the White Martyr

The White Martyr

The door was immense. In any other place its sheer expanse would be a thing to test a man’s sanity. The immensity of it, the impossibility of a portal so big, might have been enough to break even the most vehement of minds.

But the man just stood there atop those four-and-ninety stairs, body withered by a journey that no man should have completed, let alone bested.

He had set out at the head of a great army from the distant east, commanding cadres and legions of warriors and elites, each the strongest, the purest, the most trusted troops of their nations. From Naharia came the orsmen; brawlers and wrestlers, of great hearts and fortitudes to match their frigid homes. From the plains of Sietha came mounted paladins, proud and resplendent in their moon armour; their leaders reciting texts of the Mond Mena atop the howdahs of their thunder-beasts. From farther east came the Acolytes of Lumia, their esoteric arts invaluable. The guardians of the Meres of Rath Halla came astride crested achlis’s, their autumn banners melancholic even as they marched in defiance of the growing canker in the south-and-west. 

All manner of creatures marched behind their great leader. Sphinxes, august and aloof, their thoughts singular, their actions likewise. Elyouhns with braided manes and metal-wrought weapons roared their defiance at skies that bled filth. From their mountain-top aeries came the Axex, their bejewelled wings rendering those below in great shade. The sonorous calls of the Buraki sounded for miles around, heralding their presence to those in whose lands they marched.

Millions of souls, each a warrior of light, fighting the downfall of the obscenity that had taken root in the deserts of Kharkharadontis. Each a champion who had vanquished demons and countless other blights on this world. 

Each a legend in his own time.

Each and every one of them dead; claimed by the torturous road south-and-west. Fallen in battle, and to the protestations of the land itself. None remained but he, the hero; Azhar of Kheren, Leader of Men, Uniter of Tribes and Defier of The Darkness. The Hero of a thousand Battles.

He stood before that great door, alone, his mind wrought by deaths that no other man should have been burdened with. For years uncounted his life had been held ransom by Kharkharadontis, each step of pilgrimage a test of his courage and sanity. Like pages ripped from a book, his memories had been stripped slowly from him. The bubonic waters of the Morraine; the ashen veil of the Gerredi wastes; the predation of lurkers and skulkers, of agents of the grotesque pantheon – each and every encounter had killed a part of his humanity, leaving in its place a hollow thing, a vessel of good, an agent of light to those who yet prayed to the Empyrean for salvation. 

No longer was he a man. He was reborn: an Avatar of Light.

His name forgotten, his memories forfeit; he was shorn of fear and doubt. 

No sight or experience, no matter how marvellous or miraculous, could stand in his way. For if not, he would have fallen when faced by, the veiled perfection of Shetu-Mal, the writhing madness that was Aethall Don Y mall, and the insidious folly of Carceri and countless others.

He had come to liberate the world of its disease, to topple this immeasurable palace into the grey deserts that surrounded it, to justify the deaths of his men. From the halls of Baelor to the harbours of Dororath, people were waiting for this moment, and he would not disappoint.

He meditated, eyes aflame with the light of the Empyrean. In that light he basked, drawing on the strength of the Empyrean. Around him flitted despicable things, their bodies scions of darkness, wretchedness and decay. They snapped at him with maws that dripped with darkest intent and spied on him with eyes blinded by wickedness. But not once did they touch him. Their numbers grew, drawn by the despicable cries of their brethren, until a cloud of millions of those kobbold-kin surrounded him, trying in vain to separate him from the world.

Their sound became deafening, a cacophony of shrieks and yelps, brays and howls that echoed across that foul realm, a beacon for miles around that the light had arrived, that the time of death was near.

They brought the despair of the Daekyni pit with them. The air grew foul, and a despicable cold came to envelop them. The metal staircase froze, cracked. Frost covered the carved door, its sybaritic scenes and grotesque imagery hidden beneath a blanket of white sown by sapping presence of those wretched things.

The vessel of light stood finally, his body as though divorced from the frigid hell that had encircled him, standing proud. Feet scorched the ground where they stood and a great mane of light did then erupt around his head and back, flaming with the brilliance of the Empyrean. The demons screeched at the rebuke, but it was his word that banished them. 

A simple command spoken as though in afterthought, “Begone.”

The word of censure struck each like a warhammer, breaking their bodies and casting them back into the pit of despair that had spawned them.

And like that, in an instant fuelled by light and a single word, they were gone. The place was a grave: silent, cold; a dark vestibule offering death and suffering to those who would dare enter.

And the Avatar dared.

He stood, the mane of light flickering and whipping about him as though a torrent were raging. Stoic eyes surveyed the door.

