The Withered King Read online

  “Maybe they didn’t like my music,” she said while spinning on her right foot and connected a roundhouse kick on the head of a guy sporting a mohawk. “More likely for the same reason as you are.”

  “About that…” Fionn dodged an attack and replied in kind with a backhanded punch.

  “We need to talk, but not here. Somewhere less crowded,” she proposed after applying a counter block to the mohawk guy that ended in a painful snap and crack, breaking his arm in three places.

  “Let’s wrap this up then.” Fionn unleashed a flurry of kicks and punches that the woman not only dodged with ease but synchronized with as well. Regardless of how well trained she was, the fact that she seemed to know exactly where each punch and kick would come from seemed strange. Following a hunch, he took a moment to look at her in the eyes and noticed a faint unnatural blue glow in her irises. The glow was all too familiar to him. She had the Gift. They managed to knock everybody out, but the pub was all trashed and the alarm was blaring.

  “Time to leave, pick up your stuff,” Fionn yelled at Harland and the woman.

  “I already did,” Harland replied in a huff, running as fast as he could towards the back door and into the alley. Fionn held the door open for his friend and the woman carrying her guitar case and her twin blades. The three of them left the pub through the back alley. Fionn, Harland and the woman ran through alleys and small streets, until they reached a bridge that crossed the river. The three of them tried to catch their breath, the cold night air hitting their lungs without mercy. The place was empty, not a single soul in sight.

  “Now that was a pub brawl. How exciting.” Harland smiled. “We kicked them hard.”

  “We? You did nothing.” Fionn laughed.

  “We are a team, remember? Besides, I’m a diplomat, not a fighter. That’s what I have you for.”

  “Fighting is diplomacy by other means, or so they say,” the woman interjected. “I think you were looking for me.” She smiled.

  “I’m guessing you are Gabriella, but how did you know we were looking for you?” Harland asked.

  “Yes, I’m Gabriella Galfano, although you can call me Gaby. No need for formality. And as for your question, I dreamt about you.” Gaby flashed her quirky, yet endearing, crooked smile.

  Fionn looked at her. She would be the first Gifted person he had met in ages, and a non-crazed one to boot. It made him smile, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  “Wait a minute, Galfano as in the powerful and very ancient merchant Galfano family?” Harland asked, surprised.

  “The one that not only survived the war, but helped to rebuild the continent,” Fionn added. “I thought you liked your privacy and were very reclusive. I never expected to meet a member.”

  “Says the man who lives at a haunted mountain,” Harland quipped.

  “Yeah, but that’s not important here. Can we talk in another place, please?” Gaby pleaded, rubbing her arms from the cold.

  A thick fog was falling upon the city, the temperature dropping as fast as a stone in free fall. Fionn looked around because something felt odd. Goosebumps covered his back.

  “Are you ok?” Harland asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just the cold,” Fionn replied, not entirely sure that his answer was the whole truth. His instinct was telling him something.

  He remembered that once, when he was a kid, his master had told him that Evil is cold.

  Chapter 4

  Nightmares

  “So your name is Fionn and yours is Harland,” Gaby said. “As in Harland Rickman, the Foundation president?”

  “Yes,” Harland replied, examining her. Fionn could only let out a chuckle. He couldn’t blame Harland for being paranoid, after what had happened to the professor. But if this woman wanted them dead by now, she would have done it already. After all, she trained with the Sisters of Mercy: courtiers, diplomats, spies and lethal assassins masquerading as students in an all-female private boarding school for the fine arts, culture, and manners.

  The three of them walked down the well-lit streets, while a thick fog was starting to cover the city, giving it an eerie, almost malevolent feel. Harland treated them to hot chocolate, for which Fionn was thankful. He studied Gaby and the faint aura around her. When Fionn saw others like him through the Gift, they always looked like beings made of light surrounded by fog. It gave them an unearthly look. But in Gaby’s case, she looked warm, happy, and downright angelic, with only a hint of shadow, a sign of inner turmoil. Fionn had never expected to meet someone with the Gift again.

