The Tournament [A Non-Traditional Fantasy]

"FORGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

The guttural screech ripped Doyen from sleep, adrenaline surging through his veins like a lightning strike. A hand snapped for a non-existent blade before he properly woke, and the voice registered: the familiar cry of his ailing wife.

He turned and saw her—huddled into a trembling ball, knees pressed to her chest, eyes squeezed shut, and body shaking vehemently. Her thin hands clutched over her ears; dainty nails drawing red syrupy fluid from her crackling mind. Doyen didn't hesitate. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, and rocked gently. "You're safe now… it's okay," he whispered, voice low and steady, "It was just a dream. You're okay. I've got you. You're okay."

He could feel the hurried approach of the guards, summoned by his wife's cry. He could feel a blur of half-formed impressions flood him, muddled and intrusive: weary irritation, anxious concern, a strange cocktail of disconnected frustration and genuine concern. Doyen wished the guards didn't bother entering their chambers. Their useless palliations would only fall on deaf ears waiting for him to send them away.

Strangely, as if hearing his unspoken wish, they forewent the usual charade. No intrusion. Not even a knock. The guards remained outside the chamber doors, awkwardly idling beyond the ambit. Doyen didn't question it. He held his wife closer and let her tears muffle against his broad chest.

Iatric's wailing gradually dulled into a muted snivel, and for a while, they stayed just like that, with her sobbing into his shoulder, the two of them huddled together on the spacious four-poster bed. The room itself was an unchallenged extravagance mired only by the hollowness of the people within it. Only after her tears had fully dried did Iatric finally pull away, her eyes ringed with a raw red. "I'm better now, I'm alright," she said, her voice hoarse from its trial—but to Doyen, it was as angelic as the day he first heard it.

He studied her face, lined with age, etched with grief, and carefully measured her well-being. His quiet, focused worry pulled a small, pained chuckle from her, and with it, the last of the room's tension seemed to dissolve. "Why would I have anything to worry about with you around?" she asked. Though made in jest, the statement revealed much of her fear and relief.

Many things had changed since the war, since the Mokoi Khan's death. Doyen was not one of those things. He remained exactly as he was—unchanged not only physically but mentally, too. Time had passed him by, and left no trace. Iatric couldn't understand how he could still look at her with such pure, undiminished love—as if the sixteen years she had aged hadn't even registered in his mind. For goodness' sake, she looked old enough to be his mother now.

Doyen was far less concerned with his eternal youth than she was, but Iatric was certain that there was more to his curse, and it haunted her. By this point in their marriage, she was a master at burying that anxiety, and so she smothered it for another day. They laid in bed a little longer, simply enjoying each other's company as if the previous hysteria and dark thoughts never existed. Iatric released a tension-soothing sigh in her man's embrace and the morning warmth at her back. Eventually, she gathered the will to roll over and steal a glance out the window. The day star hung high in the sky, startling her properly awake.

"Oh dear! We best get dressed and ready. We don't want to miss our meeting with Duke Payola." A snap of her fingers and a veritable flurry of servants were summoned.

Doyen was far less attached to the import of proper punctuality or maintaining one's noble image. He would have happily shirked the meeting and basked in the welcoming morning glow alongside his wife. Even after sixteen years he still didn't feel like a noble.

While Iatric darted about the room with her gaggle of attendants in a regal rush, Doyen closed his eyes and nestled deeper beneath the covers, wholly content to delay the day a little longer. Doyen paid little mind to the bustle outside the safety of the blankets. Still, a nagging sense of unease prickled at the edge of his awareness—an uncertainty he knew didn't quite belong to him. It came from somewhere deep within, yet felt unmistakably foreign. He did his best to ignore the bizarre feelings, and just as he found himself on the cusp of splendid slumber, a pillow struck him squarely in the face.

"Up you are, Doyen! You promised you would show up neat and proper to every one in three events. This is event three now, so you better look as sharp as when I married you."

With a suppressed yawn and a roll of his eyes, Doyen tossed aside the covers with a lazy sweep, revealing the sculpted lines of his chest—and the gaping hollow that bore clean through the space where his heart once was.

He flashed his wife a cheeky grin. "I'm always sharp."

