Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

Red Hare bore down on Hogbarrell, black scales rustling like obsidian armor, fiery mane and tale blazing behind him like a comet as the Demon and his mount got up to full speed. A hundred spans away. Fifty spans away.

The Demon's halberd whipped out behind him ready to strike as he leaned lower into his saddle and…

The assembled warlords flung themselves to the ground as wooden shards washed over us.

A few of them rose, quivering and bloodied by shrapnel. Orchid Mantis screamed and whimpered.

I had instinctively flung myself behind my tipped camp chair for what little cover it could offer me and I rose now, hesitantly.

The moment Red Hare in all its ferocious armored glory had made contact with the eighteen span flagpole, every fiber of its wood had exploded outward all at once, turning it from solid wood into a mist of splinters in the space of an instant. I looked up to see that this unexpected challenger, this Hogbarrel, hadn't moved in the slightest as the Demon made his pass. The Demon had opted to crush this newest challenger beneath Red Hare's hooves but Hogbarrel had directed his makeshift pike straight for the beast's chest. Powerful and naturally armored as the Demon's mount was, the pointed end of the flagpole glanced off in the moment all the force of the most powerful mount in the Land Under Heaven transferred into mere wood.

Any another pikeman would have been annihilated by such force, but this Hogbarrel hadn't moved a span. The pike had damned-near vaporized, but as Red Hare had continued through the charge, its chest – the chest that had broken a god-horse – had met the shoulder of a bare-chested man.

Red Hare had bounced off of him. Bounced? I shook myself to run through that moment again in my head. The pike had shattered. Red Hare had closed the last few spans of distance. And Hogbarrell had leaned in behind one shoulder. Where his body met the scales of Red Hare, the Demon's horse let out a wheeze and glanced to one side before taking an awkward and surprised step to continue on past the seemingly unprepared pikeman.

Hogbarrell straighted up, shaking the wooden splinters from his hands and chest, bleeding in a few places where they had punctured him but otherwise mostly unscathed.

The Demon wheeled, a scowl on his face.

If the Demon and his mount were an unstoppable force, they had just met the immovable stance of Hogbarrell. Red Hare and its rider came around again, and Hogbarrell settled back into his stance – a wrestler's stance this time, as he was now unarmed as well as unarmoured.

The Demon's scowl turned into another determined grin.

I still gripped the back of my camp chair. When the Demon's whip cracked, the sky broke black and red again, and Terror washed over the combined lords, it was all I could do to dig my fingernails into the wood of the chair-back to keep from cowering to the ground before me.

The fact that I had managed to keep my feet was the only reason I saw the impossible.

Red lightning split the sky overhead as the dark cloud of terror poured off of the Demon and his mount in a wave. It surrounded and consumed the weaponless Hogbarrell, and though the brash man's eyes bulged in terror, his stance remained unmovable. He still awaited the most powerful mount in the Land Under Heaven as if he intended to tackle it. The Demon's smile remained as he bore down on the man called Hogbarrell who did not turn in the face of the Terror Mandate.

But this was not the impossible. No. This was, in fact, expected given the awesomeness of the Mandates on display. Given what little I had witnessed of Hogbarrel's Immovable Stance Mandate and the Demon's aura of Terror, this was the only outcome. Hogbarrel was immovable. Even if he wanted to run, once engaged, his Mandate would not let him.

Fifty span. Twenty span. Ten.

"Brother!"

This was the impossible. Despite the Demon's Mandate lashing out in all directions, causing some of the lords and champions, even at over a hundred paces away, to cringe and fall to the ground, or to scurry backwards like roaches before a flame, two men in green garb had run through the waves of pitch-black fear and red-streaked panic, cutting straight towards it source, as if unaffected.

One of the men was Carver, the champion of the Weeping Wall, and the other was his commander, the man who had spoken for Carver and Hogbarrell in the command tent. Poorboy, our general had called him.

Even as the Demon made his final approach, and an impact between the black-scaled wall of power called Red Hare and the muscular man in a low stance before it seemed inevitable, Carver stepped in between.

With a swing of his rickety old polesaber, Carver took the beast full in the flank. Or would have, had the Demon not seen the swing coming at the last second and dropped his own weapon – his Blade of the Fourth Peril, his soul stealing halberd, his first-ranked weapon in the Land Under Heaven – down before his mount in a last-second guard. The Mandate of Fear evaporated in the moment Carver's mundane blade met the Demon's, and Carver's didn't slow even one bit.

Instead, it was as if my mind was playing tricks on me. It was as if the laws of the mortal realm had suddenly changed in the face of such great and equal forces. Or… it was as if those laws remained, but were subordinate to the greater laws of Heaven – the ones that granted great powers from the stars and manifested them on the battlefields of men. I watched as the laws of Earth struggled to resolve the laws of Heaven in real-time.

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Swaying Willow had not risen from where he had fallen on the ground, but he was unable to tear his eyes away from the battle, now that the Demon had abandoned his aura.

"Red Hare cannot be stopped. This Hogbarrell cannot be moved," said the old minister, in the aftermath. "The Blades of the Perils and the Heavenly Beasts cannot not be broken, but Carver, too, bears a Mandate of absolutes. His is the Unstoppable Blade."

As Carver put his Mandate behind that sorry excuse for a weapon and it clashed with that of the Demon… the mount, the blade, the rider all flew off to one side, almost as if they had been displaced by a hand from Heaven. Given the meeting of so many great but immutable powers, it was the only thing that could have happened.

