Ashen Oath Pt. 2: The Mortem Song

The village of Kaleum was quiet, just a whisper of a town even on its busiest day. From light to night, always quiet. The Elder said peace was good for weary souls and should be appreciated. Calden disagreed. He was weary of boredom, weary of goats and weary of thatching. And more than anything, that made him ready to leave it all behind.

Kaleum tucked itself in beyond the orchards, through the treeline, and far enough from the road proper to host an inn. The village proudly subsisted without reliance on the world at large. Muffled by thick pines, the small sanctuary was rarely sought, slipping through time unnoticed, unchanging and most of all, safe.

“Safe.” Calden was acutely aware of this concept; a young man, eager and lost, unable to find himself, or a suitable reason for Veynar the Elder to let him leave to go looking. The Elder had raised him, and Calden knew him to be a kind man, however unwavering. The other few hundred residents of Kaleum would likely agree.

Calden turned a bucket in the goat pen behind their stone cottage and sat. He'd earned it today. He was sore, aches poking at the edges of his muscles. Veynar’s goats were happy at least, although flies buzzed in protest at the freshly cleaned pen. Calden watched a fat green one spiral off from the rest. He smiled, wondering if this was a break for independence. He cheered silently at its cockeyed course up and over the water trough – until it landed in a web. So much for freedom.

Calden scoffed at the misfortune and stood. “At least I can get you out of here little friend.”

He eyed the spider on the fence, a small funnel of white webbing filled the corner of the post and beam. Reddish segmented legs and multifaceted eyes on a thumb-sized head peered out together to form a grotesque, hungry flower. 

Calden knew this species to be painful, but not lethal. The fly struggled, while the spider exercised patience and Calden calm. Quick and gentle, Calden extended his forearm, cupped his fingers around the fly and pulled through and back from the web. The red legger darted out, but was left inspecting the empty, ragged edge of its home toying in the air. Calden cleaned bits of web from his new friend and gave him a toss. Little fly resumed his cockeyed course, spiraling back and down and landing on a fresh pile of dung. Calden thought it felt like a happy ending. He also thought it time to go in for the night, Veynar would be waiting with their supper by now.

Calden turned and looked over his shoulder towards the treeline before entering the small home. He heard a voice he didn’t recognize. He squinted through early evening glare and scanned for silhouettes. Seeing none, he tried to shake it off, but a nagging, uneasy feeling made its way into his gut. Calden called it hunger and went inside – they were safe in Kaleum.

***

Darkness does not so much settle in the village, as it cools and hardens around it. To Veynar the isolation felt like a reliable bulwark. He often talked of safety, but little of the danger that made it so valuable. Calden held Veynar's lessons dear when he was small, then did his best to ignore them as he grew; his mind would race with possible dangers of the worst kind. He dreamt of fleshless faces with empty sockets screaming for death, multiplying to devour his field of vision and consume his hearing with an anthem of pain. It was always, oppressively the same. Calden often wondered which of his nightmares had taken his parents from him. 

Lately though, he had begun to wonder why Veynar was so secretive about it all. Why did each conversation circle back to safety instead of answers? Most of all, he wondered why Veynar would not just tell him the truth.

Calden took his seat across from the Elder at the small wooden table in the dining area of their modest  home. A pot simmered in the hearth, fire casting bright, but uneven light about the room. Calden's shock of chalk white, ruffled hair flashed in the glow. Veynar said it made him look wise. 

“Like you?” Calden's words stung with the unintended bite that youth can bring. Veynar understood. Valuing wisdom in patience, he left space for his tired foster son to speak. He knew what was coming.

“I only think about leaving because I think about them.” Calden softened. “My parents…If they are alive, if I was even wanted. You named me. I don't know what anyone would call me even if they were looking.”

Veynar sighed, wise eyes level with Calden, and said, “I wish I had answers. Something...” He hesitated, and then spoke quickly. “You were left at our gate with nothing but your skin and bones and that white hair of yours. That’s…the truth of it.” He pushed out the familiar lie, one that had of late been getting harder and harder to hold.

