The End of Days - Part 3
A Multi-part Fantasy One Shot
This is the final part of The End of Days, a response to ’s January prompt. Enjoy!
Lord Andarin marched through the labyrinthine ways of Hastos. Echoes of battle drifted on the wind. Fires raged, the smog smearing the sky with thick black clouds. The gods were blinded and humanity was alone against the orc menace. The north gate was ahead of Lord Andarin and his, roughly, one thousand three hundred archers, flames rose as high as the walls and devastation had snaked its way through the wooden buildings crammed into the Last Citadel. There would be no gentle life after victory as rebuilding would take generations. That was if they won.
The road ahead was clogged with soldiers and supply carts. Gargantuan shadows thrashed in the deep fire smoke. We made it, Andarin thought. 'Archers, prepare!' he yelled. He continued to march as he heard the shhhh of a thousand three hundred arrows leave their quivers and being nocked. He continued marching until he reached the soldiers. 'What's the situation?' The men were injured, most with broken arms or legs from the look of it. The carts weren't supplies, they were carrying dead men.
'Giants, my lord, rampaging through our lines. Spears take them down but we are losing a hundred men for every kill,' the man spoke in a monotone, his eyes vacant and bloodshot.
'They aren't real giants,' Lord Andarin reminded himself. 'Merely tall orcs,' the thought made it easier to imagine killing them, for giants were mythical ancient creatures of the earth, intimately joined with the spirits of the land. No giants had been spotted for a thousand years. These monsters were not giants. 'Clear the road, Lord Panon awaits and my archers will deal with these overgrown fiends.'
'Yes, my lord,' the man saluted, wearily, and shouted the command up and down the road. The wounded who could walk did so while others were carried. Donkeys used to pull the carts were unhooked from one and led to another in order to move them all.
Andarin watched and waited as the “giants” slaughtered men wantonly. 'Faster!' he hurried through the narrow road his archers behind him at a sprint. It would take longer but he had a chance to save precious lives. 'Can you hit those orcs?' he pointed, querying the nearest archers.
'Some of us, my lord. Better to get closer,' one of the archers said.
Andarin grunted and led them further on. The wounded thinned out nearer to the fighting and between them and the infantry was a vacant stretch of road. Andarin formed his archers up, many still filtering through the bustling street. 'Loose! Loose! Loose! Aim for the tall orcs, bring them down. Save our soldiers! Save Hastos!' Andarin raised his sword and slashed the air, 'LOOSE!'
A hail of arrows hissed into the air. The sky twinkled as torchlight glinted off the arrowheads in a breath of silence. A thousand minor thuds sounded as the arrows hit their targets or missed. Arrow shafts bloomed from the orcs, the flights flitting in the wind like a spring meadow. Volley after volley arced through the smoke clogged night. Lord Andarin watched each hail of arrows pelt the enemy praying none hit Hastosi soldiers. After the sixth volley the first ogre fell, its head a pin cushion. Incensed Andarin directed his archers to focus their sights on one of the giant orcs at a time. The next fell in a single volley. A cheer erupted from the infantry and they began to advance. Wounded men were carried out between the lines, the dead were left behind.
Lord Andarin surged forward, needing to keep pace with the infantry as to not shower Lord Panon's men with arrows. He reached the rear lines of the infantry and the men began loosing freely. Fires raged atop the gatehouse, the towers enshrouded in flame. The walls were littered with corpses and man and orc. There was no sign of the cavalry.
More orcs fell yet for each one slain another emerged through the shattered gate. Andarin could see the Tower of the Boar through the smog but he knew now he would not make it and in all likelihood Panon was dead.
Still, the orcs had to die.
A horn sounded from the rear, a booming guttural sound that was foreign to Lord Andarin's ears. The archers continued to loose and the infantry pressed a steady advance. He thought he had mistaken where it had come from but it sounded again and the archers beside him looked quizzical. Andarin peered through the thick air, squinting at shadows shifting where the wounded had gathered. He climbed onto a stall at the side of the road and from there to the low roof of a small home.
Orcs.
Thousands of orcs.
Rampaging through the streets.
For the first time Andarin thought of death not as a noble prospect for a good warrior but a horrid end to a life half lived. He steeled his heart. He would not die here, nor would humanity, and if it was his fate he would do it with dignity, sword in hand. And so would his men, 'Archers, swords!' the men looped their bows across their back and drew their knightly arming swords. 'Turn about face,' the men responded with a disciplined turn, smothering the fear evident on their faces. 'Engage the enemy!' Lord Andarin gestured with his own weapon and hurried down the flank to rouse the men's hearts.