"Yes, and today you'll dress it too. Now chop-chop. You may think all of this pomp is a waste of time, but I promise you—it does serve a purpose."

Doyen rubbed the grunge from his eyes, still blinking away the heaviness of interrupted rest, almost in awe at how rapidly Iatric managed to recover from her night terror just a few minutes prior. He didn't forget, and he could feel that none of the servants forgot.

Always quick to move on, Iatric feigned ignorance. "Now, you lot go and get Doyen ready; if you wait for his permission, it will never happen."

It was only once Iatric addressed them that Doyen finally noticed the small group of servants waiting patiently for Doyen to rise, and simultaneously, he felt closer to that nagging uncertainty. He had always preferred to do things himself, but Iatric insisted that with his newfound nobility, it was a requirement to be attended to.

With Iatric's command, the servants were swiftly upon him, wasting no time to guide him to the baths. He barely even registered moving rooms by the time he was already submerged in water. With Iatric stable and back to her lively self, Doyen's body was eager to resume sleeping. Though he, too, felt the plagues of nightmares, he still preferred them to waking reality.

As the servants methodically washed his body to a cleanliness imperceivable to him, Doyen found his mind wandering to that continuously uncomfortable feeling of water flowing through the empty passage in his chest. The hole that punctured impossibly through his body acted as a tunnel for the swaying water waves. He could feel the water wrap around the hard corners of his skin and scratch against the calloused walls within. It was a constant reminder that now he was a man without a heart.

No.

Stolen story; please report.

His heart had long been abandoned—still trapped in that place.

The behemoth twin doors groaned open—stone grinding against stone, echoes bouncing throughout the extensive chamber revealed. The Saviors stepped forward in unison, calm and resolute, as they crossed the threshold into the darkened room.

The hall before them stretched long and cavernous. Cold, unadorned stone defined its walls and floor, interrupted only by a single purple carpet that unfurled like a tongue from the door to the room's far end. There, a towering stone throne waited—its back rising upward until it curved and widened into a ribbed arch that merged seamlessly with the high ceiling and draped over the chamber.

The chamber was silent. Empty. No banners, no guards, no torchlight. Only the Saviors.

Only the Saviors and that single infamous entity seated at the end.

The Mokoi Khan was unnervingly calm for a being witnessing the fall of its empire. It sat perfectly still upon its throne, tranquil and patient—it waited.

Even so far away, the creature loomed over the approaching humans, its two long, thin legs forming the backbone of its towering five-meter frame, nearly three-fifths of its entire height. The legs led to a broad, muscular torso, armoured ribs confusing the line between endo and exoskeletal as they weaved in and out of its chest. It sported many spindling arms—six sprouting from its right side and the seventh from its left.

One arm clasped a massive black scythe, nearly as tall as the creature itself; the blade ended in an even longer red whip that writhed ominously in the air, almost as if with life. Another arm gingerly carried a simple grey bell engraved with the number four. The creature was draped in a gown of silver silk, tight at the neck and open at the chest until turning to a full dress whose fabric flowed like liquid moonlight, pooling at its hoofed feet. From the top of its body, a long serpentine neck arched upward to support a giant's skull—three black, empty eye sockets glaring out from a jagged, elongated snout lined with thick, grinding molars.

The Saviors advanced slowly down the vast aisle, their footsteps muffled under the purple carpet. They travelled slowly, biding their time as blood steadily filled the glass container affixed to the end of the red dagger embedded in Doyen's chest.

The Mokoi Khan, too, was in no rush to fight and made no move to intervene. It remained seated, limbs relaxed in arrogant repose. As the Saviors drew nearer, the creature even began to applaud—slow, deliberate claps that echoed mockingly through the chamber.

Then it spoke.

The monstrous creature's voice echoed dramatically across the cavernous room, creating an illusory chorus of phantoms like a non-existent audience had gathered to witness the procession. The Khan spoke in the human tongue, but its accent was thick and foreign.

"Though I will not take my death lying, I will commend your skill in reaching me. I am impressed: truthfully. You humans have managed to push back my assaults for a second time, and this time you have even done so without the aid of those wretched devadoots."

It paused, watching them with hollow sockets, waiting for a retort.

None came.