“Why leave me at all?” Calden wondered, heart-heavy. 

“Reasons are as many as there are stars,” Veynar said. “Fear, illness, hope, or…” he produced a slight grin and his voice dropped into a hush that usually told Calden the old man would say something profound or attempt humor.

“I believe something was wanted for you. I do. Effort was made to get you here, and we both know that no one just comes to Kaleum, let alone to abandon a baby.

What with all the gutters available over in Auraveth…” 

Maybe a bit of both.

“I saved a fly today,” Calden changed the subject flatly.

“Of course you did.” Veynar lifted his spoon in salute and then dug into his spiced root stew. “Perhaps you were hidden here with great purpose, my boy, to rid the world of evil and starve out the spiders.” Veynar winked and made a fighting motion with his fists, spoon still in hand.

They laughed together as the weight of the conversation lifted for a moment. Veynar knew he couldn't brush the boy off forever. Calden was growing up and would leave on his own, unprepared, whether Veynar liked it or not. If he continued to lie to the boy it would be that much worse in the end.

Veynar’s expression shifted. He could see the hurt welling in the boy despite his own attempts at levity. Gentler, solemnly he consoled Calden.

“The reason matters not, you are here and you are home.” Veynar said, reaching across the small table to place a hand on Calden’s forearm. He rose and walked over to a shelf cluttered with books and odds and ends. Bits of ritual and interest filled any space that papers did not. He returned with a small cloth bundle secured with a leather cord. 

“I must confess.” His guilt became a force of nature. “This cloth was left tucked into your basket. The only thing that was left with you.” Inside was a dagger-length, jagged crystal green shard.

Anger skimmed the surface of Calden's thoughts but he didn't engage. He felt betrayed and lied to, but this new information overwhelmed him. A clue, a real and tangible clue, has been wrapped up in a dirty cloth and existed on a cluttered bookshelf in plain sight for nearly two decades. 

In Kaleum, it was safe.

Calden held the unwrapped bundle in his left hand to inspect the shard. It seemed to pull firelight through it, casting green dancing refractions against the surfaces of the room. Eyes and white hair reflected emerald as Calden leaned in deeply. Though Veynar knew this to be a simple prism effect, he thought something portentous. 

Tracing his finger against a finer, scalloped edge Calden was not transfixed by the rough, uncut gemstone’s sheer size – nearly a forearms length – but by the song he seemed to feel thrumming within it. Time slipped for a moment. His hands now felt warm and wet, Veynar stood before him wearing concern. Calden unwrapped his grip from the shard. He remembered running his finger along an edge, but his wounded hand was new. His palm now shredded, he didn't know if he had pressed into it or it into him. 

Blood ran down the glassy surface, green incandescence intensifying through crimson rivulets. The stone shone independently of the firelight and rose, hovering in his bloodied hand.  And then, a soaring choir sounded in his mind, or in the stone, or both. He couldn't tell. Calden looked to Veynar and the old man was equally shaken by the scene. Veynar’s eyes were wide and his right hand raised in subconscious defense, it was clear that this was not an outcome the Elder had foreseen.

The song came at first as voices ringing from a distant cathedral. Rising in intensity, the song grew louder and closer until Calden felt it envelope him. His weary doubts and aches and burdens dissipated, uncovering a warmth and calm Calden had never known. The song wove through his body and the torn meat of his hand began to mend itself beneath the glowing stone. 

The shard dropped into his healed palm and although his questions remained fully unanswered, for the first time in his life he began to feel whole.

“Do you hear that?” Calden said. “It’s singing.” Veynar said nothing. “And look!” Calden moved the stone to his other hand and waved, showing fresh skin. Veynar still sat motionless, processing the scene. “Do you hear that song Veynar?”

Veynar did not speak at first, Calden wasn't sure if he ever would. “I did not. But if you are, I fear that I know what it means…”

*****

Far away, sitting upon an obsidian throne, the Mortem King stirred. His voice was deep and echoed through bone. “Another rises.” He stood, his skull wailing primordial while his arms reached and his hands savaged a terrible rune in the air. Satisfied, the Mortem King returned to his throne and spoke again, “Another rises, and another will fall.”

