Tales of the Three Kingdoms: Silver Falcon Falls

There were moments of consciousness following the Battle of Burning Lake. There was pain, as old bandages peeled away, and new ones cinched tight, telling me that I was alive enough and safe enough, for someone to care about keeping me that way… at least for now.

There was the snapping of snares and the tumbling of rocks, followed by commands and the other sounds typical of battle. This told me that the danger had not yet passed, even if I was in no state to so much as lift my head, let alone fight.

There was my River's face, letting me know that she had survived, even if I still teetered on death's door. I slept more soundly knowing this.

There were other images and snatches of conversation that allowed me to piece together the events that had conspired to keep me alive for the moment. A metal mask dangling from a saddlehorn. A long lance bloodied past the point for several feet. Whispers of the "Battle of Burning Lake," and a new "Hero of the Times."

The final piece to my puzzle was when I lifted my head from my litter, to see my inner circle, my five officers beneath me in the hierarchy of the Coalition. River listened with Windstopper beside her. A man in furs and armor sat off to one side, my reticent cousin Castellan, where I could not see his face in the shadows. Tongs argued for laying an ambush in a valley to force a definitive conflict, while River ruled that we keep moving.

Silently, Flashammer stood behind her.

From my angle the tall, lean, former bandit leader was silhouetted against the darkening clouds. In my fevered state, it seemed that forks of power criss-crossed behind him, flashing blue like lightning.

His face was the last piece of information I needed to understand how I had survived. As I lost consciousness yet again, my fever-dreams reconstructed the events for me.

***

Red lightning. Blue lightning.

Atop the crest of the hill, Flashammer struck out with his hammer only to have the Demon's halberd deflect it. Flashammer struck again and again as, to one side, the Battle of Blood-Offer Bowl raged on, thousands of cavalry jostling to no real avail.

With each pause in the combat the Demon tried to call upon his Mandate. One dagger of fear and Flashammer would have been frozen in place, completely at the mercy of his enemy. But Flashammer was too fast, his hammer came around too quickly again after each to blow to re-attack. The Demon never had time to truly muster his energy and reach into the other warrior's mind and soul.

They did battle atop that hill, Flashammer's Flash Forward Mandate on full display, the Demon unable to call upon his Flaying Terror.

Vaguely, Flashammer was aware of the shifting battle on one side of the crest, and – like any great warrior – a very small part of his mind analyzed his immediate surroundings: the lip there that either one of their horses could fall off of, the upturned stone there that could cause his mount to stumble, and the loose scree that could force it flounder. The empty hills…

The Demon spun his halberd to counterattack…

Then it was as if he had just forgotten what he was doing. The blade slowed to a stop and then slumped off to one side.

Reluctantly, sensing a trick, Flashammer's eyes flicked in the direction of the Demon's then back to the halberd, fully expecting the blade to be back up and coming for him as soon as his attention was away.

But no, the Demon was well and truly distracted, and in the moment Flashammer had followed his gaze, he had sensed something very off about his surroundings.

Flashammer risked another look at what had held the Demon's attention, a longer one this time. Once he saw it, he couldn't unsee it.

The hillside moved.

On Flashammer's right – the Demon's left – the battle between Elite Gray Wolf Cavalry and Sparrow's own horse continued. But on the other side, no doubt hidden from those in the bowl, between the high pass the two warriors occupied now and the Northern Barrier River far below in the distance, the layers upon layers of undulating hills fuzzed and shifted.

No banners. No flickering torches. No clinking steel or battle cries. But there was undoubtedly an army like the Land Under Heaven had never seen before, covering the hillsides and coming this way. They scurried over the earth like ants kicked from an anthill.

They all followed one man sitting atop a dark horse, like a hive with its master.

"Hmph," said the Demon as he looked on, then turned back to face Flashammer atop the crest. "So it seems I was just the bait, after all. Tell me, no-named warrior, did your master send your forward to die as well?"

"My lord is nothing like yours," snarled Flashammer.

"So you say." The Demon kicked Red Hare out into the bare hills behind him, fleeing the battle before the mass of snarling creatures could descend upon the bowl.

Flashammer didn't even have time to think about it. When Sparrow had asked who wanted to take on the Demon, Flashammer had claimed him. The Demon would not get away so easily, so long as Flashammer still lived. The former bandit kicked his horse and gave chase through the hills.

