Prologue

    

A hollow crunch followed every step, vines breaking like old bones.
   “It’s time to head back to the garrison,” Hendrick insisted as the three of them passed the shriveled husk of a long-dead tree. “The Blightlands aren’t safe after dark.”
   “Surely a man as well-armed as yourself isn’t afraid of a few vines and dead trees?” Hadrian asked with just the hint of a smile. 
   The two older men droned on with their chatter while Tora was much more concerned with where she was placing her feet than engaging in the conversation.     
   Hendrick scowled at the Archon, not amused by the goading. Commander Hendrick was an old templar. Forty years in service to the Church had sharpened his instincts for death and treachery. But in the Blightlands, any priest, including an Archon, should not be this unprotected as dusk approached. 
   The blight was as corrupt as it was mysterious. None knew of its origins or how the dead vines spread and consumed all living matter if not driven back by fire. 
    “Your Holiness, I am charged to protect you on this expedition and return you safely to Ember’s Reach, and that’s exactly what I intend to do,” Hendrick said as he walked up to the Archon. 
   “Merciful Maker,” Hadrian cursed as he looked up to Hendrick. “We’ve been cooped up in that flea-ridden city for years. Just when we get out, you want to crawl back to safety.” 
   The grin on Hadrian’s face slowly faded.
   “Besides, when I call the demons…” A crooked smile touched his lips. “They answer.”
   At the mention of the demons, Tora’s eyes shifted to the lantern held at the side of the Archon. Black fumes drifted out of the lantern between darksteel bars. At the lantern’s core, a jagged stone of darkened crystal hung weightless in the air, emitting a faint light. Only a malevolent, muted flame swirled and writhed within the stone itself, for this lantern was no source of light but a weapon of unspeakable power: a shadow-lantern.
   Redeemer. Tora thought, holding the lantern’s name in her mind for only a moment before pressing on through the vines.
   “Perhaps you can tell us what you are looking for, Your Holiness?” Hendrick asked. “We can help you find it. Tora’s eyes are as sharp as a hawk!” 
   Tora knew they would drag her into this eventually. 
   “The priests always told me the blight was the demon’s last curse on the land. There would be no cure until all the Darken fragments had been found,” she said, her eyes scanning the ground around them.     
   She’d heard the story of the blight and the prophecy of The Gathering many times in the temples growing up. Listening to a priest read from the ancient texts had been a small price to pay for a bowl of warm stew. 
   Earlier that morning, the three of them had made their way into the vast nothingness of the Blightlands until the Archon wished to dismount and investigate on foot. They had been walking in ever-widening circles from where they left the horses, Hadrian’s eyes fixed on the vine-covered ground.
   “This is not the demon’s doing, Captain,” Hadrian sneered. “The Maker’s fire does not yield to mere superstitions. It burns with purpose, and you, in your ignorance, dare accuse forces beyond your understanding.” 
   The Archon’s voice echoed over the rolling hills before them, the only sound of life for hundreds of miles in that direction. 
   Tora turned toward her commander as the insult hung in the air between them. Hendrick gave a small motion of his hand.
   Do not respond.
   “We have a long ride back to camp, Your Holiness.” Hendrick pointed out. “We will barely make it back by midnight at this point.”
   Hadrian squinted at the sky with irritation. 
   Unlike herself, who fell into the Order by sheer luck, Hendrik was born into the Order of the Templar. He’d risen through their ranks over forty years and was now the personal guard to an Archon, wielder of a shadow-lantern. Tora considered the irony of the circumstance. Hendrick believed, as many young templar do, that becoming Commander would grant him unquestioned authority. However, he found himself trailing after the Archon, who seemed more guided by the fickle winds of fate than by any concept of reason. 
   Yet, there was more to it than that. Under Hendrick’s wounded pride and the cowl of his white hood, there was something else brewing within him. It was an all too familiar emotion to Tora, but something she had never seen in Hendrick: a nervous tension that came dangerously close to fear.  