"But once again," it continued, with a slight incline of the skull, "you cannot claim your accomplishments to be a human one. I understand that all is fair in love and war, that one must not carry their heart to the war table, but I'll admit…" it paused looking for the right words. "I was… aggrieved by your tactics. So tell me—how did you do it?"

The Saviors ended their march just far enough to still be out of reach of that horrifying scythe, and finally, Doyen responded. "What are you talking about?"

The Khan went still.

Previously, the Khan spoke with an apathetic curiosity, as if it had already come to terms with the course of events, but Doyen's ignorant answer riled it dearly. Gone was the passive condescension. The air grew sharp, brittle with restrained fury. When the Mokoi Khan spoke again, the words were venomous, nearly shaking the walls. "How did you turn my people against me?"

Doyen had no idea what the Mokoi Khan was referring to.

He was sure that no human would ever ally themselves with a mokoi. The idea alone was laughable. Still, as he studied the creature's ire, he couldn't help but feel a flicker of satisfaction. Frankly, Doyen was impressed that he himself was able to squelch his fury at all. He was close now. So close to felling evil itself—to finally bringing this nightmare to an end. And yet he stilled his hand aching for his sword. Perhaps the rhythmic drip and the blood loss were helping with his calm.

In the momentary quiet, the Khan's gaze dropped, for the first time, to the red-rust dagger embedded in Doyen's chest.

It was Forgo Miff who broke the silence and responded to the Khan's question. "We would never stoop so low as to join forces with the mokoi," she said, voice unwavering. "Any personal insurgencies in your ranks are your failures alone." The emboldened ranger was steadfast, and her alto voice carried a resolute confidence.

Doyen caught the glint of fire in her eyes, the wounds left by every battle they'd fought beside each other, the thousands dead behind them, yet hope still pushed forward. The Saviors carried the will of those countless deaths with them now. Forgo's prideful rebuttal helped—if only slightly—to embolden their resistance against the Domineering Khan. The Saviors stood taller. The throne felt less distant. For the first time since the war began, they were not the desperate defenders; they were the invaders now. The Khan had no place to talk down to them with such authority while they led the tide.

The ranger's biting words, rather than provoking fury, seemed instead to soothe the Khan—though not in any comforting way. If anything, the Khan looked disappointed, its monstrous posture slackening, shoulders sagging beneath silver silk like a parent resigning to a child's tantrum.

"To be resisted so thoroughly by a group of children as naïve as this," it murmured, voice low and thick with regret.

Doyen, unwilling to idly take the insult, stepped forward and prepared for his own flurry of insults, but his words caught in his throat when the Mokoi Khan moved.

The Khan slowly rose from its throne, a thin film of dust shaking free as it did so, and the demon's true size revealed itself. It towered three times the height of the tallest Savior, its arm span wider than the whole troupe combined. This was the Mokoi Khan, the nightmare that haunted history, the spectre of extinction that had stalked humanity for millennia.

The Khan twisted its long neck with a sound like grinding stone, a tremor of cracks echoing across the vaulted chamber. Its eyeless gaze drifted upward as though pondering briefly before settling, again, on them.

"The Second Human-Mokoi War," it mused. "You've made a far greater showing this time… But don't be so foolish as to believe you've won." Its snout lowered, empty sockets locking directly with hazel, "I know who you are, Doyen."

Hearing his name so spitefully uttered from the Khan's bony maw sent a shiver down Doyen's spine.

"Together we are symbols," It spoke, its voice once more echoing all through the chamber like the chorus of a rapt audience. "The flags of our people. Tonight, one of us will fall, and only one flag will remain." The Khan released a weary sigh, the breath smogging in the uncomfortable stone chill. "We are tired. Let us end this war."

The final drop of blood slipped into the glass pommel of the red dagger still embedded in Doyen's chest.

With a soft crack, the container shattered.

A blinding light burst forth, flooding the room in crimson and gold. The dagger collapsed inward, melting into Doyen's body as if devoured by it. Flame coursed through him—silent at first, then roaring beneath the surface. The light illuminated his veins, tracing the paths of arteries like molten rivers beneath translucent skin, burning a map of divine combustion into the shell of a man. His eyes curdled, hazel fading to an iridescent gold.

The Khan and Doyen, with weapons raised, charged toward one another.