When Heroes Die

"Better odds of killing a Horned Lord than finding a Southern name on the Farewell Stones."

— Lycaonese saying.

Before any of us could think, let alone speak, the Horned Lord reached out with one of its claws and struck three times against one of the red crystal trees growing throughout the cave.

Fast!

Two giant red orbs started to cloud over.

"Long was the shadow of time before at last the lay of the bet was revealed," the giant rat started to sing.

It wasn't singing in words, so much as it was imparting meaning into Creation itself. The understanding just slipped insidiously inside my head. I knew the words that I was hearing were not what it was saying, so much as what it wanted me to know.

The meaning was conveyed rapidly, far faster than if it was actually speaking with sound.

Its eyes cleared up once more.

A high-pitched keening noise reverberated, and the rhythm of footfalls echoing throughout the cave changed as it did so. It became more ominous. It was as if I could almost feel a dark monster breathing down my neck. I felt a thread of narrative try to tie itself around all three of us as the note rang out. I severed it aggressively.

That did not prevent the gale force wind that came hurtling towards us from somewhere within the densely packed forest of rocks. I reached out and stilled it. Part of a tree near us vanished as I did so, and the remains toppled at our feet.

"Stay out of its reach, kids, try to keep it restrained from a distance!" Laurence dashed forward as she shouted our way.

Yvette started chanting under her breath. I grabbed her, myself and our horse in a bubble with a flat floor for us to stand on and floated us up into the air. Sisyphus glared at me balefully. Tough. The ground was dangerous, and none of us except Laurence had any reason to engage this beast in a close combat fight.

Laurence ducked beneath a crystal tree, then swung her blade and cut through another. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything I could do to assist her directly. I couldn't layer her in a shield or teleport her out of harm's way.

Her own nature was antithetical to my own, and immediately broke whatever I tried to do to her.

I was limited to helping Yvette, and attacking the Ratling.

"Hunger wagered that by returning from many to one, the curse would nullify," the mountain of fur continued.

The giant rat stiffened, then ran its claws along three more crystals and took two steps backwards. Fifty feet travelled in under a heartbeat. The wail of a banshee echoed throughout the cave. The early onset of a headache hit me, and I aggressively stilled the air once more.

I reached towards the giant rat. I was making the attempt to directly snuff its life out. It was unlikely to work. The hunger within the smaller Ratlings fought back viciously, and this Ratling was far larger. I'd be regretting not trying it later on if it could have worked, and I didn't make the attempt.

It didn't work, but that wasn't unexpected. What was unexpected was the reason for why. It wasn't just the hungering presence I felt fighting back against me. It was as if there was a larger presence elsewhere connected to it. The malevolent force wasn't willing to release this beast.

I doubted it would release the Horned Lord unless existentially threatened.

Tentatively, I considered what would happen if I tried forcing it with my grace. One phantom, no, not enough. The hunger would just force more of itself into the beast in order to fight back. Two, same answer. Three, four… I ran through the numbers and had gone all the way up to seven before I reached a conclusion.

I wasn't so sure.

And that was a problem.

Laurence sliced horizontally through the air and then started running on the piece that she had carved out. The distance between her and her foe was swallowed in moments. Her blade came down, the beast tilted slightly to one side, her blade struck the ground instead.

I focused and vaporized one of the crystals, creating an illusion directly in front of the creature's eyes and ears. It would have been better if I could influence its senses directly, but the ravenous presence fought back against it. I was buying time while I considered whether I was willing to take the risk of sacrificing some of my spectres.

A massive paw swung ponderously towards Laurence. She ducked underneath.

The giant rat took two steps back. Yvette's muttering petered out and a bolt of lightning descended from the sky. It struck where the Horned Lord had stood only moments before. Small chunks of rock flew from the bolt's point of collision. The beast struck another note on one of his trees. The chunks changed course.

A few of them landed before the Saint.

Laurence tripped and rolled.

A paw descended to the position the Saint would occupy. Once more, I felt the callings of a song tug at my senses. Frowning, I severed them and vanished another crystal tree. A barrier of light materialized between Laurence and the Horned Lord. Its paw passed straight through it, slowing for no more than a heartbeat.

I could feel the beast's irritation as I did so.

That heartbeat was enough for Laurence to escape the monstrous paw. She scrambled back onto her feet on the far side of the arena.

The beast's eyes clouded over once more. Once again, it started to sing.

"The Star Seekers held to it that Hunger would return to beasts while sealed."

Everything was happening so fast. I barely had time to think.

Music. Music is important to it.