  He gave her a closer look. Gaby’s aura flickered, fluctuating in power. If Fionn had to guess, she had obtained the Gift not long ago, perhaps no more than a decade and a half ago, as it took time to be fully integrated with the recipient. It wasn’t a rule of thumb of course, as age sooner or later became moot when you had it. The way Fionn had received his forced the integration faster than usual, and yet it took him years to get the Gift under control. Then a heavy feeling in the bottom of the stomach hit him as it dawned on him. Culph’s notes stated that she was twenty-five, which meant that she had been barely a teenager when she received the Gift.

  Fionn shuddered. Considering that you had to die to obtain the Gift, he wondered what she had gone through to get it, especially during peacetime, and at such a young age.

  “Why you are looking at me that way?” Gaby asked, examining Fionn’s features with a crooked smile on her lips, blushing. “You look so green.”

  “Green?” Harland said, confused.

  “So you can see my aura, too. I expected that. I was wondering: You were trained by the Sisters of Mercy. Was it then that you got the Gift?” Fionn was curious. Controlling the Gift required training as it enhanced the senses and the way the body reacted and connected to the world, thus affecting how you perceive it and even your fighting style. That’s why it took years to fully mesh with a recipient and more often than not, it caused mental trauma, even madness as he had seen once before, a long time ago. But Gaby acted calm and in control.

  “Halfway through my training, it was painful. Then I ran away,” Gaby replied, looking down as if recalling a hurtful memory. “And you?”

  “Let’s say that it was some time ago. It wasn’t pretty either.”

  “You two are freaking me out,” Harland interjected, tapping a foot.

  “Relax, she has the Gift, just like me,” Fionn said, waving his hands up and down, trying to reassure his friend that everything was fine.

  “My friend here might be at ease, but I need answers. A man’s life depends on this. What’s your story, kid?” Harland asked after taking a big gulp of his chocolate.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes I get these vivid dreams that kind of tell me what is going to happen. But they are not accurate, they only offer hints. I saw images that you would be looking for me at a bar with an open mic. I assumed that it was because of what happened at the professor’s house.”

  “And you dreamt that something was going to happen to Professor Hunt?” Fionn asked.

  “Yes, that’s why I’ve been trying to contact him for days, to warn him. But he didn’t believe me. Until it was too late.”

  “Do you know if he is alive? Why didn’t you tell that to the law officers?” Harland asked with eagerness.

  “In my dreams he is. And seriously, do you think they would have believed me? They are so slow at understanding these things that I fell asleep at their headquarters.”

  “That’s a very convenient ability to have,” Harland said. Fionn noticed the skepticism in his voice. In a way, Harland was right. It was too easy, too convenient. There are no such things as luck or coincidence.

  “It is… when it works. Most of the time I don’t have control over it. It comes randomly,” Gaby rubbed her arms to warm them. “Listen I would love to explain more, but could it be in a better place?
My hotel is nearby and the weather is starting to chill too much for me, even with the hot chocolate.”

  “Lead the way.” Fionn pointed to the road.

  Fionn and Harland followed Gaby down the street that led to her hotel. The chills in his spine and the way his breath condensed when speaking told him how cold the air was getting.

  “I can barely see anything with this fog,” Harland complained. And he was right. Fionn was having trouble making out the silhouette of his friend, and he was right next to him.

  The three of them reached a square, where Fionn noticed a shadow approaching.

  The shadow was misshapen and seemed out of proportion to anything Fionn could think of. Only creatures from the realm of nightmares could look like that. It had to be a trick of the fog or a hallucination.

  Once it was in full view, Fionn wished it was just a hallucination. It was a man with a deformed face, its mouth wide open and his tongue replaced by black tendrils. It walked on its arms and legs, like a spider, but with its back towards the ground, its neck twisted in an inhuman way. It moved fast but with stilted, almost mechanical movements. Soon, several similar creatures followed, infesting the square.

