Follow Me

Part of me expanding the original first chapter into four separate chapters.

A single thought raced through Andial’s mind. It bit down through his jaw and ground his teeth until a sweet, metallic nuance of blood mixed with saliva. That thought had crashed in on his battle cry and tore through his resolve. It sliced him as quickly and easily as the claws of whatever lived in these moving shadows had made sections of three of his infantrymen. It shook him and stole the warmth he had been struggling to keep against the numb and the cold and the horror.

It was the realization that this was just beginning. He ground his heel in to the loose sand. He watched the pool of red lose its saturation as it soaked in with the coldness of his understanding of the situation. He was their Captain but with current rates, his title wouldn’t matter much. A living Captain of a dead squadron isn’t a leader, he’s a victim.

Their numbers were dwindling from the minute his men, his glorious Golden Guards, arrived on this rock of a world. They hadn’t known their enemy, their mission was to bring a message to whatever life that inhabited the world. They were sent to find intelligence. They only succeeded in discovering mindless fauna. More than once they had stumbled on forgotten but still impressive ruins. They walked through giant, sprawling cities turned to jungles and deserts. 

The first few were lost to treacherous paths through these metropolises. Old glass roofs had long ago become fused with the ground, hiding their fragility. He heard the cracking moments after the threshold of action.

More dangerous, though, were the crumbling buildings that seemed to fall at the great rumbling of a carefully placed step and the hidden bombs which brought them to avalanche. 

They soon learned to skirt the cities.

They didn’t bother to decipher the code of writing despite the accumulation of hurriedly carved symbols cut deep in the edifices everywhere they went. Every rock, every old tree, everything seemingly permanent was covered. Those same shapes eventually engraved themselves in Andial’s mind. He dreamed of them. He pretended he could read them.

Go home, travellers. There is nothing to see here.

It was wishful. He hated this world. He hated the oldness and the wildness of it.

More than the symbols, they found weapons. They were old, ancient, disintegrated curiosities. They weren’t bladed. They had no spent crystals. The technology was alien, more so than expected; oddly shaped boxes with mechanisms for pulling and activating something inside.

The men were mesmerized by them. They would take turns examining them and postulating on their purpose. A singularly well kept relic activated on one of their experiments. It sent a blast of exploding projectiles into the onlookers. Two died that night. The last held on until the suns rose but not far beyond seeing their light.

The men were still curious about the weapons but no one touched them after that morning.

Andial was far more focused on why. Why were they there, these discarded tools of war and death? Why were the cities, such magnificent locales of intricate architecture, dead and blowing away?

So many weapons, so many remains hidden inside odd armors, evidence of a quick, violent, contested end. His lieutenant had asked what could have destroyed such a people. When the question was put forth, he couldn’t answer. It was only when they found the entrance to hell that they were given a view of what may have happened.

They came to these caves by way of a trail, the path laid out in crumbling bones. They fought their way against tumbling rocks and stale, thin air. It was a low ranking soldier who found the city. It had seemed like the others, a decayed coagulated monument to a collective sorrow. This one hidden away through the miles of caverns which they had thought to be a pass through the mountains. They took to the perimeter, seeing no other way to cross it without endangering themselves with whatever lost tool of defense lying in wait.

Andial was the first to see the lights moving in the distance. When they took cover they found that the buildings, smaller and more crude than the extravagance outside, were made of bones and what could only be conjectured as dirt. He had hoped it was dirt. Some of the bones were like the remains they had found before, some horribly different. The odd ones were either from the deformed or a different species entirely. They were larger, stockier creatures with strong limbs and large, fanged jaws. They were built for predation. They were built for death. 

Andial had smelled the living versions before he heard them.

The attack came swiftly, from above. They had been wondering why there were no stairs to the strange houses. The learned it was because these things could climb better than they could walk on horizontal ground.

Half of the Guards went in that swift strike. The rest followed Andial into the city. These creatures didn’t seem like the type to set traps. But the Aelphi were. His Guards, his shining examples of Lord Obeiron’s army, dropped emitter mines. The beasts were unpleasantly surprised to find their own energy leached from their skin to power the device sending them to their doom.

The natives were caught off guard only for the first wave. As more and more followed, they learned to jump over the unfamiliar weapons seemingly by instinct. It must have been why there had been so many bombs within the outer cities.

Soon it became a swarm. Andial stopped, his men going to action without orders, spreading the remaining traps in a circle around the group. 

The creatures leapt through, slamming into the first men they could find. Blood burst from all directions but the Guards fought back.

That was three days ago.

Andial still stood, holding the line with the last of his men, baring his crystal blade to mark a spot in the swirling murk that held them prisoner. 

There had been lights in the beginning but it became apparent that these monster’s eyes weren’t their best features. The torches went out.

This was no cage of tangibility. They could easily move beyond the bright aura. They were trapped by blindness. They were bound in the darkness of a world they didn’t want to understand, surrounded by monsters they could no longer see.

The sword was a saving grace. It gave them sight and frightened the beasts back to their shadows. It imbued a new strength in them but with it came limitation. Its light had an edge that did not allow their usual formations. The courage, too, had a finite perimeter. The further they were from their leader, the less control they had over their shoulders and hands. They held their lesser blades in trembling grips, hoping for the same effect. The inferior crystals of the manufactured standards couldn’t match the special gift in the hand of their Captain.

