Roanoke: The Price of Power

The Finish

Doc led the way, kicking wide the door of his cottage and strutting brashly into the chaos that consumed the colony. Arnold followed directly behind; the chaotic din seemed to be drawing to an end. There was little screaming now, and no growling war cry of men fighting their fate. Even the once overwhelming movement within the walls had slowed. There was only the dance of burning thatch and the slow loping of wolves from corpse to corpse.

They faced the man Shaberdge across an open expanse of mowed grass near the colony's largest well. Shaberdge only grinned and stared at the two men as they approached. He stood motionless now, arms folded and eyes committed to some quiet appraisal..

Arnold fell in behind Doc where he stood, six or seven paces from the long-missing Shaberdge. Two men in long black coats. Two men that Arnold couldn't possibly understand. Practitioners of dark arts, perhaps. Members of some coven that he'd never before heard of, even after years of dredging the alleys and whispers of Londontown.

Arnold's hands were shaking, his heart racing. That these men could face and engage in some form of staring competition amongst the wholesale slaughter and destruction raised his blood to boiling. Yet there stood Doc with his hand on his hilt.

He should be cutting the man down! Ending it!

The standoff ceased when Shaberdge raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Slowly, and as mindlessly as leaves drifting down a trickling ravine, the children began to appear. They emerged from the lingering shadows between buildings, from the askew doorways of dark cottages, from every corner of the colony. Step by step they came to form a loose circle around the three men in face-off. Every one of them, every age, covered in blood and almost glowing beneath the green eldritch light.

"You would surround me with children, Darius?" shouted Doc, though the din had subsided such that shouting wasn't required. "Dismiss them and face me as a man would, you fucking coward."

Shaberdge (or was it Darius?) smiled. The expression made his face grotesque for it didn't belong on that drawn, pallid slab of flesh.

"They will leave when this is done, Richard. They'll leave with me," Shaberdge said. (Shaberdge, for that is how Arnold had known him, once.) "You see, I've created my own family here, since the Order had no love for me."

Arnold scanned the ranks of children. He saw no sign of Tom. Whether this comforted him was yet to be decided for there were far too many dead on the ground to find comfort in his absence.

"I've been teaching them," Shaberdge continued. "Remarkable potential in some of them, and those who I have introduced to the . . . what is it your friend called it? Sanguine opera? Yes! Those children will grow quite powerful in their long, long lives."

Arnold felt a sickness run through him. If this nonsense of blood-drinking and magic was true, what would it mean if such evil had been touched upon his own son?

Shaberdge snapped his fingers again, and the children dispersed back into the shadows. Like the man who commanded them, they paid no heed to the wolves that dined on dead men all around them. Arnold watched this, stared as the blood-covered youths that he'd watched singing and playing for the past four years, vanished into the unknown beyond the green light.