   For six years, Tora had been on orders to the Blightlands. Every two years, a new Archon would take his turn doing his best to push back the sickness that had infested what was once the East Wood. She remembered her first time on an expedition, nearly soiling her armor at the slightest sound or movement from her company. She remembered seeing, for the first time, the remains of trees hanging at odd angles, the endless skeletons of forest creatures littering the land, and the dried, too-smooth depressions where lakes once stood—vines covering it all.
   She was a veteran now of more than a hundred expeditions into the blight and had seen the Archon’s cycle three times. Unlike many of her fellow templar, who couldn’t wait for their tour at the Blightlands to be over, Tora welcomed the sound of the endless vines crunching beneath her feet and the smell of dead vegetation that infested the land. Oddly enough, she felt at home within the blight. 
   Until today. 
   Until that look of fear in her commander’s eyes, she could feel it too. The feeling of something creeping at the edge of their vision, but never able to catch a glimpse of it. The feeling gained from more than half a decade in the Blightlands and a lifetime of survival told her that something was out there. Something was hunting them. As much as the Archon was right about the safety they enjoyed with the lantern at hand, Hendrick’s fear made Tora’s skin crawl. She very much wanted to trek back to the horses and ride hard to the safety of the garrison and the warmth of her bed, but it was not her place to share feelings with the Archon, especially not an Archon like this one. 
   As much as His Holiness quipped with the commander, the whole of the Kingdom knew that he had a hot temper and lacked patience. Hadrian Wakenreth was a decrepit old man with stark white hair ringing his otherwise bald head and deep wrinkles accenting his face. He appeared to be nothing but skin and bone, but his lantern lent him divine endurance and long life, for he had been an Archon and the bearer of Redeemer for more than 120 years. He wore white robes with a dark fur mantle fastened to the collar. Ancient runes embroidered in golden thread covered every inch of his attire, and the chains around his waist were made of darksteel to match the lantern. 
   “To think that only 40 years ago this was as lush a forest as Avondale,” Hadrian said as he knelt down to feel one of the crisscrossed vines blanketing the ground. “It spreads without thought or care, choking the life out of everything it touches. But why?”
   “Commander Hendrick, if you were the blight, what would be your mission?” the Archon asked. 
   Hendrick’s face went slack in surprise. 
   Never would a question like that cross Tora’s mind. Questioning a plant’s motives was insane! 
   “I’m not quite sure what you mean, Your Holiness.” Hendrick kept his tone steady, though the edge of incredulity pressed hard against his voice.
   “Perhaps we have been making the wrong assumptions about the blight,” Hadrian pondered, as he paused to look over the landscape once again. “We think it’s just some plant, spreading, growing, multiplying, as all plants do. But what if it was not by mere chance that the blight erupted here? What if it were placed here?”
   Tora considered the Archon’s hypothesis, squinting hard, trying to force her brain to process the information faster. Her head started spinning, and she thought perhaps this line of reasoning might be beyond her. 
   “I wouldn’t know, Your Holiness. The blight began to spread when I was just a boy.” Hendrick said, taking the lead ahead of the pondering Archon. 
   Hadrian shot a questioning glance in Tora’s direction, eyes narrowed. 
   “I wasn’t even born yet!” Tora defended herself, throwing her hands in the air. 
   “Commander, perhaps you could requisition some older maps when we return to the garrison this evening,” Hadrian called after Hendrick, who had walked over the next hill and was now out of sight. 
   No answer. 
   “Commander?” Hadrian called again, his words echoing once again over the Blightlands. Still, there was no answer. 
   Hadrian shuffled forward through the vines while Tora scrambled over the hill, drawing her sword as she went. 
    Tora crested the hill first. Hendrick stood as a man turned to iron, eyes fixed on the sight before him: a growth of twisted vines and branches shooting up towards the sky, and at its top a blossom of sorts. The petals were colored in dingy shades of green and red, but the shape was unmistakable. It looked like a flower—a blight-flower. The plant was nearly eight feet tall, and below its dingy plumage was a bulbous growth. Its skin was dried and decayed like the vines that fed into its base. 