His hands were on the door, tracing lines across cracks, before resting flat against them like a healer laying hands. His hands glowed red then white. The air shimmered around him, the heat lifting away from him in great waves that dispersed around that landscape.

Then, like a beast enraged, he began tearing at the door. The ground trembled and for miles around it split, cracking as though the spent bodies of those interred around it were in the process of exhuming themselves. But nothing came of it save the breaking up of that desert, the crumbling of its rocks and the shaking of that palace’s foundations.

He tunnelled through that door. And then, finally, he was through, standing in a hall without horizon, save for the pitted floor at his feet and the steel monoliths that supported a roof unseen.

The place was a tomb, the echoing of lifeless sounds filling its bowels even as dust filled the hall at the intruder’s every footfall. Distant shrieks and jeers filtered through the air, echoing eerily across untold distance.

Paraments sporting icons and designs that stung the eyes hung from dark nothingness, swaying gently in the dank air, their matted lengths hanging in grey tatters.

He walked, the Empyrean guiding him amid the fanfare of disembodied moans.

And then a boundless groan disturbed the dust. From a great dais barely visible in the haze of distance, he spied a movement; an immense half-hidden mass uncoiling and slithering.

He stood fast, the flames of the Empyrean burning around him, rendering him in the light of a great beacon that fought against the darkness. But in that place, so far from the warmth of the sun, he was but an insect in an endless tract of nothingness.

And then it was before him: a gargantuan, its body neither flesh, nor ore, but a vile marriage of the two, its spindly limbs held together by black muscles that pulled on glinting bones that dripped with a foulness that took root in the wake of its colossal steps, sprouting sickening things that writhed and struggled in birth pangs against their Cimmerian bonds. 

The shapeless grotesques screamed like banshees of old, clamouring about each other for the flesh of the intruder, even as above them the primogenitor strode on.

It towered above him, a demon of the nascent world that observed its realms with an eyeless face surrounded by a crown-like crest of disembodied bone. Elsewhere on its body, a sea of faces writhed, drooling shadowstuff that hung like a forest of swaying vines, sticking to the floor and taking root.

The Hero of a Thousand Battles stood, the mane of white fire burning brightly about him. “I am come to end your reign,” he said, his voice a thing of conviction. It reverberated in the darkness, bringing hope to a realm that had none. 

But when the words subsided, their last lingering sound vanishing into darkness, nothing was changed. The demon stood above him, a million sightless eyes fixated on him.

“I have marched across deserts of rust and the ruin of civilizations destroyed by your foulness. I have seen the horrors that you have sown and I have vanquished them all. Now you alone remain, lurking in your tomb without hope of victory. I will sunder your body, will consume it in the heat of the Empyrean until nought is left. I will topple this mausoleum with my very hands and will cast the rubble across the land so that everyone can see that I have destroyed your reign.”

A groan, its low sounds shaking the room, echoed across the endless hall in reply. The beast remained standing, swaying gently as mouths screeched from nameless pits about its body, as tendrils of the shadow slithered across the floor, tearing themselves away from their roots finally. 

In a great horde, their numbers without end, did they lumber towards him. A flood of darkness, undulating, rising and falling amongst itself, collapsing and reforming in new shapes that broke away from the main only to rejoin in a deluge of sin and filth. 

He was surrounded, engulfed, but not beaten. The light of the Empyrean erupted about him in a halo of death that scorched everything about it. Shadowstuff grew hard, crusty, fused into place. It cracked, fell to the ground and shattering, as what remained of the mass struggled onwards, moaning in defeat. And the flood subsided, leaving in its wake a filth that stretched onwards like glacial plains, as far as the eye could manage.

The gargantuan, its impossible body hovering with a patience that spanned ages, lowered itself, appendages and tentacles, all writhing against one another, sticking  and tearing, feeling, probing. The distance now lessened, the true horror of its being was made apparent. Eyes in their uncounted thousands surveyed the room, each moving independently to the last, some nesting in tentacles, others collected about each other like a gelatinous hive, each flitting about in utter chaos, no one eye following the movements of another.

“I am here to end you and all that you have brought forth into the world,” said the hero as the mane of brilliant light flared into life, setting alight the ruin of his hellish adversaries

A great hole did tear in the demon’s gut. Countless eyes fell in an impossible rain from its cavity. Claws and tendrils. Many-jointed fingers and appendages, some thick and oozing filth, other spindly and dripping venom, erupted from its body, expanding until the demon was a changed thing – one impossible form melding into another.

