Deathless

Deathless Chapter Eighteen: Cleaver

Chapter Eighteen: Cleaver

A seagull glides along the skies of the ocean above the calm waters below, its wings taut against the sharp winds, the sunlight reflecting off its pale white wings as it flew across the ocean, or rather, the Archipel Islands.

A spire rises in the east, a great tower of stone that soars high, higher than the seagull might ever hope to fly. The seagull pushes on, past that great tower of spire rising from the blanket of green. The Island of the Spire.

The seas beneath the seagull are calm as it glides along, unbeknownst to the violence that had transpired below it, the Battle of the Bay, where Admiral Lasaron’s entire war fleet had fallen to Ashmur’s rains of mortar fire.

The skeletons of the sunken ships lie on the Bay’s ocean floor, with the defeated sailors that had manned those warships lie on the ocean floor as well, but they are not as dead as the ships they had once manned.

For those men are still alive, as alive as they could ever be, as awake as when the mortars struck them, when the wooden decks collapsed around them and they first felt the cold hands of the water embrace them, choking them.

And there they lie, on the ocean’s floor, the extreme pressure suffocating them, their wounds leaving them in eternal pain. Some of them were blown to pieces by the mortars. And somehow, they are still conscious in some grotesque manner.

Others more had shrapnel embedded in their skulls or harpoons thrust through their chests, through their shattered ribs. And yet they are alive. Alive in their pain and their agony, condemned to remain that way for all eternity.

The Cleaver sailed on through the Archipel Islands, its stern slicing through the sea like a pickaxe cutting through stone.

It was bound for Arlenn’s Point, the mountain named for Arlenis, the First Emperor of Arlenia, where it is said the final climactic battle of the Second War of Liberation had taken place, when Arlenis, leading his army of heroes, came forward, from the North, where the Kingdom of Raldbak had no reach, bearing arms against the treacherous Kingdom and Isenord, who had left his people to die at the hands of the dragon Raldthorn.

Arlenis and his men has stormed the slopes of the great mountain, wrestling from Isenord’s forces the stronghold. But they had walked into a trap.

As soon as Arlenis’s men had made camp in the stronghold, Isenord’s ships had descended upon them from the Red Bay, bombarding them with their cannons and deploying troops on the shore to assail them.

And it was there that Arlenis had made his heroic last stand, when he was surrounded by legions upon legions of Isenord’s armies, without any hope of retreat.

But Arlenis did not back down. As fierce as the dragon that he had slain, Arlenis commanded his troops with such ferocity and determination that they beat back their enemies for hours upon hours.

And in a tactical feat that would be spoken of in military strategy textbooks as the greatest feat of military tactics in the history of Serenar.

Arlenis had lured Isenord’s legions deeper and deeper up the slopes of Arlenn’s Point, so much so that the peak’s forested sides were teeming with legion soldiers. And in one, concise forward thrust it was over.

Archers hiding in the trees, hovering just over the legion’s men, had let loose a massive stream of arrows, killing as many legion soldiers as possible. Over three thousand of Isenord’s five thousand had fallen in that first volley.

And it was then that Arlenis’s main fighting force had charged the legions from behind, having snuck past them, crushing the legions underfoot.

King Isenord himself is said to have fought in his battle, that he had met his son at the mountain’s peak, and that they had clashed in a mighty duel that would be sung of for generations to come.