Olga McArrow - Hot Obsidian

Kosta’s legs gave way under him, he dropped his sword, bent double, and sunk to the ground. He coughed and coughed, spitting out chunks of something black. In the end, the black became liquid, then the liquid turned red. Only then the coughing stopped.

Kosta wiped his bloody mouth with his sleeve, got up, and raised his face to the sun. He was smiling; the colour returned to his cheeks; the horrible disease was no more.

Bala sheathed his sword and approached Kosta.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, desperately trying to find the answer for himself, but there was too much blood on the young Ollardian – both his own and his enemy’s – to know for sure.

“No,” answered Kosta. For the first time since the very beginning of their journey, Bala heard Kosta’s real voice, unchanged by wheezing or panting. It was a very pleasant voice: childish, clear, kind. “And you?”

“I’m fine…” Bala lowered his eyes. “Forgive me for being a burden…”

“There was nothing you could do,” Kosta reassured him. “Moroks are masters of manipulation, both psychological and magical. You had no chance of winning. It usually takes a battle Seven to kill a monster like this one.”

Bala glanced at the monster. Now, when the morok was dead, Bala was afraid that its body would take a form of a child again. But no, it didn’t.

“I thought creatures like this were afraid of the sun…” Bala shook his head. “Why did it pretend to be a child?”

“It wanted to split us at first,” Kosta frowned, “and then – to make you turn your back to it so it would attack you from behind.”

Bala winced at those words. Suddenly, all the horror he had been through, welled up in his heart again.

“Moroks are not stupid,” explained Kosta. “They know how dangerous a sword can be. It’s unlikely that you would have killed it, it knew, but it didn’t want to get wounded. Hence the performance… Bala, it’s a good thing that you kept clinging to your sword. No way I would have got to you in time otherwise.”

Now, when Bala had a good look at the beautiful forest’s true face, he dreaded the prospect of staying here after dark. They got lucky this time but few people get that lucky twice in a row.

With Kosta’s disease defeated – literally – the boys could move much faster now, so they headed back to the city in a run.

Running was difficult for Kosta, still weak from the weeks-long ordeal, but easy enough for Bala to allow gloomy thoughts and doubts pester him as he ran. How could a sick, dying boy have defeated the monster worth of the effort of a professional battle Seven? How could he resist the waves of horror the morok kept sending his way? Who was Kosta for real?

So many questions but no answers.

***

Someone knocked at the locked gates of Firaska. It was a quiet, almost shy knocking but the Crimson Guardians took it as seriously as they would a blaring alarm. Hundreds of newly-made Liht spheres, thrown from the watchtowers, dotted the grass beyond the walls, chasing the darkness away. But they didn’t reveal much. There were no monsters around, just two human figures by the gates: the very kids that had left the city in the morning. On seeing them, Aven Jay Zarbot cursed under her breath: she knew those young Lifekeepers would be trouble.

The younger of the two was holding a dirty bundle in his arms. When one of Aven’s mages demanded him to open it, the boy obeyed. He threw the rags aside and raised his trophy with both hands for everyone to see.

It was a severed head. A morok’s head…

***

“There are many dangerous creatures in our world. You need only a warrior to stop most of them. You need a mage to stop the ones of a more dangerous kind. And a battle Seven to stop the most vicious ones. But not all dangerous creatures are children of the night. This is the term reserved only for the monsters that specialize in humans, imitate their appearance and even speech while hunting.

Are children of the night sentient? Is their behaviour conscious? There are many opinions but no one knows for sure.

Our book does not delve in such discussions. It teaches you how to fight the dark creatures.”

“Tome of Dark Creatures” by Helga-Vlada and Sereg, a handbook of Crimson Guardians and Grey Hunters, first published in 1254, the newest edition published in 14501

Q: Are fairies dark creatures? Fairies are known to attack humans sometimes.

A: No, they are not. This is evident from the creatures’ behaviour. Fairies are hive species that react to anyone breaking into their hive or treading on their territory in the same way that bees or wasps do: by attacking the intruder. They never hunt humans on purpose. They also do not eat meat.

Q: But a fairy body is similar to a human body. Is it not an imitation of human shape, one of the signs of the darkness? And what about fairy larvae that can live in any dead creatures, including humans, feeding on decaying flesh?

A: Neither of those facts proves anything unless another fact, the most important, is present: imitation of human behaviour. No fairy imitates a crying child to lure a wanderer into its lair. No fairy uses human empathy as bait.

Fairies are dangerous, magically active animals you should be wary of but no, they are not dark creatures, not the children of the night.

“Tome of Dark Creatures” by Helga-Vlada and Sereg, Appendix 2

Firaskian walls followed the same protocols as temporary field perimeters did: they were divided into five segments, each segment had its own leader, a high-ranked Crimson Guardian. Aven Zarbot’s segment was the most important one of the five: she was in charge of the city gates. That circumstance made her a chief battlemage in Firaska but only in times of peace. If an emergency were to happen, like a massive invasion of dark creatures, the Elder Rule would make the oldest, most experienced Crimson Guardian – Sarien Sarra, a fragile old lady with grey hair and devastating magical powers – the head of the Firaskian mage army.

As Aven was walking through Firaskian alleys in the middle of the night in a company of five other mages, she couldn’t stop wondering whether the time to enforce the Elder Rule was now…

“Do you know those boys, Aven?” asked Sarien Sarra in her usual tone: cold, spiky, making everyone feel like a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar. Zarbot wrinkled her nose as she heard the question. Couldn’t help it. Luckily for her, it was dark enough, so no one noticed anything.