The melee was a bloodbath. The fighting had broken out into duels and small pockets of fighting, all sense of organisation decimated by the swift surprise attack. 'Form a line!' Andarin yelled but the archers embroiled in combat couldn't hear him and even if they had would be unable to reform. His hope was in the men behind him but as he turned to give encouragement and fresh orders orcs descended from the rooftops crippling the formation and annihilating all hope.
A putrid hissing alerted Andarin and he spun around as two orcs rushed him. One swung a rusty mace, catching the Lord on the shoulder, while the other threw himself at him. Andarin was knocked to one knee but managed to raise his sword to skewer the second, unarmed, orc through the bowels. A fetid stench poured out, black bile coursed down his steel, the monster falling limp on the blade. The other orc swung again, cracking Andarin across the skull.
His vision swam and he fell into the mud and blood that the streets of Hastos had become. He heard the orc screech and knew the end had come. Andarin shut his eyes to the pain and awaited the mace that would dash his brains across the cobbles.
Seconds went by.
Men shouted around him. Orcs hissed. Hands grabbed him and hoisted him to his feet.
'He's alive,' cold fingers held his chin, a calloused hand slapped his cheek. 'Wake up, my lord. You're not dead yet,' the voice was unfamiliar.
Andarin swayed in the strangers arms, his vision doubled. Blood trickled down his face. He raised a hand to his head, it came away sticky with gore.
'Bad wound but you'll live. Get some spirits on it,' a gourd was uncorked and Andarin's head was doused with something that stung.
Andarin winced, 'My thanks, stranger.'
'Get him his sword. We need every one who can fight to do so, thank me if you survive the night.'
Lord Andarin's vision began to settle and the strangers six faces merged into one. He didn't know him but he knew from the white bandana he was a surgeon or at least a healer. 'Still, my thanks regardless, good man. I will endeavour not to die too soon.'
The surgeon laughed, 'Don't make promises you might not be able to keep,' he stowed the gourd of harsh liquid in a pack and turned to a man beside him. 'Go back and see to that soldier with the broken arm, then meet me in the Bastion to restock.' The assistant nodded and set off at a sprint into the melee. 'Now, let me see to your bandage and get you back into the fight,' he unrolled a length of clean white cloth.
At some point the men holding Andarin up had left. 'Very well,' Andarin held his sword tight. The melee around them continued, the pockets drifting further apart as the Hastosi soldiers pushed the orcs back. Andarin knew it wouldn't last, there were too many orcs and not enough men. The surgeon wound the cloth about his head and tied it off.
'Not the tidiest but something is better than nothing. On your way, my lord, and I pray I see you again,' the surgeon saluted, lifted the pack onto his pack and darted into the melee. He ducked, dodged, and wove through the fighting, heading in the direction of the Bastion, the central fortification at the heart of the Citadel, a towering castle that loomed over the rest of the city.
Andarin was left alone. Duels taking place up and down the street. He moved to the nearest group fighting to turn the tide and begin gathering his men. As he neared orcs appeared on the roof top, twenty, thirty, or more, and descended on the handful of archers. They were slaughtered and as the orcs feasted more appeared on the roof. Andarin ran up the street, back towards the south, and began fighting with a pocket of injured soldiers, ones he had marched past barely a few hours ago. The ground trembled and an explosion cracked the air like thunder. A blazing furnace pierced in the east engulfing the gatehouse and a long section of the wall Lord Andarin had been tasked with defending. He was numb to the shock and fear now, numb to the aches and pains of combat. He slew a few orcs and rallied a group of men to him, together they carried on south, then east, gathering remnants here and there. Where once there had been full units of a thousand men posted there was now only survivors and injured, most gravely so. The heat of the blaze grew intense even a quarter mile from the east wall gatehouse, Andarin halted as figures appeared in the smog and flame ahead of him and his petty band.
Lord Kifarin emerged from the smoke, bleeding from a gash along his jaw and a few stab wounds on his arm and leg. The man's skin had become charcoal, his eyes bloodshot. 'The east wall has fallen, they breached the gate then blew it up. I don't know how,' the man coughed and spluttered his words to Andarin. 'The south held for a while but the breach you defended was widened by catapults. We've been undone,' Kifarin aged when those words fled his lips, his eyes sank, his jowls sagged.
Andarin knew the north was lost, 'To the inner walls, like planned. While one man can hold a sword we will live.' He grasped the shoulders of his fellow lord and shook him. 'Come on, get your men moving!' Lord Andarin turned back and headed west towards the centre of the Last Citadel.
The inner walls were breached. Orcs scrambled up the walls using hooks as long as an arm driven into the mortar. The gates had been smashed to pieces, the portcullis's melted. Everywhere Andarin looked there was dead men and dead orcs but always more men. Smoke rose in great billowing columns from the great houses within the inner city, his own would be among them. His wife, Rhii, became his focus and he rushed ahead, barging past the scant survivors, and into the inner city. He leapt through the gate, the dead piled up like a cairn in two metre gap in the smashed wood and deformed iron. For the first time that day he saw the bodies of women and children, those who refused to flee to the Bastion until necessary, those like Rhii who wished to remain in their homes rather than be crammed into the fortress beneath ground with the rest of the populace.
