The Tears of Kas̆dael

"Has she woken up yet?" Jasper ducked down as he side-stepped through the mostly demolished doorway of one of the few cabins in the village that hadn't been completely buried beneath the rubble.

"Nope, she's still out cold," Ihra replied flatly. "You find any more survivors?"

"A few," he sighed, running his hand through his hair. "Uzzîl's keep didn't get hit as hard by the earthquake as the other one; maybe a third of the soldiers up there have survived."

"And that brings us to?"

"Counting the three of us, the five soldiers we rescued from the wall, and two more I found in the village? Maybe forty. Forty to close a portal," he barked out a harsh laugh as he ran his fingers through his hair.

"We failed, Ihra. There's just no way around it. Even once Tsia wakes up, how are we going to close the portal and kill the mage with a tenth of the men we started with?"

"It's a longshot-" she started, but he cut her off.

"No, a longshot is trying to hit a bullseye from 100 yards; this…this is like trying to knock an apple off a kid's head from a mile away, while riding a bucking bronco."

"I-" Ihra fell silent, unable to rebut him. "So we run?"

"I think we've got a shot at it," he agreed. "At least the mage did us one favor; pretty much all the stoneflesh got buried beneath that rockslide, and the few who survived must have run off. I didn't see a single one of them when I was rooting through the village."

"Those bird-creatures won't be a problem?"

Jasper's nose wrinkled in distaste as she reminded him of the strange creatures that had emerged from the portal. A bizarre fusion of man and bird, the creatures had the head of an eagle, massive black wings, and legs that ended in sharp talons rather than feet, yet they also had the torso, upper thighs, and arms of a man. "I fought one of them off," he admitted. "It was dangerously fast and mobile, hit like a semi, but it also lit up like a match."

Subconsciously, he let a ripple of flame run down his fingers. "I can get us through them if it comes to a fight, but I don't think it will. Most of 'em seem to be sticking close to the portal right now, like they're waiting for something else. And I'm pretty sure we don't want to be here when that something else arrives."

"Another wyrm?"

"Maybe," he shrugged. "Maybe something worse, but I'd rather not find out." He stepped back toward the crumbled doorway. "Get her awake if you can - I'm going to try one last time to find Nissilât, and then we'll go."

"An understandable plan, Lord Yas̆peh, but one I'm afraid I'll have to overrule."

Startled, Jasper whipped his head around to find a familiar face in the ruined street. "Commander Ardul? What are you doing here? There's no way you got our message in time."

The Moon-kissed slipped off his horse, tying the reins to a fallen support beam jutting out of the rubble before replying. "As a matter of fact, we were already on the road when we encountered your messenger. You can thank your dwarven friend for our presence."

"What did S̆ams̆ādur have to do with it?" he questioned, before picking up on the second part of the phrase. "And what did you mean, 'our presence'?" He craned his head to see down the street, but Ardûl was the only person in sight.

"I rode ahead of the others," Ardûl admitted, ignoring the first part of the question, "but the bulk of my forces aren't far behind."

Hope stirred in his stomach. "You brought the army?"

"Well," the Djinn grimaced, "I brought part of it. I wasn't expecting the castle to have already fallen."

"We did our best," Jasper hurried to say, "but between the wyrm, and hundreds of those damned hulks-"

"It doesn't matter," Ardûl interrupted him. "The only thing that matters now is closing that portal before it stabilizes."

"I don't know if that's possible, Commander," Jasper replied bluntly. "You didn't see that mage in action. He leveled a castle, he summoned a goddamned wyrm-"

"And right now, he'll be weakened," the Djinn spoke over him. "There's a good chance he won't even come out to fight us, but either way, that doesn't change our mission. Chasing an army of those winged monstrosities," he gestured to the creatures circling above the portal like a flock of vultures, "through the countryside would be practically impossible. We need to close it down now, before they leave us in the dust and sack Abāya."

Jasper doubted the winged fiends were the worst thing waiting for them beyond the red veil, but he knew the commander had a point; the last thing he wanted was to see a repeat of Hargish's fall. "Alright, so what's the plan?"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was his first time seeing the commander take charge on the field of battle, and it soon became clear that Ardul moved at a blistering pace. Jasper was immediately dispatched to retrieve the survivors in Uzzîl's keep, and by the time he returned, barely twenty minutes later, lines of Djinn and Durgū were already forming into ranks in the ruins of the village.

Despite the speed with which they fell into place, their presence did not go unnoticed. As the first ranks began struggling up the hill toward the portal, the chimeras circling around the portal dove toward them.

The winged beasts' charge was utterly unorganized, but that made it no less effective. Rising and dipping with fast, spastic movements, the chimeras tore through the first ranks of the soldiers. Their talons struck with devastating effect, ripping through flesh and bone, shield and armor with equal ease, before they soared back up into the sky with a struggling soldier gripped in their massive claws.

