Soul Fire

Soul Fire - Chapter 46

They guarded the gates to the Palace of Asillia. It was a noble and vaunted duty, though the meaning had been lost over centuries of peace. The post no longer held significance for the men who attended it, with ceremony and tradition falling to routine and boredom. They wore the polished armor of Asillian House Guard. Their weapons had never been raised in combat, or even anger. Their training was rigorous, though rooted in the irrelevance of practice halls, with their blows stoically endured by inanimate, wooden dolls. They represented the finest warriors Asillia could muster, yet were novices.

As night blanketed the palace with darkness and sleep, they stood dutifully at their post on either side of the gates of the palace. No one would pass that gate after dark. No man would tread the road splitting the imposing gatehouses - the bastions holding aloft giant braziers of fire to light the way.

Indeed, that fateful night, no man walked the road marking the official entrance to the palace.

Yet, the guards still failed in their duty.

As they stood, as alert as apathy would allow, they cast pools of shadow across the stones, their bodies obscuring small patches of road from the light cast above. Normally, those shadows would move in subservience to their motions. Usually, those shadows would wait patiently when the guards remained still.

Tonight, the shadows did not obey.

They began to writhe, sliding and roiling, as though the patches of black were somehow alive. The guards had no reason to lower their attention to the road beneath them, their eyes forever cast up and outward, searching for false danger - turned away from the true threat. The shadow of one guard, then the other, rose from the ground, slipping up through the boots of their armor, then swelling within the confines of the metal. The guards felt a chill, attributing it to the growing cold of evening. The cold grew, changing from discomfort to pain. For the guards, there was a brief moment of excruciating agony, the prelude to the eternity of their death. Blood trickled from the open vents of their helmets and the small gaps between metal plates, a soundless death within the privacy of their useless armor. The metal shell had been incapable of affording the protection for which it had been forged.

Having sundered the flesh they had invaded, the shadows melted back to the liquid black from which they had issued, the bodies of the guards crashing to the road, their swords still sheathed by their sides.

With no eyes now turned outward, an army of shadows rolled across the road, then within the gates of the Palace of Asillia. They covered the ground in black, swarming from around walls and houses, coating the road in their film of darkness. When the last of the shadows had disappeared through the open gate of Asillia's keep, a man stepped into view. He stood blacker than the night, his cloak billowing in the fickle wind that lapped at walls and whistled between them. By his side sat two swords, the jagged shapes of their hilts by his hands, which rested at his waist.

And spinning around him, weaving in a twisting circle against and through his skin, was a wreath of shadows.

Below that high road, the people of the City of Asillia slept soundly in their beds, oblivious to the invasion of their palace by a fleshless army from the dark.

*****

By the time the next patrol reached the palace gates, to find their comrades cold with death, the alarm was raised. Horns pierced the air, carried effortlessly by the stillness of the night. The standing guard of Asillia were mustered from their beds, as much by surprise as duty, rushing to don armor and take arms against the unseen. The men quizzed each other, asking questions to dispel their disbelief. No man alive, nor his ancestors for countless generations, had seen this.