Through all the chaos, the Queen remained solemn, regal and terrifyingly noble. She did not gloat. She did not roar. She simply continued, her body unfolding with slow, terrifying grace. Wrath had no need for words when pain was the language she sang.
By the ti the battlefield had fallen still again, nearly two dozen knights lay broken across the soil. A few were still alive, but none would rise soon. The healers behind them cowered behind the broken fragnts of their wards, clutching relics that no longer responded to their touch.
At the rear of the battlefield, the Cardinal stood unmoved, for now. His gloved hands tightened slowly around his reliquary staff, the leather groaning as his grip shifted. His face, flushed with exertion and mounting fury, held not fear, but contempt. Jaw clenched, nostrils flaring, he took one sharp breath and let it out like a man preparing to speak above a storm.
"This…" he said, voice low, "is unacceptable."
His words were not directed at her, not exactly. He spoke them to the air, to the weight of expectation, to the force of his own role in this battle. Around him, the surviving clerics hesitated, so praying still, others faltering, no longer sure who they prayed to.
The failure of the order would an his own failure.
He stepped forward.
Not rushed, not panicked, just forward. One step at a ti, as though entering the nave of a cathedral. With each movent, the golden runes etched into his armor ca alight, one by one, until the entire breastplate glowed like a forge. His crimson tabard flared behind him, caught in a wind that did not exist.
Then he raised his staff.
"Cast off the veil!" he shouted, his voice sharpened into sothing that cut. "Reveal thy false divinity and let the Light reforge this ground!"
He drove the staff down.
The impact did not break the earth, it broke the air.
A do of golden fla erupted from him, the radius spiraling outward in asured pulses. Where it touched root, the bark shriveled and hissed, thorns disintegrating under the heat.
While the downed paladins, those a foot already in the grave had their wounds nded, their bodies healed and their vigor returned.
The cleric's wavering faith seed to find new light and a new hope as they too began using their own holy spells to reinforce their fallen comrades.
On the other hand, the Queen's own advance faltered, her limbs retracting slightly as the flas licked against the edges of her growing canopy.
The Cardinal walked forward beneath a radiant halo, his staff now crowned by twin rings of script that burned too bright to read. The sigils orbited him like miniature suns, each one spinning faster as he advanced.
The Queen flinched. Not from pain, but from recoil.
Her vines slowed. Her reach receded. The forest, for the first ti since her arrival, pulled back.
And the Cardinal smiled.
Not a mocking smirk, nor a triumphant grin, a deep, righteous smile, as though confirmation had settled over him like anointing oil. His faith rewarded, his conviction proven and his power revealed for all to see.
He raised his voice again, this ti to all present.
"I did not need Van Dijk," he declared, the na spat with disdain. "Nor the powers of unknown gods…" the latter words were for his own self and thoughts, he then added, "Nor relics raised from the graves of monsters. I needed only the will of the true gods. And here, now, I burn your legacy into ash."
But sothing shifted in the Queen.
Her chest, still partially sealed, began to twitch. Not to reopen, but to convulse.
There was no sound. No cry.
But the air around her changed.
Ludwig, watching from the edge of the clearing, felt it before he saw it. The sa pressure that preceded storms. The way a field falls silent before a thunderclap.
For the first ti since the battel began, the Queen no longer sang, but scread.
It was not a scream made with a mouth. It pulsed outward through the root system beneath them, invisible but felt, a choral eruption of anguish and instinct. The vines around her no longer blood or stabbed.
They dug.
And deep beneath the battlefield, soil split.
Roots tore downward like harpoons. They did not reach toward the Cardinal.
They reached beneath him.
A hundred stalks erupted from the earth around his feet, thorn-tipped and shrieking, spiraling up his legs and around his staff, lashing at the rings of fla. He struck back with light, severing many. But not all. The roots fought back, curling around his greaves, pulling, twisting. Several lashes struck his robes and seared them black.
"Enough!" he roared, his aura pulsing once more.
A second wave of fla exploded outward from him, vaporizing the closest roots in an instant. The light burned hotter now, sharper, as if drawn directly from fury rather than faith.
"You shall not taint with your unholy touch!"
The Queen recoiled again, but not from pain.
From instinct.
She pulled inward.
Her petals folded. Her arms curled tight. The bloom of thorns along her back receded. And in a motion that looked more like retraction than retreat, she collapsed backward into herself, the tissue of her chest sealing with wet pressure, vines snapping free of the corpses they had adorned.
Then she was gone.
One great lunge backward, one coiling spiral of root and bloom, and she vanished into the woods like smoke chased by wind.
The clearing went still.
Only the sound of the dying remained. Paladins sprawled across scorched moss, clerics half-collapsed in ash and blood, and the Cardinal , panting, unmoving , stood at the center of a circle scorched into divine fire, his robes torn, his staff cracked at the top.
To those watching this looked like a clear victory, but to Mot, who was watching with a keen interested eye, sothing was not right, she wasn't that wounded, nor was she hard, and the last thing she did before she disappeared was look toward the north.
Mot's eyes followed that direction and all he did was smile, "I guess he did sothing…"
User Comments
0 comments from readers