Repentance

Part 9

Thus it was that Antaeus found himself left with little more than his five warriors in the glittering skeleton of the Bastion of the Penitent. Even his powerful magic had proved too little at the end to withstand the sheer numbers of the Pact Army. The Norn shamans spoke their weirds and their chants, while the last protective magics fell away from the aged weathered walls.

In this last, most fatal hour Antaeus took his Cardinal Hand and climbed to the church located centrally in the Bastion. To him it seemed clear that while the White Mantle could no longer inhabit the Vale, then neither would the Pact's forces.

That day he spoke words more terrible than any he had spoken before, more calamitous by far than even those which had helped conjure and bind the bloodstone, and magics of Repentance. As his voice boomed out above the storming of boots, Soldiers began to fall screaming in the courtyard, faces blackening and blistered and with blood running from their eyes, ears and nostrils. The chanting rose to a boisterous pitch and then became a vast wailing shriek of horror. A huge flash of light turned the sky white, and thunder boomed louder than it had before. The Vale, a moment later was surrounded by a darkness so complete that even Captain Osada in his tent located near the back of the pact encampment thought he had been struck fully blind, or perhaps lost his good eye to an arrow.

But in some way, Antaeus had failed. The Bastion was still over run with Pact troops, although now much of the Pact's army lay sobbing and dying on the ground near the entrance to the Chapel. No one knew how or why the magic targeted those it did. Some were lucky and unaffected while others were less fortunate. Cat was one of the more fortunate ones. She was tired, worn and blood oozed from her shoulder and her nose. She pushed her way into the central chamber of the chapel, in the center strangely untouched by smoke or flame the wind which was allowed in by her opening the door shifted six piles of gray ash, scattering them slowly across the floor.

So Antaeus died. Cat looked up, seeing a great form billowing out of the bell tower, crimson as a sword in a forge, writhing and wisping like smoke, a massive red hand formed, grasping at the sky.