In Kaleum, candles flickered and sputtered. Fires died next and darkness congealed. The air crispened and the ground rattled. The earth churned at the gate and a hellish glow traveled in fissures and seams along it before making its thunderous crescendo. The ground heaved outward, mystic flame and molten rock spewing, making way…for something.

“Sorceries!” The Elder rushed to the open swinging door and saw towering figures at the edge of the village. The gate burned around them. Violet blue flames licked nearby fences and buildings. They did not march here, they were delivered.

They were the Mortem, Armored skeletal warriors clad in blackened armor ribbed like forged bone. At the fore of their command a fleshless hand lifted a blade of screaming souls and pointed. Its subordinates obeyed, fanning out in unison to begin cutting down the residents of Kaleum.

Calden’s shard pulsed in his hand. Amid the chaos, the song in his head grew urgent, loud and rhythmic. Outside, screams from villagers shrieked in despair. 

“Hide!” Veynar slammed the door shut and his commanding voice snapped Calden back to reality. He shoved Calden towards the rug in the center of the floor. “Into the root cellar! Open the hatch! Now!”

Calden dropped into the low space beneath the floor, and tumbled a landing. Steadying himself in the dark, his hand found a hilt. Instinctively he pulled. It was a great blade, wrapped in the same dirty cloth as the shard and tied with another leather cord. 

Calden didn't have time to consider how many secrets Veynar truly held. He looked up through the slits between the floorboards and saw the door splinter and explode inward. Veynar was thrown to the ground. Full frame in the former doorway stood not just any Mortem, but an elite, a Choir’mourn. Its adorned helm was formed by jagged bone and crowned with batlike wings. The Choir’mourn lowered its fearsome head and charged in.

Veynar tried to push himself up from the floor but the Choir’mourn reached him first and drove its sword through his back and into the wooden floor, scraping Calden’s cheek below. Veynar’s head turned and his fading eyes met Calden’s through the crack. Calden whipped his hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

Without hesitation the Choir’mourn withdrew its blade from Veynar's body and moved toward the hatch. The erupting door frame had tipped chairs, broken their table and flung the carpet from its place secreting the hatch to the back wall. Calden's hiding spot was now clearly visible. A gauntleted hand drove through the wood like filament, grasped Calden around the neck and pulled him back through, effortlessly cracking the floorboards around him. Maybe his clavicle too. The Choir’mourn tossed him to the ground beside Veynar’s body and raised its screaming sword to strike. Calden closed his eyes and prepared to join the souls trapped within the blade's edge.

Death did not arrive. Instead, something caused this juggernaut to hesitate. Calden was prostrate, holding the clothbound sword in one hand and clutching the shard to his breast with the other. The song, though fearfully faint, sustained him. Slowly he stood.

“You are Corthanis?” the Choir’mourn spoke, haunted with rare surprise. It continued to speak, but Calden couldn't hear it. The song grew from within and drowned out the horror, propelling him forward to face the evil that was destroying the place that through it all, felt like home. He saw his moment and knew.

Calden screamed, and searing over the rhythm in his mind he cocked back and jabbed with his shard-bearing hand. His gem laden palm struck the Choir’mourn’s chest and the armor crumpled like tin around it. Calden's blow continued until his fist burst through the creature's back. In an eruption of otherworldly light, the Choir’mourn evaporated, dropping its pile of broken, writhing armor behind. Calden fell to his knees. He wanted to weep but kept moving, the melody carried him, the beat providing cadence to carry on.

In a daze, Calden reflected on the name that the Choir’mourn addressed him as: “Corthanis.” He looked to cover Veynar, but saw nothing usable. He closed his foster fathers eyes and knew the old man wouldn't have kept a name from him.

His trance was broken by the frantic screams of nearby villagers, friends that might as well be family dying in the street. Because of him? Could he save any of them? The song relented and the familiar feeling of claustrophobic anger returned, of feeling trapped and abandoned at once, the chorus rose and sharpened his rage into an edge of instinct. He turned his focus to the fallen shell. 

