under such circumstances, if ever discovered, are killed immediately by the people for the safety of the whole community, if not by their own grieving families.

If an adult is infected with the illness, however, it is fully fatal. Their bodies did not have the chance in adolescence to grow to adapt to such unique circumstances, and once the first cascade begins, the first release of this wild magic brought on by either a rare moon or a special sense of terror, they are not able to withstand it. They change and transform, but incompletely and inhumanly. While a natural born lycanthrope becomes a werewolf, an infected one becomes an abomination. They become an incomprehensible sack of screaming teeth and oozing meat, totally lost in both sanity and grace in the throes of the transformation.

Until recently, lycanthropes have never had a kind fate. However, in the past decades, the Holy-Church has adopted a new, experimental program, taking these children from their families and raising them in confined, secretive compounds to become crusaders and paladins of the faith, known only as —

“— Grims,” finishes Acacia, looking at the master of the teahouse as she explains their emergency. The Vildt man sits on his side of the desk in his office with folded hands below his face, having been disturbed from his rest.

“Why have you come to me with this?” is the first thing that he asks in a troubled voice, looking out of the side of his eyes toward the window. “I sell tea, Miss Krone.” He rises to his feet. “In fact, you should leave. Immed -”

“- Mr. Tatze,” remarks Acacia, interrupting him. “Why do you think I am here?” she asks, placing her hands on the desk. She reaches down below her cloak, pulling out a satchel of coins and dropping it onto the desk. “Sell me some tea,” says Acacia, narrowing her eyes as a coin rolls out of the purse and toward the man, who stops it with a finger.

Behind them, the priestess and the boy who works here stand nervously and wait.

“You and I both know who will be blamed for this incident tomorrow,” says the girl, who wishes she was a real princess at night.

His hands slam against the table, the coins rattling. “THAT’S RIDICULOUS!” yells the vildt man, his ears shooting up as he glares at her in rage.

“Be that as it may, Mr. Tatze,” replies Acacia in a cool, collected tone. “This is the world that we find ourselves in,” she replies, sliding the purse his way to ease the pain.

For the scholars of the world, there is, of course, no connection. However, in the minds of the people, the connection between lycanthropy and the vildt as a species is as clear as the light of a new day. The vildt are already an admixture of animals and humanity as is. The mental leap from them to the half-beastly werewolf is not far at all. It has been common hearthlore for generations that lycanthropy comes from the vildt. It is one of the reasons humanity bears a quiet grudge against them. Wives’ tales say the illness comes from childbirth between a vildt and another species, like a human or an elf, which causes a catastrophic malfunction in the body down the line of birth as the animal mixes into the blood.

The apparent connection is so simple that it simply cannot be dismissed in the eyes of the broad public, no matter what any academy of the magical sciences has to say about it.

A werewolf running amok in the city will be blamed on the vildt. After the failure of the city-guard last time, during the enemy attack and attempt to kidnap her, they will never admit that an outside threat had entered their watched walls a second time. The city-guard and the politicians of the region will support the anti-vildt narrative of the general populace to save their own skins.

Tatze’s fingernails scratch against the wood of the table as he grits his teeth. “What do you need?” asks the representative, who has a very difficult line of work for someone in a teahouse.

____________________________________________

~ [The Cathedral] ~

The greatsword cuts through the air, slicing through the space where Kaisersgrab was in the second he swung the weapon in the same instant he had stuffed the priestess into his cloak for safe-keeping. His helmet tracks upward, looking at the creature that has lept up into the air above the intangible blade and past its long arc, hurtling toward him.

Sir Knight’s free hand barely shoots out in time in something akin to a fist that slams into the arc of the monster. Kaisersgrab’s body has changed; it’s become a wretched mess of sinew and teeth, like someone had pierced a wolf below its jaw with a meathook and yanked it outward. His legs have broken backward at the knees, the muscle and sinew all over his body becoming thick and tense as overflowing ambient magic pours out of his mouth, ears, and gaping wounds. Teeth press themselves through his arm, piercing the dark metal. A clawed, gnarled hand presses against his helmet.

— A second later, his gauntlet comes free, coarsely ripping off its socketing.