“I saw them enter the city in a company of eight other Lifekeepers and talked to their leader. He said that they were on a mission and wanted to hire a Transvolo mage in Firaska and jump to Torgor,” reported Aven. “For some reason, they decided to stay in the city, though. They earned the trust of one of the college magisters, visited the college library, and trained with the young mages. That was unexpected but not suspicious. Young Lifekeepers often travel together and share their experience with everyone who wants to learn, it’s their tradition. Magister Sharlou spoke well of them, so did the college swordmasters…”

“What kind of magic did the boys use to kill the morok?” Sarien interrupted her.

“It was killed with an ordinary sword,” said Aven.

The other mages exchanged puzzled looks behind Aven’s back. The rest of the way, everyone kept silent…

Lots of warm Lihts floating under the ceiling of a detention room filled it with enough light to keep all the night horrors at bay and enough warmth to make it cosy. Bala and Kosta shared that room with several sleeping citizens that had been caught by the guards in the streets after the curfew. What those people did was not a crime and the detention they got was only for their safety because of all the dark creatures prowling around, so the room did not look like a prison cell and the cots there were clean and comfortable.

The morok’s head had indeed allowed Bala and Kosta to enter Firaska at night but it had also alarmed the whole Crimson Guard. There would be questions, lots of them. Tired as they were, the boys were too worried to sleep now.

Kosta walked up to a sink in the corner of the room, grabbed a bar of soap and began scrubbing the dried blood from his hands, hair, face and clothes. The water turned crimson-red; there seemed to be no end to the bloody filth no matter how hard Kosta tried to wash it away.

Bala, feeling sad and useless, sat on his cot, and hid his face in his hands. A swarm of questions he couldn’t answer tortured him. He could make neither heads nor tails of the situation. What kind of disease Kosta had? Why did it pass after the morok had died? Why was Kosta immune to the morok’s horror magic? Who was that boy after all…

For the first time in his life, Bala regretted not having been reading more. The only things he could remember about moroks were a snippet of one of Kangassk Magesta’s incoherent lectures and a couple of his teammates’ bedtime stories.

He knew that moroks were dangerous magical creatures of a dark kind, because they preyed specifically on humans. He knew that the magic they used was not “spells” but rather a limited set of patterns. They knew a few illusion tricks – they used those to fake human appearance – and could spread waves of horror-inducing magic. An ordinary person could resist one such wave at best. Bala could not do even that: the very first wave had paralyzed him. But Kosta… Kosta stood his ground like a breakwater, through all three…

When Aven and Sarien arrived at the detention station, a couple of young Crimson Guardians woke up everyone in the room and escorted them away, leaving Bala and Kosta alone. They were going to be questioned, that was as clear as day, so they prepared themselves. Kosta, now scrubbed clean of most of the bloody filth, hastily combed his hair with his fingers in a feeble attempt to look nice. Bala did his best to put on a brave face; he was the “adult” here, after all, and needed to look like one.

Seeing the “adult” warrior the Crimson Guardians had told her about, the “adult” who in fact was just a teenager scared out of his wits, Sarien got suspicious, to say the least. But learning that this boy wasn’t even the one who had killed the morok and that the younger one – a twelve-year-old! – had done it, made the old mage almost furious. Was Aven Zarbot that incompetent? Obviously, those kids were not the ones who had killed the monster! But who did it then? And why did that person decide to hide? That seemed worthy of Sarien's attention.

“I heard, my dears, that you had killed a morok,” said Sarien sweetly, like a loving grandma would, while her battlemage companions inconspicuously spread around the room, keeping an eye on the boys’ every movement.

“Not we,” said Bala, a shame in his eyes, “Kosta did. To protect me. He is the true warrior here.”

“You?” Sarra gave the younger Lifekeeper a long look, with a very convincing surprised expression on her face. The kid’s clothes were still splattered with blood even though he had tried his best to wash it away.

“Yes,” he nodded with quiet dignity.

“Oh how interesting!” almost cooed Sarien and sat at a cot next to Kosta’s. “I feel that you are telling the truth, my sweet. But it’s all so very puzzling! The morok was killed with a simple sword. It’s so rare! You see how old I am and I’ve seen that done only once in my whole life. Thirteen years ago. I was leading a team of young mages through the Firaskian forest and we met a whole pack of moroks: four ancient monsters hunting together! Their illusion was extremely convincing: they pretended to be a family – wife, husband, two kids – and played their parts so well that it took us long enough to recognize the trap. By the time we did that, we were doomed. My companions were no battle Seven, and a single mage, even a mage of my calibre, was no match for a morok pack. A young woman saved us that day and she, too, like you say you did, killed the moroks with only a sword. Only her sword had a handguard, unlike yours, and was not a katana. But that woman was immune to the horror magic, just like you must be if you’re indeed a morok-slayer. She had raven-black hair, black eyes, and – I never forget a face, my dear! – she even looked somewhat like you.” Sarien looked Kosta in the eye, a silent question in her gaze. “Well, what else? The woman was wounded in the fight and I treated her wounds; it was the least I could do to repay her. That encounter left her four claw marks on her right shoulder. She didn’t say much about herself, not even her name, but she mentioned that she was from the No Man’s Land.”