The Trial in the Swamps

[Nectorist 12874]

The Trial in the Swamps

 

A bitter laugh caught in Valentin’s throat as bile-water stained the shimmering white of his greaves. With each squelching footstep, his armor, fresh, unblemished, new, bore the marks of journey: beige-colored mud that effused the stench of the dead.

 

It’s not even funny as gallows humor.

 

Trepidation could be quelled some by a grimace and a head’s shake, but it would shatter the moment that anxiety met that which gave its rise. Only the wealth of experience, though his was a paltry treasury, could steel his heart. The aspirant drew in deep breaths, inviting the sweet, rancid taste of carrion, and lowered his head. His gaze drifted to the bog-waters, meeting mud, and what may have been a skull’s empty sockets, though it was not a thought he cared to ponder on. As he closed his eyes, and thought of the saloon of Salvo, of the White Caverns, and of the deserts of the Horde, he saw fear and its many teeth.

 

I will not surrender.

 

Sir Corswain had slowed some for him, but he had not stopped. A black blot in the green haze of Gorgoroth. Shambling forward with an awkward gait, the aspirant made his way back to the side of the holy knight. Self-assurance could cool quivering nerves, but to stand beside a man of his repute, to fight beside him, was the source of true confidence. “Sir Corswain, I-” The knight shushed him.

 

---

 

A dark-mailed arm pointed ahead, to a bridge wrought of bone, above a chasm in the swamplands. A trio of canines stood watch, unmoving, and as the two made a slower approach, led by the elder knight, their forms broke through the thick fog. They were fetid creatures, strewn with buboes and boils that leaked miasma, but their senses could not be questioned, for as a bloodhound in a hunt, they sensed the approach of the lumbering, heavily-armored men no closer than five hundred paces away. The sound of guttural barking preceded their charge, and within a five-count the beasts, half a man’s size, had reached them.

 

An experienced warrior, Sir Corswain, his flaming axe drawn long before, dispatched the first with little more effort than the flick of his wrist. Pus and excretion flew through the air as it perished with a shriek, though its undaunted pack-mate was undeterred, and soon pressed the holy knight. What ensued was an awkward dance, as the foes, ankle-deep in the beige mud, struggled to outmaneuver the other. The knight, whipping his axe with great precision, managed only to lick the hound with the flames of his axe-head, for it was deft enough to avoid injury.

 

For his part, Valentin had yet to even draw his falchion by the time the third hound was upon him. The aspirant yelped as the beast crashed into him, knocking him to the ground and submerging him within the mud. Though his armor defended him from the beast, it was not a gory end that he needed to have feared- though, as instinct would have it, he did- but instead drowning. As he flailed and thrashed, sending fists flying wildly to strike the hound, to no avail, the bile of the earth seeped through his visor. It smelled of death, and he felt a hand brush his shoulder.

 

The eternity he spent within that swamp ended in a moment, as he was suddenly, violently wrenched from the ground. He gasped for air, even if it tasted worse than suffocation. By the time he found his bearings, he saw Sir Corswain, donned in his dented, though still unblemished, black-plated armor. The corpses of the other two hounds, felled by axe-blows that had seared gashes into their bodies, were strewn at his feet. 

 

“You will not live long if you forget to use your weapon.” Like many of the holy knight’s remarks, the twinge of humor was muted, drier than the deserts of the Horde. With little more than a moment’s delay, he resumed their march, and they passed over the bridge.

 

---

 

Danger subsided for a time the malice of Gorgoroth instead residing within the gathering mists, which coagulated into visible shades, darker patches of green than the rest that settled over the swamplands. As the two men trudged onwards, the mists whispered to Valentin.

 

“I am quite disappointed,” said a friar’s polite, well-assured voice. “You know what you saw with your brother, yet you said nothing. It is unbecoming of a priest to keep sinful secrets.”

 

“You have failed me,” said a maiden’s calm, soothing voice. “Did your mother’s look of shame not make you rethink any of this? You grasp for purpose, for relevance, but in doing so, you have forsaken your place, your own family.”

 

“Stop this idiocy,” said a crusader’s gruff, commanding voice. “You allow yourself to be haunted by the eyes of a dwarf, of a pagan. You cannot call yourself the son of Caius Maximilian as if it is your shield, for you’ve not the blade to stand beside him.”

 

The aspirant’s stomach turned, though it may well have been the foul vapors of the swamplands. Voices were annoying, they were unavoidable, but they did not not prompt recollection of anything he had not spent a thousands nights reflecting upon, as he stared up to the roof of his silent chambers. He looked beside him, to Sir Corswain. Little could be shown behind the helm, and less could be shown on the holy knight’s face, but the powerful man had picked up his pace, walking at double-time. Valentin hurried to match him, altogether forgetting his pondering about what it may have been that this redoubt of the Faith, the unbroken knight, had heard himself.