The cursed armor took notice. It began to whisper to the boy. Calden felt it competing to speak over the shardsong for his attention,

“You are seen and remembered Corthanis,” an incorporeal voice hissed while the ruined armor scraped across the broken floor towards Calden. The shard began to pulse, hot in Calden’s clenched fist. Shaking his head as if waking from a nightmare, Calden took a startled hop step back and did the only thing that had done any good tonight. He raised the radiant shard like a shield and howled his rage at Veynar's death like a feral dirge – the stone would save him. Wouldn't it?

Calden watched with arm outstretched, shard in hand as the armor rose into full bodily form, pieces loosely shambling and bobbing forward in the air. As the gauntlet's wicked clawed fingers neared his bloodied face, Calden used his gem hand to strike it away. Like hitting stone. The armor hovered on, slow and immovable, course determined. Calden slapped the gauntlet back again, it didn't budge and to his horror, neither did he when he pulled back for another strike. His hand began to fuse with the gauntlet in a burning, unnatural union. He quickly reached for the shard with his other hand, he must keep it… safe

The armor pulled itself towards Calden as it continued to distort, wrap and forge itself onto his body. This was a new rhythm. Wrist, forearm, elbow, shoulder, torso… The armor continued to envelope him until it reached Calden’s opposite hand, the last visible trace of skin and shard. And in the final moments of Calden’s known self, he saw dimming, pale green light as the pair was swallowed whole by the obsidian armor.

“Born Corthanis, but Calden… is, grmmm…” the armor growled gravel in the darkness. It began to corrupt and twist Calden’s body and mind beneath its hardening exterior. The boy felt his thoughts slipping and his body warping and melding, and he wondered how he was alive at all. He could feel the suit withering his very being and clung to images that felt like home: shared days with Veynar, the goats and good people of the village ambling about, of the secrets he had finally uncovered about himself this night – more than he bargained for, but still not enough. 

“I now know what I was hidden from,” Calden scraped what remained of his thoughts from despair and addressed the armor directly, “I do not know why, but I will not let it take me! Veynar died without knowing. the people outside… screaming,” his voice trailed off, it was getting more and more difficult to maintain himself with each passing second.

In the darkness of his mind's eye, he saw a flicker. Singular at first. And another, and another. Each pulsing green light and tone like a firefly signaling others in the night. His chest thumped. And again. Whatever it was, it was working. The wisps coalesced into blinding green light beating back the ichorous black around him. The shard would not let Calden succumb without a fight. 

Calden wrapped his arms around his chest and stooped in pain. A violent battle raged within. He tried to take control, but felt like an onlooker in his own body. His breast thumped again, the shard settling in the chest cavity of his reforging body, a new heart pumping life and hope throughout his veins. The armor took notice. 

Two ancient and opposing relics were at war. Equal in measure, the fight between the cursed armor and the shard assured mutual destruction. Perhaps Kaleum and this half of the forest would burn as well. 

The song of their magics refused to harmonize; a battle between the touch of hope and the taint of corruption, good and evil both unyielding. Calden struggled to stand. He needed to get outside. He needed air, and he needed to help the village. “I am responsible, I am their greatest tragedy and I cannot die here in vain without doing something” he thought. He pushed himself, and rose to his feet, determined to put an end to the horror. Hope soared. Step by plodding step, he made it to and out the door, retrieving Veynar’s sword along the way.

The beat in his chest intensified. He staggered in the street. He could feel tendrils of the armor refusing to give up the fight within. The shard needed him, it was powerful yes, but Calden’s will itself would tip the scales in their favor. He would make the song his own.