  “What the hell?” Harland exclaimed while the man-spider moved faster into the fog. “Was it me or did it seem to be running away?”

  “I would hate to find what they were running away from,” Gaby said.

  Then another shadow appeared from the fog. It was the same bearded man from the fight at the pub. His eyes were bleeding profusely; his jaw was slack and he was stumbling more than walking. He held what remained of his left arm, a bloody stump, with his right hand. He reached Fionn and cried for help, before his skin melted away like a wax figure, followed by his muscles and what was left of his bones, leaving a puddle of human remains in front of them.

  “Wasn’t he one of the guys from the pub fight?” Harland asked with a tremor in his voice. He started retching.

  “Yes,” Fionn replied.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick, excuse me,” Harland said before turning to his left and vomiting.

  Fionn felt a new wave of goosebumps rising from his lower back to his neck. It was the way his body alerted him to danger. He saw Gaby pinching the bridge of her nose, and guessed it was the way her body was alerting her.

  A chilling, wailing sound pierced the air. It was the kind of scream that no human throat or any animal from this realm should be able to produce. For a second, Fionn thought that it sounded like a soul does when it is being torn asunder, and even he wondered how he knew that.

  In the middle of the square, there was a man with the weirdest visage, wearing a mishmash of clothes, similar to those worn by the gang members they had fought at the pub. He had a circlet around his neck, glowing with a turquoise light. The man was babbling incoherently, grabbing his head and pulling his hair, scratching his skin with desperation, to the point that he was bleeding in several places. Under his skin it was possible to see wailing faces trying to escape, tiny heads and hands begging for help. All of his body was covered in a substance which smelled similar to the ooze found at the professor’s house.

  “Gig aug ngg ma nil.” The man said in what Fionn recalled were words of an ancient language. The kind of language one can find in books that should not be read. “It’s coming, it’s coming and my mind is only the door, only death and oblivion will cure my affliction. It’s coming, it’s coming and it has no skin in this realm, it will wear me like clothes, my souls are feeding him,” the man screamed.

  “That doesn’t sound good.” Fionn had heard similar words before and although he couldn’t make total sense of them, he knew what they meant: big problems.

  “I wish I hadn’t understood that.” Gaby retched, barely holding herself against a wall, dropping her guitar case onto the ground with a loud thud. Harland came to her aid.

  “Breathe, deep breaths,” Harland rubbed Gaby’s back. She managed to get her bearings back. “Doing that helped me.”

  “Those faces… they are his companions, the guys that attacked us. He absorbed them. We need to help them.”

  “We can’t,” Fionn said with a somber tone. “Those poor buggers are goners. They are being used as a door for a creature from the Infinity Pits.”

  “Hell,” Gaby said with a hint of fear in her voice. “What’s happening?”

  “I assume that whoever hired those guys didn’t want to leave any witnesses alive, including you. And somehow he or she tricked them into being used as a door for a possession from a creature from the Infinity Pits,” Fionn replied. The muscles on his shoulder blades tensed. He had seen this before. Humans were prone to dig their own graves if they allowed themselves to be convinced. That’s how the Great War started and that’s how it ended. The real end.

  “Door?” Harland asked with fear in his voice.

  “Door, host, it doesn’t matter. Something is using them to bridge an incursion. We can’t save them,” Fionn explained, his lips tightening up, his hands reaching instinctively for his fangsword.

  “Fionn, we haven’t had an incursion anywhere in Theia for centuries,” Harland said.

  “Not that you know of,” Gaby said with a somber tone.

  “If it were an incursion, the magick alarms would blare by now,” Harland said candidly. “It has to be something else.”