A servant, in a family livery and short sword in hand, wept at the body of his mistress, her two young children beside her. Her husband, their father, would likely be fighting. Would likely be dead, Andarin knew.
The hissing and horns of the orc horde echoed behind him as the last resistance broke and the monsters gained a clear run to the Bastion. Lord Andarin knew he had to go, had to join up with the remaining lords and the Autarch to defend the Bastion, the last hope of mankind. The Bastion could hold for weeks, but they had also thought the walls would hold for days not hours.
An orc burst out from a postal station nestled on the roadside between mighty oak trees, their limbs charred and burning. The orc screeched. Andarin spun, his sword a blur, and slew the beast without feeling. Another emerged, meat dangling from its teeth, and died similarly. Andarin could think of nothing but Rhii as he watched the servant weep. He headed for home.
His house, the house of his family for a thousand years, was burning. The gardens torn up, the windows smashed, the roof caved in in parts. Flames licked out the windows and scorched the stone and brick. It had not been a grand home, not like those built in the last few centuries out in the fields were land was plentiful but it had been his and his to tend to in order it survived for future generations.
Yet now it burned.
And Rhii was inside.
Lord Andarin sprinted towards the burning building and scrambled through a window into a room that was not burning. The smoke rose from beneath the door and the wall hangings seemed paler, drier, than before. He found the door to the next room and forced it open. The roar of fire deafened him and he failed to hear the hiss of orcs. A sword pierced his arm, the rusted metal shearing at his flesh like a lumber saw. Andarin grunted with pain and slashed wildly. Steel met steel. A second orc emerged from behind a pipe organ, then a third, and a fourth, until the music room felt cramped. Andarin lashed out at the nearest, failing to strike and feeling the beat of a club on his back. He fell to one knee. The orcs launched themselves at him. He scrambled backwards through the door and found his feet. He lunged, catching a pursuer in the neck. The body slumped in the doorway forcing the next orc to jump. Andarin slashed its legs, removing one at the knee. More orcs appeared from the smoke clogging the room. Andarin felt his lungs tighten but he could not leave, not now. He waited for the orcs to attack, as their nature demanded, and picked them off one by one in the doorway.
Close to twenty lay dead in and around the doorway forcing Andarin to climb over them. He crouched beneath the smoke, though it would soon engulf him, and hurried for a door into the hallway. The tapestries burned bright along the walls and smoke rose from the carpets eager to burn. He hurried to the door leading below, into the cellar, where he hoped Rhii had had the sense to retreat too for if she didn't she was surely dead.
A damp scent crawled up his nose as soon as he opened the door, the fire would have a difficult time spreading to the cellar. Lord Andarin descended the polished stone steps into the darkness below.
Rubble littered the steps half way down, a hole in the wall to blame. He peered into the darkness, a faint light flickering on the other side. It was a section of tunnels he hadn't known existed, the wall had been ruptured from the tunnels. Andarin quickened his pace.
At the base of the steps he found a brazier, faint with only a couple of coals still burning. He found an unlit oil lamp and lit it with a wick on the embers. The lantern bloomed with a warm homely light that banished the darkness and revealed blood on the floor and splattered across the shelves stacked with ancient scrolls and priceless trinkets from bygone ages. He followed the trail of blood deeper into the cellar, deeper than he had explored, until he was certain he was underneath Lord Panon's home. Skulls sat in recesses on the walls, stone caskets lay on the floor with waist high statues of people, likely of the occupants. The blood trail thinned out and led behind one of the caskets.
'Rhii?' Andarin said, weakly, his throat dry as old bone.
'Andarin?' Rhii whimpered. She emerged, her dress in tatters, her hair smeared with greasy smoke and blood. She held a sword in both hands, gore up to her wrists. 'Is it over?' she staggered towards Andarin, shaking. Her hands reached his head, 'What happened?'
'The battle continues,' Andarin said, taking her hands in his.
Rhii began to sob.
'Though I think I know a way to the Bastion from here,' he wrapped an arm round his wife and guided her out of the crypt and back into the cellar. A faint hiss echoed on the old stone and he hurried, urging Rhii along. 'Where are the servants? Your mother?'
'Dead. I think. I don't know. I... I...' Her sorrow drowned her words.
'There is no need for words,' Andarin kissed her forehead. 'Let us get to the Bastion.' they climbed the steps, the heat of the fire engulfing the door out. Andarin led Rhii through the hole in the wall half way up the steps that the orcs had used. The tunnel went left and right, he chose right as that was in the direction of the Bastion.
