Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

I try not to dream. There are too many things in the world that can use them as doors into you, and in my line of work it’s best not to take the risk.

Charms and spells can help keep your mind safe from intrusion. Travelers and farmers will ward their beasts for the same reason. Knights will inscribe their armaments with holy scrawls or embed them with blessed medals to ward off unwelcome spirits in the wild.

The world’s thick with old memories, old wrongs, and all those ghosts are more than ready to complain at you about it. Traveling anywhere can be a risk. Near every village has a witch or hedge mage who will make curse traps for a pittance.

I have my ring. It traps the dark dreams, and the dark things that might use them as doors into my psyche — but it traps the good ones as well, rips them right out of my head. I don’t ever remember them when I wake. When I sleep, I sleep black.

Sometimes, when I can’t stand the quiet in myself any longer, despite the danger, I’ll take the ring off and welcome it all in. The dreams, the nightmares, the memories that can feel like both. Doesn’t matter much. My waking life is often a nightmare ugly as anything my mind can conjure.

Often, anyway.

I’d given my ring to Maxim to help the old knight find some rest. He slept on the small bed in the cottage’s one room. Though he stirred and muttered, he’d managed to fall unconscious sometime in the night. I sat awake against one wall, content with a blanket and a roof over my head, rubbing at my naked finger, watching the wisps play in the hearth. The fire crackled, warm and welcoming.

I fell into it.

***

Bird song tickled my ears. Warm sunlight kissed my skin. A soft breeze brushed against my cheek.

No. The soft breeze was a teasing breath pushed through pursed lips.

“Stop that,” I muttered. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“You’ve been asleep an hour. Sun’s almost above the Beryglass.”

I took that in a moment. “Damn.” I craned my neck, winced as I felt it pop, then started to stand. A firm hand pressed me back against the eardtree. The hand’s touch softened, thin fingers gliding up the ivy-chased contours of my armor to trace my jaw.

“I need to go, Dei.” I opened my eyes to fix her with a stern look. Any sternness I might have felt scattered when, even as my eyes began to open, she pressed forward to kiss me. The kiss was not chaste, or brief, and for a moment I became lost in a storm of pale hair and warmth and hungry lips. When she pulled back, I had to take a moment to catch my breath. Gray eyes speckled with green twinkled knowingly.

“You don’t need to go anywhere,” Dei said against my cheek, breath warm as summer sun. “You’re already where I want you.”

Again, my eyes nearly slid shut — this time in an effort to muster a thought. “Table’s gathering,” I said, voice rough. “I should be there.”

The holy sister clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Let those old men talk. I have you less and less lately — let me enjoy it a while longer.”

She settled against me, pressing her cheek and one hand to the smooth surface of my breastplate. Even warmed by the sun, it couldn’t have been comfortable. Still, she relaxed as easily as if my armor were a downy pillow, sighing in content. My gold-and-green cloak and rich surcoat intermingled with the gray-and-silver of her clerical vestments. She’d removed her clericon circlet — a band of silver, gold, and brass intertwined — and hung it on the crossguard of my sword, which leaned against the tree nearby. I felt certain that was some kind of infraction in her order.

It would all be done soon, anyway. I couldn’t quite remember why.

“Longer we stay,” I said, trying to be reasonable, “the more chance someone will see us.”

She scoffed without opening her eyes. “Let them.”

“Dei…” I shifted lightly. She was small, pushing slight, and hardly a weight even with all my war gear and Alder accoutrements. “You’re a holy sister of the Cenocastia, and my confessor. It wouldn’t be…” I struggled for a word.

“Seemly?” She arched a light brown eyebrow, enunciating the word strangely, as though she were tasting it. “It’s not like all the members of my order swear vows of celibacy. We’re not a gaggle of repressed old buggers like those zealots in the Priory. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s going to stumble on us rutting under the boughs. We’re just enjoying the sun.”

I shifted again. When the priestess opened a single lid to inspect my face through her lashes and saw my blush, she let out a breathy laugh. “Oh dear. Now I’ve put that idea in your head. Do try to keep your calm, Ser Knight, ‘twas only a jest.”