The floor, covered in a carpet of jelly and gore, began undulating, rising and falling as though in pangs of breath. Buboes formed, each throbbing with an inner vigor. In moments they were grown, erupting, revealing disparate things that marched towards the Avatar with a singular intent. They surrounded him, clamoured around him, tried with desperation to consume him and end his sojourn on the mortal world.

But the strength of one overcame the many and with the Empyrean in his heart and  rusted blade in his hand, he saw them off in a cavalcade of death and ichor. When finally he was done, he was bathed in the reeking filth that remained of those monstrous things.

“I have fought life itself to get here, have opposed the very laws of nature. You will not stop me, now come and be judged, that the world may move on to a new age of peace,” he roared. 

Under the scrutiny of his light was the body of that horrid behemoth revealed in its totality; a vestigial thing from elyden’s primordial age, cast away by the Great Creator, allowed to rot and perish in the deep places of the world, where its haunted dreams festered.

He knew not how, but this history and more was revealed to him under the gaze of that abomination. And, as the realisation of his folly began to dawn on him, he heard a voice like oil in water, drifting from the darkness without the glow cast by the dying flames.

“Who are you to oppose the scions of elder days? You, who are but a mortal speck beneath my fingernails. You who think you are a saviour of the yoked. What makes you so different from those who have come before you?”

“I am the One. I have brought tribes together, united them in promise of your downfall,” he said, knowing now that he was addressing the true master of this dread realm.

“You mortals and your promises. Just a word, hollow and vain, like you. I could snap you now, with but a thought. I can pulverise your bones, liquidise your flesh and imprison the speck for soul that remains. I can thread you to the Penumbra and weave your anguished screams across Elyden.”

“Words. Where you speak and threaten, I act!” said the flame-maned saviour, his sword suddenly ablaze. He charged.

He made a half-step before being hurled to the ground. A pain unfelt before cursed through him, but he stifled it, cleared his thoughts, saw nothing but the Empyrean, and stood.

Only he could not. His body was immobile, his body crushed. For a desperate second he feared, but the disparaging thought was gone in an instant, replaced with a renewed vigor. His master was the Empyrean; the realm of thought, and asceticism, and austerities. There was nothing that could be achieved by the physical that could not also be attained through perseverance of thought.

With a thought the great white flame was his again and his body was lifting itself from the ground, suspended limply like a man crucified. The flame of the Empyrean burnt with such fervour and intensity that his clothes were burnt, the metal of his accoutrements melted. Around him, the ruined corpses of vanquished fiends liquefied, festering into nothingness in a heartbeat, leaving a crusty slag behind.

“There is nothing you can break that I cannot remedy. Face me coward! I did not march across nations and defeat horrors to trade words with a shadow.”

“Is that not what you seek here? The Shadow?”

“Show yourself!” as though egged by the passion of his words, the mane about him illuminated the room in an impossible light that blotted all in its uncompromising glare. All but for a figure of darkness that stood in stark contrast; not even the light of the Empyrean able to penetrate it. It was a silhouette of darkness, a figure of unabashed wickedness. Large, strident, it moved closer, raising a hand. 

“I am the Usurper of Dynasties, the Destroyer of Bonds. I am the Great Hater, the Schemer, the Silent Entity. I am he who waits. I am he who will rise in their wake to claim the world. I am he who Corrupts. I am Rachanael, the Conspiring Scion, Demiurge Eternal. And you will die.”

And then, as though the gesture were a command, the light, the mane, the trespasser’s strength; were all gone. The lifeless body remained suspended, its limp body naked, suddenly cold.

The Demiurge retreated.

* * *

Years later, when the empire that suckled on Rachanael’s corrupt teat had festered around the Inner Sea, a pilgrim travelled to what we still know today as Kharkharadontis.

Like Azhar, and so many before and since, he braved the horrors of that desert. He crossed seas of burning sands, bypassed hordes of aberrant tribes, made pacts with withered creatures that may once have been human. He gathered followers -scholars and shapers - from the eastern world, as Azhar of Kheren once had. Together they survived the perils of that harsh land and came to the Sepulchral Palace. 

Their minds broken by what they encountered, they turned back with a prize that they hauled throughout the known world to their home. Unopposed by the denizens of the blackened world and their kin, they travelled east to what is now the Meniscus, where they placed the desiccated idol they collected in Kharkharadontis.

It remains there in a monolithic temple to this day; a floating idol of purest alabaster in the design of a man crucified by his ideals. Little do the reverent wretches that have grown to pay tribute to that idol know the pain that surrounds it, the White Martyr.  

* * *