Once or twice Flashammer used his Mandate to catch up and catch his quarry unaware. The Demon, so used to being the hunter, not the hunted, was forced to defend himself, sometimes driving his dogged pursuer away, sometimes gaining just enough space to flee once more. Across hills and valleys, roads and rough terrain, their duel dragged out. In the long run, no beast had the power of Red Hare, and Flashammer could not use his Mandate as easily as Red Hare could run. The fantastic beast ate up both flat land and inclines as if they were the same, and Flashammer along with his stolen mount eventually began to flag, his mind growing wearing just as his horse's muscle did.

There was no help for it then.

Eventually, Flashammer lost sight of his quarry. Then he lost the trail. At last, he was alone in the hills, no use to anyone. It had been days by that point, and Flashammer was wondering what had become of his leader and what his brother might be doing far away from the battle and cut off from any information from the front. Flashammer could only guess at the outcome of the Battle of Blood-Offering Bowl, as well. Only then did he chastise himself for not abandoning the Demon immediately, and instead turning away from the chase to perhaps warn Sparrow of the mass of humanity heading for him.

He decided that no one sane – not even Sparrow, if he had survived – would stay in that place with those things. There was no way to find his comrades again after so much time and space.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The best he could hope for was linking up with his brother and the thousand or so archers and trappers that were cursed to perpetually trail their leader's cavalry. Perhaps together they might have some hope of reuniting with the man they had sworn themselves to.

***

There was a column of smoke splitting the sky, the equivalent of an entire village burning where no village should be. Flashammer turned to his brother. The former bandits had traded information. Flashammer had told his jowly brother all about the feral creatures and everything they knew about the one who had created them. Tongs, in return, had helped form the makings of a plan. Now was the time to enact it.

Flashammer was coursing over the hills again.

Toward the fray, heading straight for that pillar of fire and smoke, Flashammer rode alone. For this, it was better to be alone. No man on foot could keep up with a horse. And no man on horseback could keep up with his Flash Forward Mandate the way he was about to use it.

The only question was if his mind could keep up with him, as well.

The swarm of creatures covering the hills before them appeared endless.

As the first of the monsters noticed him, Flashammer didn't bother trying to kill them. What were a few less creatures in a horde of so many?

Flashammer had gotten a new spear from one of Castellan's men – good stout walnut wood – and rather than lower the point into the snarling creatures, he simply used the lowered shaft to deflect the monsters out of Stolen Horse's way.

While he drew further upon his own strength and stamina and that of his mount to push through the creatures, he saved his mental energy for what his Mandate was about to do. The swarm of creatures was charging something, now, down in the lakebed, and they were slow to notice one dark rider coming from the side. They never organized. They never formed ranks. And now that they were surging forward with a mindless will, it was that much easier for Flashammer to pick his way through toward their center.

Finally he had to call upon his Mandate.

Now, they were so thickly clotted that he needed to Flash Forward from gap to gap, straining the limits of what his mind could process and the limits at which he could move a horse and himself forward in a blink.

He appeared nearly completely surrounded. Stolen Horse slammed into the unlucky creatures to propel them forward in a mist of their own blood as they absorbed almost all of the warbeasts momentum in an instant. But in that moment Flashammer saw the last three gaps before his target open up.

They would not stay open long. And so densely packed were the creatures now, this close to the center of their hive, that Flashammer might not find another gap to flash his mount into. His best bet was to make all four remaining flashes all at once, chaining them together before any one of the gaps before his target could close.

It was a stretch. It would strain the limits of his Mandate not once more, but four more times. The maneuver might break him, leave him barking mad and unaware of his surroundings, his mind left behind somewhere along the way. But if he failed in this, he died within the horde anyway, and somewhere in the nearby column of smoke and fire, Sparrow would die too.

Flashammer could feel the aether distort and begin to tear around himself, even as slivers of crackling energy appeared in the next four places all at once. Perhaps only he could see such things, but it wouldn't have mattered if others could see it as well. The tell-tale sign of his Flash Forward Mandate existed in this time and space for only the briefest of moments. If any nearby observers blinked, they would miss it.

Blink. The creatures around him swiped at empty air.

Blink. A horse and its rider appeared and were gone.

Again. He was only in place for one one-hundredth of a heartbeat, mind reeling.

Again he blinked. He struggled to orient himself in time and space, barely able to recall where he was, or when he was, or who he was and why he was doing this.

Blink. Stolen Horse slammed through a final skein of feral creatures, who never even had enough time to realize what had hit them before their bodies exploded into pieces from the sudden, impossible force of a horse appearing from nowhere.