“You are perfectly safe with me, Sister Fidei.”

“I am grateful to hear it, Ser Alken. Still, if you see these trysts of ours as sin, then perhaps I should assign you penance.”

“Oh?” I arched an eyebrow.

In reply, a secret smile formed across her small mouth. “Yes. There is a collection I’ve been transcribing of late — Mysteries of Mediir, originally penned by the historian Lorenz of Dolorna. I’m going to loan you the first volume when I’m done with it.”

Feeling as though my eyes were already glazing, I coughed and said, “that’s… very kind.”

“Mhm. Oh, don’t pout dear. I know you’re no illiterate, but you must exercise things besides those biceps of yours.” She traced a finger along my upper arm as she spoke. “A good knight is wise as well as skilled in feats of arms.”

“I would have thought you’d have me reading holy scripture instead of texts about pagan empires.”

“Do you want to read scripture?” Dei asked, raising her eyebrows.

I took a deep breath. Playful as she might be, odd as our closeness was — a clericon of the Faith and a knight of the Alder Table — she was still a priestess. “I think either of my answers to that question might earn me more penance,” I said diplomatically.

“Oh?” Dei asked. “Do explain.”

“It’s sinful for a knight to lie,” I said gravely. “Especially to a priest. And, if I don’t lie, I’ll be admitting to a servant of the God-Queen’s own church that I don’t want to burn candlelight reading Her holy word. Besides, isn’t it your job to read to us iron-heads?”

“So brazen! Just for that, I will assign you vigil as well. Tomorrow night, I think, you will stand watch at the Pool of Amerys until dawn in meditation.”

“That’s a lonely part of the city,” I commented idly, hoping she couldn’t hear my heart quickening through the layers of gilded steel plate and chainmail. “A poorly lit part as well.”

“Are you afraid of the dark, Alder Knight?”

“Only what might be in it,” I said.

Dei pressed closer to me, hiding her smile behind a curtain of pale yellow hair.

Birds — true birds, of the kind that couldn’t be found anywhere else outside the Elder Realm — flitted through trees that shone like marble under the sun. Beyond the grove of aura-rich eardetrees, towers of glass and silver gleamed in the day, crowned by great palaces of gold-touched clouds high above. The music of a flute came from somewhere, beautiful and sad.

All the wonders of Seydis, realm of elves and elder-things, the City Ever Dreaming, Tiir Ilyasven, Gilded hall of God’s own chosen archon, waited for me. A council of legends — of heroes and lords and kings — gathered, and I had a seat at the table. Quite the place to be, for a commoner’s son from a poor domain. How had I risen so far?

Chance, chance, chance, and a strong sword arm, and the will of those wiser and mightier than me. I’d fought hard to be here, but I didn’t fool myself into believing my own merit had lifted me so high. Rosanna and Lias would be at the council. I needed to go, to stand by my queen, my patron, and make a good showing of myself.

I lingered in the grove, preferring a few more stolen moments with Dei to all of it. We’d stolen what moments we could, in those last months. She had been a resource, at first, with her order’s occult knowledge and histories. Then she’d been my confessor, then my confidant… then more. It had been hard to put a label on it, our relationship. Not amorous. She had been a Lay Sister of the Cenocaste, a scholar-priestess, and I had been an Alder Knight, a paladin. She’d offered me advice, knowledge, and empathy.

Slow-witted as I can be — and I had been much worse back then — It had taken me a long time to realize I was falling in love with her. When I’d realized it, it had taken me even longer to admit it to her. We’d shared our first kiss the day I had.

Then...

It had all gone wrong. Which was why I knew the truth of what I said next.

“This is a dream,” I mumbled against Dei’s hair, breathing in her scent.

“Flatterer,” she said, smiling without opening her eyes. “I thought all that knightly talk embarrassed you. It’s for lords and poets, not me, you said.”

“I’m an Alder Knight,” I said. “They trained me to know the difference, to see through illusion.” I paused, feeling as though my next words were not unlike setting a broken limb, or pulling an arrow. Necessary, but painful. “You’re gone. This city burned. We were never together, not like this.”

