The Falling of Hell's Army

~Prologue~

Chapter 1: The Ritual

    In a throne room of the great king who ruled Ramalana, there was an ancient ritual that would be taking place. One that will determine the fate of the land. The walls were full of weapons passed down from generation to generation of all the past king’s who had survived the challenge. Those swords were the ones that each of them had used to accomplish it. The king was a relatively big man. This was a given because royalty was always the most nourished of the land.  He had ordered his men to bring in the prisoner. He was shackled with a guard at each side of him. He was clearly no older than the age of twenty judging by the almost baby skin smoothness of his face. This prisoner had hazel eyes, but from a distance they looked brown due to the darkness of his eyes. His hair reflected this concept due to the fact it was also dark, except his hair was brown, but a more of a dark brown. The man stood tall, but not abnormally tall. He was roughly five foot ten, about average height for an almost fully grown adolescent. You could tell that he was a common villager by his clothing. The cloth and stitching was homemade, actually you could tell that the whole thing was homemade and most likely passed down for a couple generations, but stitched on his shirt was his prisoner number, and under it read Leo.

The king had brought his mage with him to conduct the ancient ritual. His mage was an aged woman. She had wrinkles that maped her face like landmarks on a globe. The way that she had conducted the ritual also showed a lot of experience, almost as if she had been doing this every day of her life for the past sixty years. She was a little on the short side, even for a woman, she stood roughly two heads shorter than Leo, but she conducted the ritual the same. Height obviously wasn’t a problem for her. She looked at him with blue eyes, but aged as well, almost as if they were tinted with a light gray. Her hair was the biggest give away, it hanged long, almost to the top of her legs and was worn in a long ponytail like Rapunzel. It was a faded out blonde, so faded that you had to really look to tell that it was blonde.

The king glared at Leo as his mage grabbed a pot of water and began her ritual by slowly dipping her fingertips into the pot and flicked the water at him,  “So Leo Benjamin Davis, you think you are good enough for my daughter and to take my place as king of Romalana?”

    Leo looked firmly back at him, trying not to flinch by the water being flicked in his face, as if he was trying to intimidate the king, “Yes sir!”

    He didn’t believe it, he didn’t believe anyone was worthy enough to take his daughter and his place on the throne as the new leader. In fact, no king in the history of Ramalana had ever felt that way. so they had to come up with a test, a way to prove a man’s worthiness to assume the role as king.

“Then you know what you must do!” He gestured for the mage to continue on with the ritual.

The mage had called for the tub, and four men came slowly walking in with a enormous tub and placed it in front of Leo. They wheeled in a crate full of gallons of mystical water that had been specially prepared by the mage herself and stored in the lowest level of the castle to keep them at their highest spell count. They began to open and pour the water into the tub. One by one the guards poured their multiple full gallon pots into the tub until it had been three-fourths of the way filled and the mage tossed in some herbs as if she were making a soup or stew. Then she chanted a spell that, for the life of him, he couldn't understand but he was able to gather that she was chanting the same statement over and over again. The water began to boil and the herbs dissolved and the water turned a light pink color.

The King stood up and shouted, “Then the ritual is final! If you wish to wear my crown and take my daughter, my own flesh and blood, then you must travel through the gates of Hell and slay Satan himself!”