   Tora had never seen another like it. Stowing her sword, she came to stand beside her commander, struggling to catch her breath. Behind her, the Archon’s chains dragged across the ground with their familiar sound until, all at once, they fell silent.  
   Tora looked up. 
   “Flames take me…” she whispered, the words nearly swallowed by panic. “What… what in damnation is that?” 
   “Tora,” Hendrick said, his voice low and measured, “in all your years out here… have you ever seen anything like this?”
   His eyes never left the growth.
   “I have never seen anything like this in m-”
   “Captain, fetch my journal. A new finding like this must be documented!” Hadrian barked, cutting Tora off before she could finish. 
   Tora slung her pack to the ground. Questions flooded her mind, questions that either offered no immediate answers or the answers couldn’t possibly be true. She found the leather-bound journal, the charcoal pencil lashed to its cover, and tossed it to the Archon. The look on his face when he caught it let Tora know that he was less than amused at the expedited delivery. She looked back at her commander, who had mustered his courage and was now mere feet from the strange flower. 
    Tora ran to join Hendrick. 
   “What could it be?” Hendrick asked, more to himself than anyone else. 
   “I don’t know,” Tora responded. “But we were tasked with pushing back the blight using any means necessary, so…” 
   Tora unsheathed her sword, sending the ringing sound of steel scraping against steel throughout the rolling hills. 
   The sound brought Hendrick out of his stupor, and instinctively his hand reached for his own weapon.
   Tora shot Hendrick a smirk as she spun the sword’s pommel in her hands. She faced the flower and brought the sword above her head with both arms, readying a powerful slash. 
   “Not so fast,” Hadrian said, shattering Tora’s hope of dealing the death blow to the blight-flower. “If you have never seen this plant’s equal, then I have no doubt that this is, in fact, quite novel. Others will want to hear about this, and we can’t have you soldiers going around hacking to bits what could be the first breakthrough we’ve had in forty years!” 
   Tora suppressed the urge to roll her eyes at the old man’s comment. She lowered her sword slowly, keeping it in her hands just in case. Fear was all but radiating from Hendrick as she stood beside him. 
   “At least we’ll be famous, yeah?” Tora asked, with a comforting smile.
   Hendrick responded with a nervous smile of his own before his eyes went back to the flowering pod, scanning every inch of it. 
   “I must draw every detail of this plant and annotate the size, smell, and texture of each part,” the Archon said, now standing with them, his head nodding back and forth between his journal and the plant. 
   Tora inched closer to the growth, her courage returning as time passed. She stepped forward, and an acrid smell burned her nose, nearly making her retch. She recoiled at first, but against her better judgment, her curiosity won the moment and gave it another whiff. 
   “Whoa! Commander, you’ve got to smell this thing!” Tora yelled, her smile now beaming from ear to ear. 
   Hendrick shot Tora a look that said that he was in no mood for teasing. Tora dropped the smile. 
   “Sulfur, definitely sulfur,” the Archon said, tilting his nose in the air. “Captain, be sure not to breathe in too much of that while you’re so close.” 
   Tora waved her hand dismissively at the aged man, and her eyes went back to the bulbous leafy shell. The texture of the vines in the Blightlands was something that she had felt a thousand times before, but this pod was different. 
   How could something grow out of death and decay? Tora thought.
   She considered the question as she carefully moved around the plant, braving the noxious, sulfurous fumes that filled the air. Suddenly, a low, unsettling gurgle rose from deep within the plant. 
   For the moment, she dared not breathe, hoping it was her overactive imagination getting the best of her. In the red-orange glow of the setting sun, her ears open and her eyes wide, a tiny movement caught her eye—the pod had just pulsed. 
   Tora’s eyes went wide against the fading light, praying she had imagined it. Air spilled from her nostrils as the tightness in her chest eased, hope creeping back in small, dangerous measure.
   Then it came again. A sharp, unmistakable pulse.
   Another.
   And another.
   Tora’s blood ran cold as sound followed movement, a low and muted lub-dub…lub-dub…lub-dub.