Red Hare staggered at suddenly finding himself on a different course than he intended, for the second time in as many bouts, but continued on, beyond the reach of Hogbarrell's arms or Carver's blade. Carver spun his blade and turned as he watched the Demon gallop past and then wheel for another charge.

Hogbarrell lifted his feet from his stance with all the force of a snapping treetrunk, then turned to lower himself into his new stance. Now two of the sworn brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, angled like the two faces of a wedge. Carver and Hogbarrell – simple names from poor villages no doubt – but between the two of them, they were immovable and unstoppable. The third brother had finally caught up with them and stood behind his two larger companions, though Poorboy was tall in his own right.

"I can't believe the situations I let you two drag me into," said the third brother.

"HRMPH!" Hogbarrel lowered himself further and his legs bulged again with the power of his stance.

Carver stroked his stubble then dropped his hand back to his haft to ready his blade once more.

Poorboy drew a pair of shortswords – little more than long-knives – and took a very odd stance. He was squared up behind his brothers, standing tall, both arms low and out to either side, almost as if he were forming the base of the triangle behind his two more martial companions. It seemed right, though I wasn't sure why, until a scent wafted through the air, pleasant and earthy, like spring-time when trees began to bud.

Green shoots rose up through the stoney scree beneath Poorboy's feet, extending outward in a circle. When that aura touched the place where Hogbarrel stood, vines seethed beneath the earth, and green shoots pushed out from around the immovable man's ankles. His base grew thicker, and only then did I see that his immovable stance was not caused by a Heavenly augmentation of his mortal tissues, but by the twisting of woody roots around his ankles and waist.

Where the shrapnel of his shattered flag-pole pike had gouged him, Hogbarrell's wounds began to close up, as if they had never been there. But no, where there had been bloody furrows from the wooden shrapnel, now there were fresh, silvery scars on Hogbarrells chest and arms, as if Poorboy's Mandate hadn't undone the damage but merely facilitated and accelerated the natural healing process.

"Incredible!" said Swaying Willow, finally rising to his feet. The old minister took an involuntary step forward, as if reaching out for that healing Mandate, that aura of life. Even seeing one of the three brothers put his shoulder into Red Hare and come out unscathed, even seeing another brother swing a rickety polearm at the Demon's great halberd, great mount, and great personal martial strength, and blowing all three back like leaves in a breeze, I wondered if this Poorboy did not have the most powerful Mandate of the three.

"Together," said Swaying Willow, "they cannot be beaten. I have never seen such powerful Mandates, such powerful men, in perfect complement."

Again and again the Demon attacked from the back of his Red Hare. Again and again he took a different angle. But each time he passed by, finding himself unable to dislodge Hogbarrell, or unable to meet Carver's blade, or perhaps scoring a glancing blow, but finding the wounds on the three brothers closed up before he could even come back around, the Demon must have realized that he could not overcome this new challenge.

Each time he wheeled his mount, the brothers took another step forward, and each time they met, they did not give ground. Until finally the Demon lashed out with his Mandate, and, for some reason, the three brothers seemed almost unaffected by the aura of Terror, dark as a blood-red thunderhead though it was.

I stepped forward to stand beside Swaying Willow, whose eyes remained fixed upon the fight, a look of holy admiration never leaving his face.

"What happened?" I asked. "Is the Demon weakening?"

He was not, I realized even as I asked the question. For even at this distance I had felt the lash of the Demon's power. We could barely see the clash in the fog now, the three brothers had gained so much ground.

Swaying Willow was shaking his head. "It seems that Courage is not the cure for Terror, merely a treatment."

"Then what is it? What keeps them from fleeing as Stallion did. Which of their Mandates can beat the Demon's?"

"Trust. In one another. And it is no Mandate."

Finally, three powerful warriors against one, and the Demon not able to gain an advantage either by his mount or by his Mandate, one of his passes went the wrong way. Hogbarrell broke formation, and Red Hare, remembering its early brush with the immovable man, shied. The Demon's parry was off as a result, and Carver's blade found its mark. Even so, the Demon was a great warrior and all of this, in the span of a heartbeat, he took in and adjusted for. The polesaber meant for his neck caught him across his shoulder as he threw himself well back in the saddle at the last moment. Black armor plates cleaved clear off, blood sprayed, and one of the Demon's arms went limp.

Carver stepped forward to follow it up, as the Red Hare's pass had been slowed, but even then the Demon made a counter-attack with only one hand on his halberd… aimed not for Carver or Hogbarrell, but at the base of the triangle.

Poorboy was not prepared for the long, vicious weapon to extend the full reach of its haft and the full reach of the Demon's long arm. No doubt he saw the life flash before his eyes before Hogbarrell's fist shot up to punch the strike off course.

"YOU GO FOR OUR BROTHER, YOU TREACHEROUS BASTARD?!" Hogbarrell howled. He broke his roots and stepped forward as if to chase the Demon.

But Carver held out a hand, giving him a wry grin, as if to say, "You really think you're going to catch that?"

The Demon, slumping in his saddle, was already disappearing into the mist, Red Hare riding away at full speed, no doubt as shaken as his rider to have met such an unexpected challenge.

***COALITION MISSION REPORT: TOURNAMENT FOR TIGER CAGE PASS***

SUCCEEDED Primary Objective: Defeat the Demon in single combat.

ENEMY SLAIN: 0 | ENEMY CAPTURED: 0 | LOSSES: 12

OVERALL GRADE: D (Pyrrhic Victory)