 

---

 

Their endless march brought them to more solid ground, though the waters of the swamplands gathered still beneath their feet. Before them stood a cauldron, bubbling from the reaction of gore and a mix of foreign spices. A ring of bent, twisted, wilting trees encircled the clearing, unmoving in this windless plain. For years, at least it felt like years, they had sought something, anything, a thing that he had long forgotten seeking in the first place. Now, they had found it, or something, but it was all he had wanted to see. The endless journey had reached its end.

 

Again, Valentin was mistaken. Not ten seconds after he lowered his guard and began to laugh again, a roar from the woods shook the ground. In an instant, Sir Corswain’s axe was drawn, its embers flaking to the ground, but in his haste, Valentin fumbled his own falchion, allowing it to fall and sink into the bog. He grasped desperately for a weapon, flicking his eyes right and left as he sought a sign of the coming threat, but as his hand grasped a hilt, and he wrenched the tool from its sheathe, he found that he had drawn only a simple Norlander’s sword, albeit one of fine craft.

 

Emerging first from the trees were a pack of pestilent bats, shrieking as they writhed in the air, somehow still aloft despite the uneven flapping of their torn wings. A single cleave brought the end of a majority of their number, but those that remained circled around the holy knight’s head, where they clawed and pecked and bit. His great helm protected him from the brunt of the damage, but as he swung, violently and hastily, Valentin could see that he was disoriented. The aspirant turned to aid his mentor, but a figure in the furthest reaches of his periphery caught his attention.

 

The beast that burst through was of a more necrotic nature, wrought of corroded flesh and bone reduced down to sinew and marrow. Nonetheless, it moved with power, and the two great tusks that protruded from its maw were among the largest that Valentin had ever seen, far surpassing any boar from his father’s hunts. The pang of fear that rises at a battle’s commencement rose in Valentin’s chest, though it was not the sort that would have made him shy from the beast; much the opposite, for he surged forth, blade raised to meet the creature.

 

Unfortunately, for all of his zeal, his manner of fighting was accustomed to the battlefield, again dwarf and orc, not the denizens of the dark. His sword’s slash bit only the whiskers of the boar, though its tusks met their mark, and the aspirant was sent flying. The soft terrain, and his thick armor, prevented the worst, but the wind was knocked from his lungs. He had not a moment to catch his breath before he was struck again. It was a more awkward angle, and thus not as emphatic, but it was still enough to throw him against a tree and send his sword clattering elsewhere. Hoping the crack he heard was from a branch, and not from his back, the aspirant grabbed onto a loose root and pulled himself out of the way of the beast’s charge, though in its wake, several trees were cleared.

 

Dear God, give me strength, preserve- Valentin’s hand, prodding at the mud, felt a hilt at his fingertips. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ripped it from the ground. 

 

---

 

A brilliant burst of gold-orange light shone from the falchion, crafted from ebony and embedded sanguine crystals and cosmic metals. As the aspirant held the blade aloft, the rampaging boar stopped for a moment, blinding by the light in this dark land. 

 

Taking the opportunity that he was given, the mud-covered man sprang to his feet and charged at the boar. With one hand he grasped its tusk, with the other he began to clave his falchion into the beast’s side repeatedly, as if he were a butcher. The boar fought back, shaking and stomping, but the princeling held firm, continuing blow after blow to its side. As the two fought and wrestled, they collided with the fuming cauldron, sending its contents spewing onto the grounds of the swamplands. As a black haze engulfed the area, nigh-blinding Valentin, he was thrown again from the boar, though as he rose again to face it, his body close to breaking, he heard the sound of its hooves growing quieter with each passing moment.

 

Turning to see what had come of the holy knight, Valentin could hardly make out the man in the thick smog that had overcome him. “Sir Corswain! Sir Corswain!” He cried out. A moment later, the black-plated knight, his armor darker than even the fumes, showed himself before the princeling. 

 

“Fear not, my lord, it is I.” The knight’s words settled Valentin, who was relieved to find him standing tall, towering even, above a litany of bat-like carcasses. An axe of sleek silver rested in his hands, bloodied with the ichor of the foe. Able to breathe again, the aspirant sheathed his falchion and lifted his visor. “I, uh, I apologize for knocking over the cauldron. I, well, I didn’t really have a choice, but…” The knight’s head turned quizzically as Valentin’s words trailed off. The two stared at each other for several long moments. 

 

Suddenly, flames cut through the smog, and further through the dark-plated knight, who was split in half by a flaming axe-head and collapsed to the ground without the faintest hint of resistance. Valentin, startled, had put his hand down to his falchion, ready to draw it again, but through the smoke emerged Sir Corswain once more, though with a flaming axe and without a helm. Valentin shared a look with the templar, but his attention was affixed on the enigmatic figure of Sir Corswain that now laid at his feet. It was both taller than the man it was mimicking, and its axe was cooled, without a single ember upon it. The aspirant had little time to ponder much else, for a final blow from the knight’s axe ended the false-Corswain’s life. Its blood, a deep green hue, splattered across his torso.

 

“You will not live long if you trust only that which your eyes can see.