13-23. Martyrs
The battle was one-sided.
It was also short-lived, with the green-armored force overwhelming the others. They did so mercilessly, efficiently, and quickly. The battle was over in less than thirty minutes, and Elijah watched as the victors swept through the fallen, looting anything of value. When they’d finished, there was nothing left but naked corpses.
Those were left where they’d fallen.
Not long after, the surviving army marched away. Pointedly, they had taken no prisoners. No one had surrendered. Instead, they’d fought to the very end. That told Elijah all he needed to know about the conflict. To them, giving up just wasn’t an option. Maybe it was because they were all true believers in their cause – whatever it might be – but Elijah suspected that something far more fundamental was at play.
They hadn’t surrendered, even when their defeat was assured, because they expected no quarter. If you’re going to be slaughtered anyway, then the only option is to continue the fight.
He watched as the army – maybe five-thousand strong – disappeared over the horizon. A few minutes later, when he was certain it was safe, he descended from the low cliff where he’d perched and headed toward the battlefield.
Or graveyard, now.
It didn’t take him long to cover the mile or so between him and the site of so much slaughter. Maybe a few minutes, and only that long because he found himself hesitating. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to walk among the bodies. But he needed information, so he pushed forward.
The smell hit him well before he arrived. It was both familiar and disgusting. The unmistakable odor of blood was the most pervasive, but there were a host of other scents that came with such a slaughter. Evacuated bowels. Body odor that hadn’t had a chance to fade. Even an oddly sweet aroma he recognized as a perfume popular in Dravkein.
Unfortunately, his initial impressions were accurate. There were no survivors. Each man or woman bore a multitude of wounds, but every single combatant had their throats slit. The other army had taken no chances on that front. They wanted to ensure their enemies were dead.
As Elijah walked among them, inspecting what he could examine, he was aware that he didn’t have the whole story. For all he knew, the fallen were all criminals. Dangerous people who’d faced the consequences of their deplorable actions. The green-armored army could have been entirely justified.
And yet, he sympathized with the dead, his natural empathy marking them as victims of the oppressive regime he knew ruled Ithalon.
Every single body was deformed in some way, though most lacked the more overt mutations Elijah had seen with the farmers back in Dravkein. Instead, these people were more like those who’d lived in the city proper. Or the hunters.
As expected, the victors left nothing but bodies behind. No armor. No weapons. Not even scraps of clothing. It was as if they couldn’t stomach the idea of leaving their foes a sliver of dignity, even in death.
Before Elijah realized what he was doing, he’d begun to gather the bodies. He even counted them. Two-thousand, three-hundred, and twenty-eight. That was how many had died – at least on their side. The other side had taken their dead with them.
After stacking the bodies, Elijah just stood there, staring at them. He had no idea what had prompted the battle. He was no pacificist who believed that violence was never the answer. Often, it was the only solution. And for all he knew, this was one of those times. Perhaps all these people were murderers. Thieves. Vicious bandits.
But when faced with more than two thousand corpses, he couldn’t help but feel that it was pointless.
He also couldn’t just leave them there. Subconsciously, he’d always known what he was going to do. It just took until that moment for him to accept it. Once he did, he started digging. The ground was rocky and hard, but once Elijah shifted into his dragon form, the turf parted easily before his claws.
It didn’t take him long to dig a mass grave.
Nor was it difficult to get the bodies in place or cover them with rocks and dirt.
It was the work of an hour or two, but to him, it meant so much more than that simple time investment. Once he’d finished, he stood there for more than a half hour until, at last, he decided to move on.
He didn’t follow the army, though. Instead, he went in the other direction, following the trail left by two thousand-plus people. It went on for about thirty miles until he saw a familiar sight.
Nine stone rings encircled the town. It was much smaller than Dravkein. Maybe large enough to host ten thousand people. Fifteen, if they really packed themselves inside. But the circles were inactive, and after only a little inspection, Elijah established that the settlement was entirely abandoned.
It took him a while to find another trail leading off in the other direction. Someone had taken great pains to conceal it, but Elijah could feel the subtle shimmer of life tracing a ribbon through the otherwise desolate landscape. It was old, though. Maybe a few months, judging by how weak the signature was.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
After only a little consideration, Elijah compiled the bits of information into a reasonable idea of what had happened. The residents of the settlement had known the green army was coming, and the bulk of the population had abandoned the town.
Meanwhile, they left a few brave warriors behind. Maybe in an effort to placate their enemies’ bloodlust. Or to trick them. Or perhaps it was just an effort to slow them down so the others could escape.
In short, they knew they were going to lose. Likely, they knew they were all going to die.
It was easy to see them as martyrs.
If it had been Elijah, he might have built some defenses and forced them to besiege the town. But there was probably a reason they hadn’t taken that route. Maybe they were incapable of building walls that could stop the other army. Perhaps they didn’t have time to do it properly. Whatever the case, they had chosen to meet them on the field of battle rather than force a siege.
