Mortis

 “Advance!”

The Royal Army of Vinos lurched unsteadily into motion with a great groan of metal and the stamp of boot leather on hard baked earth. Noble knights, peasant pikemen and mercenary men-at-arms marched across the dry fields, preparing to enter battle while ignoring the hooded pariahs in their midst. The low, unearthly chant driving many of the prince’s soldiers to hastily make the sign of the Almighty Sun across their chests for fear of being tainted. Whole battalions kept their distance from the dark figures as the opposing battle lines closed. For none wished to fight alongside the Falhorne. Only the infamous “Corpse Company” of the Royal Gendarmerie stayed close to the hooded warriors and they were dead men anyway. Dead men overseeing heretics on the wrong side of a holy war.

One heretic stood out from the others. His grizzled face cloaked in shadow above black plate armor. His eyes of blank white chalk staring into the opposing mass of Templars, feudal levies and warrior priests, steadily approaching across the barren stretch of farmland. Vitus Bastarnae, praetor of the Falhorne of Vinos, was again defying the Church, along with the bounty that the Inquisition had placed on his head. Unlike the thousands of reluctant soldiers in the prince’s ranks that day, he had no fear for his immortal soul. Fear meant nothing to the dead.

The morning sun had finally pierced the towering grey clouds, yet the praetor saw nothing but darkness as he spoke the final words of the chant and tightened the grip on his halberd. Ashen figures stalked forward in the shadow of a black mountain. He heard nothing but the moaning of a spectral legion. All was empty as the hand of death descended and the corpse-state claimed him, its voiceless call washing over the ranks of the initiated as the veil grew thin.

Mortis.

Vitus felt the Black King’s summons. Felt it resonate in the minds of his apprentices. Tagus on his left and Piso on his right. He began to move. Nineteen others following in his wake, wicked polearms glinting with a deathly glow. Drawn forward by that which could not be foresworn. 

Now he was running. They were all running. Black robes fluttering like carrion birds in flight. Completely subsumed in Mortis, Vitus was barely conscious of the half-seen shadows moving at his side or the crack of incoming arquebus shots left and right. He was a fleet-footed corpse alongside other fleet-footed corpses, dim shadow-wreathed eyes focused solely on what lay ahead. Everything paled into insignificance: the low-hanging black clouds, the gunfire, the screams of the dying, the war cries, and the clash of steel. The world was closing in, everything blurring, merging, melding into a single image of a descending blade – he was in Barbarus. 

Flashing, spasming images of formless clashing colors raced through an endless grey void. Ahead were white pulsating things, shrieking and writhing toward him as through murky water choked with dust. In this place between worlds, the only thing with a hard-edge, the only thing to have any solid definition at all, was the blade of his great halberd, that blazed with a sickly yellow flame yet gave off no heat. He could not see his hands, they had been swallowed into nothingness, but his weapon leapt forward at the white things like it possessed a will of its own. 

One of the writhing forms noiselessly exploded under the impact, shooting rays of bright light in all directions that burned and dissipated into the void. The halberd that was no longer his own crashed into a second white form and impaled a third, directed by forces beyond life and death. He had become a weapon of the gods.

Excerpted from “Falhorne:The World is Burning” by Tristan Dineen, All Rights Reserved