The sounds of fire and fighting faded to nothing leaving the couple with the sound of trickling water and their own breathing. There had been many branching paths to the tunnels but Andarin chose none of them figuring that a long straight tunnel would be the main one.
He was correct.
The tunnel ended in a set of stairs with an iron bar gate at the peak. The metal had rusted over years and the lock had long since corroded to nothing. It swung open and Andarin knew he was in a storage room of the Bastion. He ran, dragging Rhii along, up to ground level and then through a courtyard and into the fortress. Soldiers and commoners dove out of his way, them clean and fresh for battle, him drenched in sweat and blood with a bandage about his head and his cloak singed. He reached the command room. Autarch Ralin stood, sword in hand, joined by two other Lords.
'Andarin! We heard you were dead!'
'Not yet, Your Exaltedness. How goes the defence of the keep?'
'Poorly. We do not have the men.'
'So our end has come.'
'It appears so,' Ralin swallowed.
'Then I will die fighting,' Andarin raised his sword.
'NO!' Rhii shouted.
'I must, for even with so little chance of victory I must try,' Andarin kissed his wife. 'Stay here, this is the safest place,' with that he rushed to the battlements.
The orcs surrounded the Bastion on all sides. Smoke clogged the sky and Hastos lay in ruins, not a single building in the inner or outer city remained standing. The Autarch was right, there were not enough archers to man the walls, nor enough spearmen to hold the gates if – when – they were breached.
'Where are the rest of the soldiers?' Lord Andarin asked an archer captain.
'Dead or underground with their families. Some commanders felt they had a better chance in the cellars and dungeons, my lord.'
'Who allowed them to go?'
'There is no stopping a man facing certain death when he has the chance to see his wife and children again, my lord.'
'You are here.'
'As are you, my lord.'
Nothing more needed to be said.
The orcs began climbing the walls, using the iron spikes and hooks from before while the giants piled up corpses to simply walk. No matter how many arrows plummeted down the ranks of monsters grew no thinner, though it was hard to see in the smoke. The rising sun made the air glow, obscuring his vision moreso.
The first ogre ascended, a little over twice as tall as Andarin and wielding a club as thick as an elm tree. A single swing cracked the merlons and sent a dozen archers sprawling. Andarin backed away as the beast set its narrow black eyes on him. The ogre raised its club to squash Andarin. The Lord darted into the beast but the club came down quicker than he thought possible. Andarin dove under the orcs legs, flailing with his sword. Blood, or something resembling blood, spurted out from the beast's calves. It roared and tried to grab Andarin. Fat fingers clawed at Andarin's legs. He hacked at the fleshy digits, removing two and splitting a third. The ogre spun with its club outstretched. The heft of wood slammed into Andarin, knocking the wind from him and sending him rolling down the hill of corpses. He tasted blood and struggled to catch a full breath, he rose anyway.
Orcs surrounded him, but not nearly as many as he had thought. They hissed and screeched, slowly forming a circle to ensnare him. The ogre rampaged on the battlements, distracted by the archers and spearmen up top.
The ground trembled, the sensation coming from the west. Lord Andarin turned to see orcs running his way, waving swords and maces overhead. Then, from the sun lit smoke and fog, emerged cavalry.
'CHARGE! LEAVE NONE ALIVE!' Lord Essen sounded his horn. He slashed left and right, decapitating orcs with each swing.
The cavalry wove around Andarin, slaying every orc encircling the Bastion. Soon Lord Essen appeared again from the morning fog, this time slower and showered with blood and guts. 'Andarin! I am pleased at least someone lives,' he removed his helm.
'Why have you stopped? Is there not more bearing down on us?' Andarin panicked but the ogre atop the walls was dead as were the orcs that had scaled the walls.
'No, Andarin. We have won,' Lord Essen said. 'I am organising hunting parties to scour the vicinity, we cannot let a single one of those fiends escape. Does the Autarch live?'
'He does.'
'Good. Good, last thing we need is new leadership. We won Andarin, cherish the feeling,' Lord Essen kicked his horse and rode north. 'With me men! There are still orcs to hunt!'
The cavalrymen roared and joined their commander.
Lord Andarin gazed upon the citadel bathed in blood and dawn. Never had the scent of death been so beautiful.
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The total length of all 3 parts is 11’952 words, a mere 48 under the upper limit. The first vague plan for this story had a drastically different ending, one that would have needed a few thousand more words and had Andarin joining Essen in the cavalry charge out of the city and then back in, once I realised that I had to adapt the story to fit the limit and I think it is better for it as it brings Rhii back into the story as well as the Autarch, even if only for a short time.
I like this one. Saved in the nick of time.
Well, Redd, that was sure action-packed, wasn't it? I enjoyed it very much.