A man in Gray Wolf irons and a matching metal mask however, did have time to notice the sudden appearance of Flashammer in a spray of displaced viscera. Flashammer would later learn that this man was called the Feral King, and he called his Mandate the Rabid Dog Mandate.

That cloaked servant of Gray Wolf had time to suck in a breath and shriek, "To me!" before Flashammer remembered himself. His spear struck the Feral King through the heart and shot back out, almost too fast to see.

Nothing Mandated about that spear thrust. That was all training and experience. That was all perfect precision, like a lightning bolt striking a weathervane in a storm, and then vaporizing, only its afterimage remaining.

The thousands upon thousands of creatures shrieked as if Flashammer had put his spear through each and every one of them, all at once. But they did not fall over as corpses would. They did not wither away like summoned demons severed from their sorcerer and therefore this realm of reality. They did not turn back into the people they had once been, as if they had been cured of an affliction.

The masked man's last order, apparently, stood.

"To me," the Feral King had said, with his voice and no doubt with his Mandate as well.

The multitudes turned inward on Flashammer. He only had another heartbeat to puzzle it out. He grabbed the Feral King and dragged him from his feral horse, draping the man's corpse across Stolen Horse's saddle horn.

And then Flashammer – despite his barely reoriented mind's protests – was blinking away again.

Both his physical reserves and his mental capacity had been pushed to their limits. He could feel his mind straining and fracturing to acknowledge so many different places all at once. Was he ahead of the horde now, on the far side? Or was he still back beside his brother, where he had been when he had first blinked away? Maybe he was in one of those five places that he had blinked through on his final approach toward the feral horde's commander.

His eyes were screwed shut now trying to make sense of everywhere he had just been, everywhere he had just come to and come from and everywhere in between. But he was no longer blinking now. He was standing still. Unmoving. Unwavering.

A dozen times and places appeared at once and then slowly spiralled in toward the center, coalescing and resolving into a single image like a boxer shaking off a blow to the head, or a drunkard finally sobering.

At length, Flashammer found himself rooted again in this reality. He was here. And he was now. And he was standing beside Stolen Horse, a single wet corpse in black robes and gray armor spread out on the stony ground before him.

He could hear the enraged howling and gurgling of the feral hordes somewhere in the nearest hills, but he had gotten far enough ahead of them that he now had a moment to collect himself.

He was atop a rocky outcrop, looking past the body of the Feral King. Beyond, the Northern Barrier River cut a deep canyon through the stony hills.

"To me?" Flashammer said aloud, to no one in particular, or perhaps to the corpse of the Feral King.

Flashammer reached down and gripped the metal mask that covered the body's face. He couldn't claim the head – not if his understanding of the Rabid Dog Mandate was correct – but he could at least claim this.

"To me," he said, nodding to himself. Then he kicked the corpse out over the precipice and into the fast flowing waters of the gorge below.

Moments later, from a safe distance away, Flashammer watched as a hundred thousand or more feral creatures threw themselves over the cliff edge to follow the body of the Feral King in his final orders: "To me."

Flashammer had no idea how long it would take the stragglers to follow their master, even in his death. How many of the people across Western Alley Commandery had become one of these feral beasts and how many of the creatures had received Feral King's final order? How long would that final order last? If the course of the River smashed the head of the Feral King into a hundred pieces against the river stones, or split his corpse down the middle, would the creatures continue to follow all the pieces, or just one? If the fish and the reptiles consumed him, would the order fade away when there was nothing distinguishable left of the man?

Flashammer shrugged as we continued to watch the stream of mindless creatures fall from the precipice. Maybe Sparrow would know. He liked to read. He liked to study these things.

As for Flashammer – who mounted up and began a long leisurely ride, back across a hundred or so li, where he hoped his master and his brother were safely beginning the journey back out of these accursed hills – he was nothing more than a simple bandit. What did he know about Mandates and magic and being a Hero of the Times?

***

***SPARROW'S BAND MISSION UPDATE: BATTLE OF THE LAKEBED***

SUCCEEDED Primary Objective: Survive the hordes.

SUCCEEDED Secondary Objective: Save some of the Black Altar villagers.

SUCCEEDED Bonus Objective: Figure out a plan to cut the odds.

ENEMY SLAIN: 270,230 | ENEMY CAPTURED: 0 | LOSSES: 9

OVERALL GRADE: A (Decisive Victory)