(Sir Knight) has used: [Total Entropy]

The air around him freezes, turning into a full void, and the colors of everything within the space invert.

A shadowy tendril presses out of the broken wrist, slithering out an awkward distance and into the severed gauntlet that is held in the mouth of the time-stopped werewolf. The fingers spasm, twitching.

The spell fades, and the duration of the effect runs out.

In the same second as Kaisersgrab’s head yanks to the left, Sir Knight pulls his newly reconnected hand to the right. His other arm, having let go of the greatsword already, clutches the fur on Kaisersgrab’s torso, and a second later he’s heaved the werewolf over his head, slamming it down into the stones beside him.

— If only Junis wasn’t trapped inside of his cloak right now, he’d just throw Kaisersgrab in there, but…

The stones crack, the brickwork shattering from the impact that presses down into the fractured masonry. Sir Knight’s disconnected hand, hanging down lower than the other on a thread of shadow, grabs the hilt of his greatsword just in time as Kaisersgrab buckles his legs, his dense, strong legs kicking together once at Sir Knight with sharply clawed feet.

The strike hits him square in the chest, and Sir Knight slides back over the floor, his long, black cloak billowing before him from the momentum of the strike as Kaisersgrab spins around, jumping back up to his feet with inhuman strength and speed.

The wolf snarls, froth and drool leaking from his twisted maw.

Kaisersgrab’s head turns, looking to the side, toward a group of priests and priestesses who have been trying to escape the cathedral in the midst of their fight.

Lycanthropy is a maddening disease. Those who are in its throes simply cannot differentiate. They are like a dog in a chicken’s coop; it will kill, eat, and hunt far more than it could ever want in one sitting, if only because that is what its instincts tell it to do.

“Open the door, OPEN THE DOOR!” yells a priestess, spinning around and hitting her colleague, who had been unsuccessfully trying to do just that for the last minute, as the monstrosity barrels their way, fangs and teeth bared as it lumbers indiscriminately at the next thing that has taken its attention.

Sir Knight is doing alright for himself, what with not actually having a physical body and all. However, normal humans don’t stand a chance against a werewolf. They won’t even have time to cast a spell, and even if they throw a punch, it’ll be like a baby hitting a giant.

She screams, covering herself.

(Sir Knight) has used: [Shadow Work]

As the werewolf lunges, all around the cathedral, shadows press into the broken sculptures, the shattered gargoyles who had fallen from their perches and collapse onto Kaisersgrab.

Sir Knight, having rushed over in that instant, hoists the grabbing priestess into the air and shoves her into his cloak before grabbing her friend by the door. “Wait, wait! Don’t kill me, I’m just -!”

— And in he goes.

The stones erupt behind him. Sir Knight crashes into the door, breaking through it and rolling out into the street, pieces of his deeply dented and scratched armor falling off of him from the impact. Metal rattles in all directions, colliding against the walls around him in the side street next to the cathedral.

His shadowy tendrils reach out, pulling it all back together as he rises back up to his feet, watching the door of the cathedral and readying himself as a hulking, musclebound silhouette makes itself seen beyond the smoke inside the building as it comes his way.

He looks out to the side, down into the city, where he senses Acacia.

____________________________

~ [Junis] ~

“Oh… please…” Junis lifts a hand, smiling a tensely nervous smile. “Please stop screaming,” says the blue haired elf, as several priests and priestesses find themselves in quite a state of panic. She’s not really sure what’s going on ‘outside’, but they seem to be quite worked up.

— Or maybe they’re worked up because of where they are now?

Quietly, the elf blinks and watches them struggle to move. They all just float around the area, hastily yelling in panic at one another and ignoring her entirely.

She sighs, looking down at the book on her lap that her hands are resting on, and taps her fingers as people start praying around her. Presumably, they think that they’ve been sent to the underworld.

Junis shrugs.

Who is she to say they’re wrong? Maybe they have been.

She lifts her gaze, looking at the crying priestess above her.

“It’s very unprofessional to cry at work,” says Junis, looking at the distraught stranger. “At least wait until you get home like the rest of us.”