Andial stood, the single oddity among his kneeling and shielded men, unprotected from the never growing promise of painful murder. His eyes alone were witness to the undulations in the abyss. He was the closes to the edge, closest to the light, closest to an immediate death. Yet he was seeing this fright with something deeper than vision. He felt them move. He felt his men quiver. Above all, he felt the weight of that single thought. He was a victim of the truth that he was staring into another and vastly more terrifying night. He could not escape the undeniable irony that the celebrated heralds of the Armies of Obeiron were about to be slaughtered with such utter lack of ceremony.

The howls snapped him back to the battle. A large ash-grey body slipped in and out of lighted view. Another did the same nearer to the group’s flanks. Fifteen or more began bolting into sight then disappearing. Their jaws slashed through the air as they bit into the men’s fear.

This tactic was nothing new. It was how they had originally disoriented the Captain and his men. They had kicked up enough sand and sent them into changing position to face a new direction. It was how they covered the way out.

Something shot over the soldiers. There was a brief sound of alarm as a few of them lifted their weapons, training in on whatever had been sent through the air. A muffled whimper of surprise confirmed Andial’s first assumption. The missile was a piece of their own, taken earlier in the fray. Scarlet drops showered them. The blood was cold. He let it paint him, wake him and hush his self-assassinating mind.

His lieutenant, Herth, a man of twice Andial’s years came to his side.

“Captain, there’s no communication with the ship. Hasn’t been since we came through the caves.”

Andial nodded with barely-there movement. Herth paused for a few moments, custom predicated everything, even the promise of total obliteration. Too long had passed, though. He cleared his throat and spoke again.

“Sir, do you have orders for us?”

Andial lowered his blade. The light came from under him as he turned to his men. His lips curved into a coy smile that surprised everyone. More-so, it surprised him that the words he spoke were so calm, so collected, so focused to a penetrating point.

“Yes, I do. Follow me.”

Planning and strategy had fled from the battlefield after the first day.Leaving the lost soldiers with their unpredictable and inconsistently effective siblings, rage, force and bravery. The decision to move forward was instantaneous. There wasn’t a single thought put toward the choice yet it still seemed so right. So much more right, Andial thought, compared to the other option. He refused to stagnate in the dust and darkness, waiting for death to close in through the form of a beast’s gullet. He knew he would rather run straight into his end, weapon drawn and his men at his side. He was Aelphi. He was a Captain. He was a royal and his blood screamed for honor. He would accept nothing less. To allow death is to allow more than your life to be taken, that was what he had always been taught.

His voice raised with his sword and his men as he signaled them to charge forward.

“And remember, my Golden Guards, fight until you die!”

He bellowed the immortal words of their lord and cemented everything in place. They knew this would be their last. They knew this would be the single charge used to judge their entire lives by the scholars who would live beyond them.

They threw their shields into the darkness, putting the spinning chain blades into motion and locking the switch that would halt them. The cutting edges found flesh and paved their way. Their free hands unleashed new weapons, the weapons that were never allowed unless in dire circumstances. The Golden Guards held their trophies, collected from past battles, wielding them, activating if the device called for it.

Armed for their end, they formed an arrowhead behind Andial, their Captain.

With that brilliant royal red emission blade held up in the air, high above his head, he watched the creatures come closer. They were drawn to the movement. They were attracted to the scent of sweat and tenacity.

One of the larger, braver ones lunged at him. It jumped off the backs of one of its own, skipping like a pebble along a sea of it’s putrid kin. Once in the air, it seemed to swim through the heft of darkness that the soldiers were planning to burst through.

Andial twisted. His long hair tore free from its bounds and whipped like a danger itself. The Captain unsheathed his own treasure, an axe, forged in the shape of a hideous creature to rival these enemies. The sinister blade’s mouth gaping in a ghastly smile. It welcomed the challenger. The teeth of the axe grabbed and tore through the leaping form’s underbelly. Andial didn’t wait for the rest of the body to drop. He stepped over the mound of steaming entrails. He started into a full run towards an arbitrary, imaginary location somewhere in the ink. It didn’t matter in which direction. The men cried out in deep, proud calls. With each step he took in front of them, their resolve strengthened. With each step he heard from behind, the heat in his body flared up to fight the numbing cold that had been holding him back. They knew their trajectory meant nothing. They weren’t headed in a direction. They knew where they were going.

The rush met the first circling line of beasts, catching them off guard and sending them into a panicked scatter. Andial could feel the shards of stone kicked up by their talons. They peppered his face as he barreled onward. He struck out at the stragglers, severing anything he could. Thick, dark blood oozed onto the ground, rolling like a soft dough out of the dead and dying.

Forward they pressed and forward they went. The opposition had gained footing again and it became far more of a struggle between claw and blade. Andial tnsed his wrist and gripped the handle of his emission crystal blade. He felt the familiar tingle shoot from his shoulder to his fingertips. It was the once friendly feeling of his body’s energy being put to damn good use. It had been too long in that cave, though. He had spent far too much of himself and he was waning.  He sent a roaring blast of red destruction into the mounting defense. That wave of melting heat cleared the way, but it wasn’t quite enough. The ranks refilled almost as quickly as they had thinned. From the feeble light show playing out around him, he knew the others had even less to give.

A sound began to rumble from the ground. The vibrations turned into full fledged movement as everything began to shake. Andial looked up, ready to sidestep the ceiling that would inevitably be plummeting down on them. He saw only blackness.

There were more sounds, more quakes, like footsteps of gods. A high pitch scream sent his mind reeling back. He went to continue the fight but even the natives were balking. For a moment, atop the trembling ground, everything stood still.

Author's Note

Still not reviewed for errors.