Knight of Endrell Book One: The Red Empire

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter 14

Many miles outside of Gis, horsemen thundered towards the empire by the millions, and soldiers ran by them on foot matching their speed. Upon their shields and armor was the symbol of a blue rose.

Far from the war, Sidonin made his way back to his palace, guarded always by the Monte Farasus and his army of Matacuul, where he took an underground path to a chapel inside. Within the partially damaged chapel, he sat in the center of its embroidered spiral floor and concentrated his mind on drawing energy from the deepest parts of the earth into his flesh. Red smoke seeped through a circular vent shaft beneath him, and in his trance he focused the energy upward into the sky to repair what was left of the veil.

With the armies of Gis dwindling, eventually the people broke up into two groups to cover more ground, each were protected by the woggris from the back and the sides with four of the eight warriors heading one group. Kinai and Eunteneus occasionally went ahead to take out the generals. At some point Kinai asked Eunteneus, "Where is the emperor?"

To which Eunteneus responded saying, "Look to the root of the red veil."

As Kinai looked up, the darkness started to close in on the very center of the empire leaving just a spot of red in the sky – a beacon covering a one-mile perimeter encamped about the great palace where Sidonin awaited the return of the people. The ground was black and sooty mixed with dry and fresh blood, filled with the corpses of the long dead from years of keeping the red veil alive.

What was left of the Racuul, some 10 million, kept the people busy while their generals unlocked and opened the doors to the dens beneath the palace. Great beasts pushed giant levers on four small towers around the edge of the palace district to activate a mechanism that would draw in each ring of the surface panels that formed the ring of the district into the base of the palace, opening to a dark gulf that looked like a sinkhole moat around it. Torgan felt something grip his nerves and he left his position, killing soldiers as he raced through the streets and hopped up on the rooftops to look down on the palace. As his eyes sank into the abyss that now surrounded the palace on all sides, he felt heaviness in his chest and sighed to himself saying, "Yund, Auana!" or "Mercy, Auana!" He ran back to Eunteneus in the middle of the fight and told him, "The Racuul unleash the greatest of their gods from the darkness of the earth, from Tal-metha!"

"Let it be so," said Eunteneus, "No friend of the emperor escapes death this day, not even a god."

"Theliim (friend), Ginre-Zan rises!" replied Torgan.

Eunteneus kicked a Racuul soldier far over the army, into the palace dens and said, "I will not hide from him."

Torgan smiled and leapt ahead into the Gisic legions killing them from within their own ranks. The other warriors followed him, clearing some ground and separating the Racuul into smaller groups. When this was accomplished, some of the younger children, mostly eight to twelve years old, led by Kaitherion swarmed the groups of soldiers both inside and out. They grabbed a hold of them from head to foot, covering their eyes and stabbed them repeatedly in every vulnerable spot they could reach.

By this time Evcan and his archers finally pressed their way into the vicinity of the people where the battle was thickest, and showered the Racuul with arrows. Kinai and the warriors fought a little harder, taking out hundreds and thousands at a time. Attul blinded them with his bright light and engulfed them with disintegrating radiation. Besmo whipped through them like a ghost, reducing them to dust by accelerating physical decomposition in a millisecond as his spectral aura made contact with them. Knightegel blasted them with waves of great violet flames and sent them rolling into the air with walloping strikes.