   With a curse on her lips, Tora threw herself at the pod, slashing again and again in a frenzy of steel. The thing was far tougher than it looked, each strike glancing off with bone-rattling force, but she pressed harder. Black ooze spilled from every strike. Within moments, flecks of it speckled Tora’s face and armor. Chunks of the bulb tore free and scattered across the ground, but the plant refused to fall. 
   Tora’s sword blurred through another vicious arc, then the world vanished beneath her as Hendrick slammed into her and drove them both to the ground. It was only then that she realized that she had been screaming during her attack on the blight-flower.   
   “What did I say, Captain?” Hadrian shouted as he shuffled his way around the plant. “This is a novel finding of the blight, that could give us further understanding into the nature of this disease! You have maimed or possibly killed this specimen. Your actions will be reflected in my report!” 
   “It pulsed!” Tora screamed back, dragging herself out from underneath Hendrick and stood face to face with the Archon. “Whatever that thing is, it has a heartbeat! I heard it!  If this thing grows out of the land of death, then it must be destroyed!” 
   Hendrick placed his hand on Tora’s shoulder and pulled her back an inch. “Tora, get a hold of yourself,” he ordered. 
   Tora shrugged Hendrick’s hand from her shoulder and stomped away, swinging her sword at the vines at her feet.  
   “Your Holiness,” Hendrick said as he walked closer to Hadrian. “Please don’t hold this against Tora. She has been in these lands for many years, and her nerves can get the best of her.” 
   “Yes, but what are we to do with…” Hadrian’s voice trailed off as they both turned to hear the wet sucking sound of something falling out of the pod. A clump of bone, hair, flesh, and black ooze fell to the ground and started to writhe and pulse amongst the vines. 
   “Demon!” Hendrick screamed as he jumped back and drew his sword in one sudden motion. 
   Tora ran to rejoin her commander. The black mass on the ground writhed and squirmed as Hendrick leveled his sword. To her horror, bones snapped together within the ooze to form legs, then a torso. The ooze and masses of clotted hair streamed along its frame, bringing more bones to form arms, hands, and finally a skull. Pointed fangs accented the jawline of the beast that had grown to nearly five feet as the ooze began to solidify on its skeletal frame. The vines around its feet suddenly came to life and grew up into the creature, creating bulky muscle groups on the beast’s body. 
   Tora’s eyes grew ever wider as she witnessed the unnatural and unspeakable transformation of the creature. Her mind raced, trying to force her arms to move or her feet to run, but she couldn’t. She was paralyzed with fear as it suddenly opened its eyes. Two shining black pools of emptiness. Standing between the remains of the blight-flower and the three of them was a demon. Nearly as tall as Tora and powerfully built with viney skin that looked as hard as oak.
   It took a step. 
   The vines that fed into its feet crunched and shattered as it ripped itself from the ground. 
   The breath went out of Hadrian in a long hiss.
   “Stay back!” Hendrick yelled; the sound of his voice shattered the fear that had gripped Tora’s heart. Hendrick reached up with his free hand to slide the hood of his white cloak from his head to ready himself for battle. Tora did the same, revealing her bright blonde hair. The last sliver of the sun was barely visible on the horizon, but it felt dark, much darker than it should be. 
   The demon took another crunching step forward. Tora looked down, seeing the sleek and slender claws that tipped each of its four-digit hands, and brought her sword up in a two-handed grip. 
   “This way, demon,” she snarled, moving to the right. Tora stole a quick look at Hendrick, who was likewise circling to his left. “Yes, look at me.” 
With a deep breath to settle her nerves, she lifted her sword above her head defiantly, courageously. This is what she had been trained for.
   The demon lunged at Tora, screaming a bestial howl. 
   She met its attack with steel, her blade catching the claws in two quick and fluid parries. When her sword hit the creature’s skin, it was met with a high-pitched ringing like steel upon stone. Tora checked another series of attacks, and then another, before falling back a step. Another flurry of blows and she fell back again, but at that time Hendrick’s sword came down hard on the demon’s shoulder from behind. Tora’s plan had worked, a simple flanking maneuver that even the most junior soldier was taught. But the beast did not fall with what should have been a killing blow. 