  A booming sound exploded through the air as the circlet shone bright and finalized the transformation. The man’s head grew to a point where it exploded in a big gory mess of innards and foul smells. The final scream was even worse, coming from a beheaded neck. It was a primal exclamation of fear, pain, and hate, which reverberated against the walls, shaking the city to its foundations. The headless body started to grow, ripping the skin away, while its muscles bulged and changed color to an oily black.

  A foul, viscous liquid covered its new ‘skin.’ Its muscle-bound arms ended in four fingers with sharp claws, and its legs with inverted knees ended in talons not unlike birds of prey. Scales formed over its skin and on its bloodied neck. Above the metallic circlet, and where the head had its place before, a deformed skull now grew. It was a grotesque caricature that mixed the muzzle of a wolf with the upper part of a goat and the eyes of a human. The creature finished ripping apart the remaining human skin. It kept increasing in size, becoming taller than a three-story building.

  The creature roared and started its rampage, demolishing the obelisk in the center of the square and crushing the stalls of late night food vendors around it. Its massive claws slashed through concrete and hit a gas pipeline, causing an explosion and a fire that soon spread over other buildings. Smoke, mist, and screams blended in a cacophony only interrupted by one thing: the alarms, at last, going off.

  “Told you, Harland.” Fionn forced a smile.

  Harland facepalmed himself. “Now what?”

  “Now I do my thing. Look at it this way. You always wanted to see me in a real fight, full power and all, like in the books.” Fionn cracked his neck to the left, relaxing his shoulders. He started to walk towards the creature, saying, “You should take cover. This will get ugly.”

  “What are you planning to do?” Gaby asked.

  “First, I will deal with the big guy there. Then I will clean up the mess of the smaller ones.”

  “Let the guards deal with it,” Harland said.

  “They don’t stand a chance against that. I do,” Fionn smiled. A part of him was glad to finally have a fight of this level, he missed the adrenaline.

  “You will reveal your secret.”

  “What secret?” Gaby asked, confused.

  “You will see soon.” Fionn winked at Gaby and walked away from her and Harland. Fionn walked slowly towards the creature. His left hand crossed in front of him and reached the pommel of his sheathed sword. The wind howled like a dragonwolf and a green glow started to come from the sword. Fionn unsheathed his
blade and the wind picked up. The fangsword’s silvery blade was covered by the green glow, the engravings on it shining with words from an ancient tongue. Fionn’s irises went from regular green to an intense, almost surreal shade of bright green with golden specks. He smiled, feeling his muscles and bones welcome the surge of energy dormant for so long. He reached inside him, to the source, his Gift. It felt familiar even after so many years of not summoning it, like an old friend that had always been there. Its warmth energized him. He continued walking until the creature took notice of him.

  “The engravings, the form of the blade. I remember reading about it. It’s the Black Fang! One of the Tempest Blades...” Gaby’s eyes opened wide in sudden realization. “Wait a minute. That means…” Gaby said to Harland, as they both took cover behind the columns of the arcade.

  “Yes, you are right.”

  “He is the legendary Greywolf! How? He must be…”

  “Over one hundred and thirty-three years old? I had the same reaction when I found out. Apparently, the Gift slows aging.”

  The sky was raging in fury, lightning slashing across the dark skies, the wind blowing away the mist. The square was being emptied, the townspeople trying to get as far away as possible from the giant creature, whose red eyes were locked on the man standing in front of him in defiance. Any other mortal would cower before the behemoth, but this one was smiling. The creature started a conversation, its deep, booming voice echoing all over the place.

  “Why don’t you run like the other mortals?”

  “Not really my thing.”

  “I will crush you.”

  “You can try.”

  The creature roared with anger, stomping its way across the plaza. Fionn didn’t waste time and jumped into the fray, slashing it with Black Fang. The creature replied in kind, raising its massive right claw and trying to shred Fionn like paper. He parried the attack with the sword, but the strength behind it almost broke his arm. He got ready to parry the second one, biting his lips to tolerate the pain, when an attack by Gaby on the creature’s back interrupted the exchange between them.