And they’d died.
Likely in the hopes that they were giving the others a chance to survive.
Elijah was well aware that his imagination was doing a lot of heavy lifting when it came to his interpretation of what had happened. But it wasn’t unsupported, either. He chose to believe his first impressions.
After scouring the settlement, he found that it had been picked clean of supplies. The infrastructure suggested it was much newer and far less advanced than Dravkein, though. The best example of that was the slaughter yard, which sported similar – though depowered – cleansing circles, but otherwise, it was no more than a wide, open area stained with the blood of countless monsters.
Once he realized that there was nothing more to be found in the abandoned town, Elijah headed back the way he’d come. He barely hesitated at the grave site, mostly because the local monsters had already converged on the area. A few had even started to dig for the bodies they sensed.
Elijah’s instincts told him to kill them all, to protect the sanctity of the grave. And yet, he knew it would do no good. Just like his efforts to bury the dead. Even the echoes of life within them attracted the ever-hungry monsters, and they wouldn’t stop until they consumed everything. Then, they’d fight one another in an endless cycle of violence and consumption.
One day, everything would be gone, and only a single monster living on a barren rock would remain. Such was the nature of the abyss.
Under the Guise of the Stalker, Elijah passed them by. A few perked up when he drew too close, but his stealth skill was effective enough to prevent true detection. None of them were strong enough to break through.
He left them behind, his thoughts a dark cloud.
Following the army’s trail was easy enough. They made no efforts to conceal the evidence of their passage, so Elijah made good time in his pursuit. Within a day, he caught up to their campsite.
They’d deployed some defenses – mostly a nine-ring ritual circle meant to keep the corruption at bay – but for the most part, they looked just like any other marching army he’d ever seen. The neat rows of green tents made for the most obvious characteristic, but Elijah also noticed the cooking fires, well-placed guards, and at the center, a much larger command tent. It was trimmed in gold.
Elijah chose not to attempt an infiltration. Doing so simply wouldn’t make much sense. There was very little he could learn inside that he didn’t already know, and if he was caught, there was a good chance they’d peg him as hostile. He couldn’t let his first meeting with them devolve into a fight.
Not when his primary goal was to follow them to Ithalon. Otherwise, it might take him weeks more to find the place.
So, he retreated a few miles, deployed his own tent, and settled down to rest. He couldn’t sleep, though. Not with visions of the dead dancing in his thoughts. Instead, he showered. He ate. And he focused on two tasks.
The first was cultivation. He’d just taken a step forward with his body, but that was easy compared to the next task – his soul. Even though he’d progressed to the fifth stage with his body, he could still unequivocally say that his soul was the more powerful of the two. That was due to three major factors. One was his first specialization, which he believed had laid a foundation for all future specializations.
The second came from when he'd tried to make direct contact with the World Tree. Doing so had nearly killed him, but when he’d survived, it had pushed his cultivation into an entirely different threshold of power.
Finally, the power of his soul came from the clarity of the imagery he’d forced upon it. The tree that was his cultivation system leaned hard on the iconography of the branches he’d developed with his Mantle of Authority. And with that came power.
As he’d been told, the tiers of cultivation – at least in terms of expressed power – were a lot more loosely defined than other aspects of the system. Two people could technically reach the same tier, but one could be far more powerful than the other. That was not always the case. In fact, most of the time, they were roughly the same.
But Elijah had always been an exception when it came to cultivation. He’d developed a Mantle of Authority far earlier than most. So early, in fact, that even Kirlissa had been surprised by the achievement.
With that extra power came a cost, though. It made it much more difficult for him to progress.
That was why he’d chosen to take the next step with his body, which had already been prepared by constant use of his homemade soap and the punishment he’d routinely endured. Now, though, he wanted to move forward with his soul, which he believed would give him a much better chance of survival.
So, he focused on preparing himself for the next step, which involved quite a lot of planning. It was easy to imagine his tree as the antithesis of the abyss. The one light of life amidst so much desolation. He channeled that into his plans, into the heart of what he wanted to accomplish with the next evolution of his soul.
The other task he chose to concentrate on was similar but wholly different. During the Labyrinth of Dead Gods, he’d leaned on Hu Shui’s and Benedict’s expertise when it came to runic formations and ritual circles. However, that didn’t mean he was entirely idle.
Throughout the Primal Realm, he had paid attention. He’d taken notes. He’d learned.
And now, he had the chance – and the imperative – to truly digest all that information. Perhaps he’d never reach their levels of expertise, but that wasn’t the goal. He needed to fill the gap in his knowledge and in doing so, hopefully figure out a way to use it to escape the abyss.
So the night went, and though he didn’t make much real progress, it was a nice step in the right direction.
After a few hours, Elijah left his tent, packed it away, and continued his stealthy pursuit of the army. That was how he spent the next two weeks until, at last, Ithalon came into view.
He already knew what to expect, but Zek’s descriptions did not do the city justice. Not at all.