   The demon whirled around and jumped on Hendrick, the force of the collision knocking him to the ground. It sat atop the commander, his arms and legs thrashing, as its claws scraped against the armor. Blood and pieces of metal went flying in a matter of seconds. 
   Screams. Dreadful screams. 
   Tora rushed to aid her commander when a beam of crackling red energy impacted the demon on its side, sending it flying from the wounded Hendrick. The beast tumbled along the ground before it found its balance and started scurrying for cover on all fours. The crackling beam still chasing after the demon, Tora traced it back to its source, to where the Archon was standing on the bank of the hill, lantern extended before him, unleashing its terrible power. 
   The beam cut back and forth across the vines, igniting everything it touched as Tora jumped on the motionless body of Hendrick, trying to protect him from the flame blast. She turned her head to find the Archon’s prey. The demon had been hit twice along its body, two smoldering cuts through the vine-flesh. A third hit finally dropped it to the ground atop the next hill. 
   Hadrian extinguished Redeemer and walked down the hill towards the fallen demon.
   Tora propped herself up to see the damage done to her commander. His face had three deep and bloodied cuts running across it. They could be fixed. He wouldn’t die from those. But a wound on his neck was life-threatening. Tora put her hand on the neck wound and turned her head to find the Archon. 
   “Blessed be the wicked, who are cleansed by my hand,” Hadrian said as he approached the fallen but still moving foe. His voice was calm as he spoke in a measured, rehearsed cadence. “Blessed be the righteous, who will stand in eternal flame,” he continued. “And blessed be the Cleansing Fire who rewards the faithful.” 
   The Cleansing Rites. 
   The Archon stood over the demon, which was thrashing and gritting its fanged teeth in pain. 
   Hadrian held his lantern over the demon and said calmly, “You are cleansed.” 
   Flames erupted out of the bottom of the lantern, followed by an impact on the ground that Tora could feel in her chest. The demon was silent. Its body stopped moving. 
   In the silence, Tora leaned her head on Hendrick’s breastplate to listen for a heartbeat. It was there, but weak. She picked herself off the ground and stumbled to the Archon, still standing over the demon. 
   “Your Holiness, Hendrick needs to be sealed! He’s losing too much blood.” Tora said, trying her hardest to suppress a tremble in her voice and hoping that the cauterization would preserve Hendrick’s life.
   The Archon stood atop the ridge, unmoving. 
   “Hadrian!” Tora yelled, no longer caring for decorum. 
   Silence.
   Stillness. 
   Tora sheathed her sword as she stomped over to the old man and, for the first time, realized just how exhausted she was. She placed her hand on his shoulder to shake him out of whatever shock had claimed his wits. 
   “What is wrong with you!” Tora yelled, and then she saw them. 
   In the dying light of the sun were the blossoms of more blight-flowers, hundreds of them. The closest were twenty feet down the next hill. The dingy flower petals shook as the bulbs pulsed beneath them. Whatever hope Tora had allowed back into her heart in the moments since the demon’s passing was now extinguished, forever gone, as she knew that she would die that day. 
   Hadrian retrieved the journal from his darksteel chain belt and pressed it into Tora’s hands. “Take it and leave this place.”
   Tora stood there stunned, looking over the mass of blight-flowers, some of them now starting to crack open, spilling their black ooze on the ground.
   “Leave!” Hadrian shouted as he pushed her back. 
   No response was needed, as Tora ran back the way they had come. 
   Past the body of Hendrick. 
   Past the remains of the blight-flower. 
   She sprinted across the dead earth, boots crushing vines underfoot, until a fierce glow exploded behind her, washing the blackened hills in light and setting the night sky ablaze. She slowed just enough to glance over her shoulder and saw a crimson beam spear into the heavens. Hadrian had started summoning his own demons to come fight for him.