Dei didn’t reply at once, though she became more still. Then, with a sigh, she pressed closer. burying her face beneath my arm so her next words came muffled. “Dreams don’t have to be a lie.”

“This one is,” I said softly, stroking her blond hair. In the real city, she’d cut her hair into a medium-length bob, not let it grow long like this. The feminine mane was my own fancy, just as the real Fidei hadn’t been nearly as flirtatious. My mind had conjured a more seductive version of her.

It didn’t compare.

Dei’s voice turned bitter. “I haven’t been able to find you. You were lost to me in the dark.”

“That’s because I didn’t want to see this,” I said. “I didn’t want to remember.”

“Liar.”

The sky changed color as we lay together in the grove. From blue and white and gold to something more molten.

“Why can’t we dream?” Dei asked softly, her words almost a whisper, almost quiet enough to hide the edge of pain in them. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Because I don’t know if you are my memory,” I said, “or a shadow.”

“That’s not an answer.”

I pressed my lips together, frustrated. Dei lifted herself by her arms, studying my face fondly. Possessively. She twined several strands of my hair — red touched with gold, like gilded copper — around her long fingers. It’d gained that sheen after I’d sworn my oaths.

“My golden knight,” she said, smiling warmly.

I focused hard on her face, drinking in the details, burning them into my memory. Part of me had feared I’d never see her like this again, that I’d always remember how she’d looked at the end — that my memory of her would always be a poison.

Fidei was pretty, more than she could have been called beautiful. She had soft features, nearing delicate, with sleepy eyes and a convex nose just a bit too long for her face. I’d enjoyed that minor imperfection — it made her seem more studious, more mature. She was slim as a reed, her large gray-green eyes and paleness making the overall effect almost ghostly, and indeed she’d often been less than hale.

A sharp contrast to me, built tall and heavy, sharp-eyed and angular as I was. Our differences went beyond the physical. Where I tended to stray easily into idle thoughts and brooding, the world at large tugging at me with a hundred invisible strings, her mind had an easy focus, a way of looking into you and seeing, knowing, understanding, without judgement or mockery. She’d been kind. Patient. I’d too often been a bore, full of stress and suspicion, lost as I’d been among elven illusions and lordly politics.

It made her an astute confessor. It hadn’t taken her long to break through my walls. Had there been anything I hadn’t told her, once?

Ten years of sin now. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

My jaw clenched, unclenched, tightened again. My lips trembled. When I managed to speak, the ache in me made my words a rasp. “I miss you.”

She rose then to straddle me, adjusting her silver-trimmed robes until she’d settled again. Her silhouette helped block the sight of the sky turning to blood, of the glow of flame rising beyond tree and tower. She placed both hands to either side of my face before leaning forward to kiss my forehead, just above the left eyebrow. Her lips drifted lower, patient. She stopped when our mouths brushed together, breathing her next words into me.

“There are few worse hells than being alone even amid plentiful company.”

“I’ve been lost in the dark so long,” I hissed, voice strained. “I don’t know where I’m going, where this path ends. It started here, with you… how did it all get so twisted? Why did you have to—”

She silenced me with another kiss, this one brief. She fixed her eyes on mine when she pulled away, so they filled my vision. “Look too deep into anything, Alken, and you will find rot. The past can’t be changed, and there is no threshold pain cannot exceed, no height to which debris cannot stack. I have seen the gates of Onsolem — filth can tower into eternity itself. There are times you must climb it, if you wish to see the sun.”

I wanted more than anything to weep. The tears wouldn’t come, and that dry pressure was a small hell. “I cannot climb this. There’s nothing above it I care about — I’ve seen the gods, seen the dead. The world is broken.”

“If you cannot find happiness in paradise,” Dei said, eyes impossibly wide, her slender frame backlit by the rising flames so it seemed cast in deep shadow, so that she was a shadow, “then seek it elsewhere. There are worlds in the darkness, my knight.”

She pressed her forehead against mine, locking our eyes. “I am waiting for you there.”

The grove around us turned to ashes as fire consumed the dream.

I woke to a panicked shout, and the sight of an object hurtling towards my face.