Calden set to work. He listened first and then began to craft. He found weakness in the shards' tone and fortified it with tempo and drive from the armor. Reluctant drums pounded a defensive march that shook the armor's core as it resisted purpose, life itself. Calden reached for the tendrils that sought to wriggle in and corrupt, swift and gentle he began plucking them like dulcimer strings in his mind. Something new was taking shape while Calden wove his own song…

***

Smoke vented from the seams of Calden’s jet bone armor. He returned from the battle within, to chaos in a ravaged Kaleum. Moving to unsheath Veynar's sword from the cloth, the armor grew rigid and stiff against his will. The music was gone. He stopped, frozen, statuesque. For a moment he thought himself a prisoner, the armor his tomb. It had won. No. Calden flexed with every fiber of his being and tried to move the only direction he knew – forward. 

Cracks began to appear on the surface of the armor, small hair-sized fractures at first, combining into cloudiness and then like a crumbling husk, began to fall away like burnt papers. Shrieks of a thousand lost souls escaped the suit. Calden dropped to his knees, ringed by a pile of thick black ash.

Head bowed, he began to rise anew. A final dusting of soot and light shook itself from each crease and crevice of Calden’s new suit, standing tall, revealing a pale ivory, gilded armor in place of the Choir’mourn's wretched and blasphemous plate.

The armor whispered once again. Pleading this time, beaten and sorrowful, “Our King took our name from us… do not let him take yours.”

Calden shook his head in disbelief and gave himself a quick pat down to be sure he was really there. The shard beat stronger in his chest. A montage of images scrolled in his mind:

Snowfall drifts across marble towers. 

Hands hold him close. 

A forbidden lullaby he shouldn’t understand, and 

A gentle voice calling him… Corthanis.

Screams cut off the vision and punched him back to the waking nightmare that had become his reality. Wanton slaughter continued throughout the village – dead, dying and in-between littering the streets while Choir’mourn ripped survivors from their hiding spots.

He felt the renewed purpose of his song.

Calden raised Veynar’s sword with two hands and took a fighting stance. In a fell movement he lunged and spun, the violence he intended felt pure and just. A new choir raised up inside him, this one neither wholly light nor dark, but eventide. It belted a haunting aria as he squeezed. The blade, now an extension of himself, flashed green from tip to hilt, acknowledging its bearer.

“I will not hide!” Calden resolved. “This King you speak of shall know me by name!” He sealed an oath through clenched teeth. Calden would claim his birthright. From a low growl to a thunderous shout, Corthanis howled, “And by my hand he shall die!”

Mortem after Mortem fell to his blade. He cut through them like chopping wood; splitting helms, lopping limbs and cleaving torsos twain. The fire within would not relent until each one of these vile soldiers was left an empty, twitching pile of armor in the street.

Through the windows of a cottage to his right a Choir’mourn raised his blade to a family.

With one swipe of Corthanis’s blade, the side of the home erupted in an explosion of wood, steel and debris. The attacking Mortem froze for a moment to assess what they were seeing: a white armored figure emerging from the swirling dust. 

“RUN!!!” Corthanis screamed toward the innocents. And without equivocation, he rushed the nearest abomination, driving his sword, wrist and elbow through the still stunned Mortem. He had not even begun…

***

A safe distance from the carnage, under the shadows of the treeline, a low voice, surprised, questioned, “What am I looking at, Curfew? Mortem fighting Mortem?”

“Shh. They're likely to hear you…the boy did. Can't take you anywhere,” Curfew couldn't resist a jab at his companion for their near discovery by Calden earlier in the day.

The lines on Curfew’s face drew taut and he tightened his grip around his ax. Something began to stir within him, memories of armor cursed, of the throne he once stood abreast, “Vesperon my friend, this Mortem clad in white is familiar in ancient ways.”

“So cryptic,” Vesperon cocked his head and smirked, “Are we gonna give the kid a hand or not?”

As Vesperon and Curfew emerged from their camp at the forest rim, moonlight revealed their monster-mocked armor. Emblazoned with ferocious parts from slain quarries – some for magic and others for reputation – the pair has provoked retreat into the skulking night from even the most ghastly of beasts and horrors, and they have never feared to follow. They are the hunters who stalk the world’s darkest evils in the hope that ordinary and innocent lives never have to see the teeth that lie in wait in the dead of night.

They are the Eventide.