With raucous screeches, the chimeras looped up in a backward somersault, dropping the soldiers at the apex of their loop, before diving down for another strafing run. Within seconds, the field threatened to dissolve into chaos, as the soldiers were bombarded from every direction by both the chimeras and the bodies of their own friends, turned into bombs of flesh and steel. But before the ranks completely collapsed, a commanding voice thundered over the frenzy.

Jasper couldn't make out what Ardûl was saying, but it seemed he didn't need to. Men on the edge of breaking, straightened up, imbued with newfound resolve as their wounds healed over, and abandoned their swords for the javelins strapped to their backs. Dozens of the beasts fell beneath their first volley, relieving the pressure long enough to allow the line to surge forward again.

But all of this was little more than a distraction. As the fight raged on below them, Jasper sprang toward the top of the bluff, barely holding on as he grabbed the crumbling ledge. With a grunt, he pulled himself up and over the edge, rolling onto solid ground with a sigh of relief. God, I hate heights.

"Took you long enough," Ihra loomed over him with a smirk, but offered him a hand up.

"Yeah, well, some of us aren't comfortable free-climbing up a wildly unstable cliff in the aftermath of an earthquake," he grumbled. Anything else he would have said went unspoken, though, as he caught sight of the portal.

As impressive - or, perhaps, horrifying - it was from a distance, it was far worse up close. From here, he could tell that the hazy red veil stretching between the portal's still swirling vortex was a perpetual rain of blood, accompanied by a scorching wave of heat that made the whole thing reek to high heaven.

He bent over, suddenly choking on vomit, as the putrid smell hit him, a response that was only made worse as he remembered the source of that blood. Is the priest's blood up there? The tavern keeper's? Tōrîl's? Nissilât's?

The others fared no better as the stench overwhelmed them, but when the last of the contents of their bellies had been thoroughly vacated, they were able to press on. An irregular trickle of chimeras continued to fly through the portal, so they kept close to the ground, hugging the mounds of rubble as they approached, but all cover ceased when they were fifty feet away.

They paused to gather their breath and broke into a run. As Jasper neared the base of a portal, a pair of chimeras burst through the veil of blood and, with hideous shrieks, dove toward them, but he had been prepared. Soul Sear.

The birds were staggered as the stream of blue-white orbs intercepted them, and with quickening stride, Jasper flung himself headlong into the bloody rain.

He nearly collapsed as the rain pelted him, each drop burning like molten lava, while agonized voices screamed in his ear, begging for a savior that would not come. Sheer momentum alone pushed him forward, one wobbling step, then two, and finally a third before he broke through the veil and collapsed on the ground.

"Holy crap." He rose shakily on his knees and spat out a mouthful of blood that he wasn't quite sure if it was his or not. "That was so much worse than I'd expected."

"Heeelp." Ihra croaked beside him, struggling to rise, and he realized his immunity to flame had let him get off easy. His fingers twitched with a healing spell, casting it in quick succession on the four of them, before he turned his attention to the world they were standing in.

The city stretching below them must have had a hell of a view once upon a time. Majestic mountains framed it on two sides, with a massive harbor and a wide-open ocean on the third. The fourth was the city itself, a sprawling metropolis whose buildings sported a vaguely Middle Eastern aesthetic, full of courtyards and domes and thin towers.

Now, though, it was only hell. The mountains were naked and brutalized, the peaks shattered and pockmarked by hundreds of craters and thin spires of smoke. The ocean was long drained, its once fertile floor as cracked and dried as the Sahara, and while the city itself seemed to have escaped the worst of the damage, it was clear that it, too, was falling into ruin.

The most striking scene, though, was the pitch-black sun that hung low above the desiccated ocean. Despite its dark face, it bathed the world in an eerie, red glow. There was something malevolent about it, an active hunger that seemed almost alive, and he quickly looked away as the queasy feeling returned.

"Any idea where we're supposed to go?" S̆ams̆ādur was the first to rally himself, staring at the hellish realm with obvious unease.

"Not a clue," Jasper shook his head in frustration. "Does Ardûl expect us to search the whole damned city?"

He was interrupted by a cough next to him as Tsia tried to speak, and hacked out a mouthful of blood instead. "I might have a guess," she finally managed to speak, pointing to a massive domed building sitting beside the dry shore, ringed by a dozen lofty towers. "Why don't we try the temple of Nūr?"

"Nūr?" Jasper furrowed his brow at the vaguely familiar name, trying to remember where he had heard it.

"The sun god of the Djinn homeland."

Nūradīn's story came rushing back to him. "You think this is the world they fled from?"

"I don't know," she replied pensively, "but that building certainly resembles the descriptions of Nūr's temple in the stories. 'Twelve servants of stone held council round the golden throne, by the silver sea in the mounts of Kār-Akkitôn,'" she added, obviously quoting some poem he was unfamiliar with.

Quickly comparing the poem to the massive building Tsia had pointed to, Jasper found himself agreeing with her. The twelve towers might be the twelve servants of stone, the dried-up sea might have once been silver, and there was certainly no shortage of mountains in the area. The lynchpin, though, was the black sun watching over them. This really might be the Djinn homeland.