The illusion I had created was evidently not doing anything. The Horned Lord was navigating perfectly despite being trapped within the sights, smells, and sounds of a make believe garden maze.

The Ratling started to dance around the central podium and strike a multitude of crystals. It was fast, faster than I could blink, covering hundreds of feet and thousands of notes in the span of only a few moments.

I vaporized another tree, this time I deliberately created discordant noise within the arena. A riotous din rang out in a continuous loop. It didn't take much effort to do, and I was able to attempt a few other esoteric attacks at the same time. Unsurprisingly, much like trying to kill it, I couldn't overwhelm it with emotions. The hunger wouldn't allow me to interfere with its body at all. The Ratling's head swung my way as the cacophony rang out, and it glared at me.

Well, that's effective.

The Horned Lord reached down swiftly and picked up a massive cylindrical red crystal lying beside its feet with one clawed paw. It turned and struck a last note with it, then turned its gaze back to Laurence. The noise I had only just created harmonized with the rest of the Ratling's composition.

… Not as effective as I thought.

It was as if it had known what I would do in advance.

Laurence had sprinted closer. The tail of the Ratling swung her way. She anticipated the attack and leaped, sliced forward and running on the air towards it.

Its left clawed paw scraped along the ground below her. An unholy shriek resounded, before a cloud of dust billowed around upwards. The beast took two steps to the right. Laurence followed. She swung once more.

The claw continued towards Laurence. It was about to smash into her from below, and I was not certain if she could survive the impact. Desperately, I created a cushion between her and the approaching hand.

She was still hurled far up into the sunlit air high above.

How does it respond to a projectile attack?

I sent an actinic beam its way. Despite having been somewhere else moments before, the rod it was holding in its right paw was suddenly between the Ratling and the beam. It was as if that was how events were always intended to proceed.

The light was deflected towards my daughter. I felt a harmony call to me. I broke the call of the song once more, then I vanished my own working.

… I was strongly starting to suspect the Ratling had some form of precognition or reality warping, and it wasn't weak either.

The Ratling's eyes began to cloud over once again.

"The tyrant marched, the Tumult was conceived, and soon the truth was learned." The Horned Lord took five thunderous, hasty steps to its left. Over a hundred feet disappeared in moments, and struck against two more of the giant crystals with its rod. They rang out like gongs.

The earth trembled.

It's like… a giant instrument.

"Focus on breaking the crystals," I ordered rapidly, practically spitting out the lines in haste.

My daughter started to chant once more. Her eyebrows narrowed, and she reached into her pouch, pulling out a vial, a broken cocoon and some other reagents, then levitating them into the air before her. Golden symbols traced themselves into the air before us.

I reached out and attempted to superheat the air around the creature. The effect took. Some of its fur caught light, but the flames petered out when they reached its hide.

Laurence fell towards the beast from above. It leaned forward at an impossible angle and whipped its tail at her. It struck, sending her hurtling up into the sky once more. She cut out with her sword, creating an angled platform in the air. Landing on it, she ran quickly and bled momentum as she angled herself in a half circle.

The problem I had with trying to brute force this was that I couldn't actually win, even at seven ghosts. The more I tried to force destruction, the more essence the hunger needed to invest into keeping the Ratling alive. I suspected, but didn't know, that it wouldn't be willing to lose that much of itself.

If I was wrong, I would potentially be removing myself from the fight.

If I was right, we would automatically win.

It was a game of chicken played against the sentient embodiment of consumption, and it wasn't one that I was certain I wanted to play.

"The rules of reality-"

The light in the arena flashed purple for a moment.

I tried inverting gravity below the Horned Lord to hurl it up into the atmosphere. It moved out of the effect before I had even finished willing it into existence.

"-Are writ as the Gods will-"

I was disoriented, it was as if I was tasting the sound of space. The floor below us bled yellow.

Would trying to age the Horned Lord do anything? I doubted it. What I knew about their species suggested that they could not die to old age.

"-Guide my hand clearly-"

There was a melodious roar. It sounded as if the floor was talking to us. I hadn't realized that it was even possible for stones to make those sounds. The last part of her prayer — or was it an incantation — was swallowed up in the din.

My daughter finished her current spell and started a new one. Space warped, the central clearing stretched out while the surrounding structures were looped around to one side and compressed into a small zone.

… She probably made a mistake somewhere because the air above the arena looked to have been turned into a pretzel. I deliberately avoided looking at the mess.

The Ratling reached rapidly towards the compressed space containing the forest and struck more of the trees at once than it could have possibly struck otherwise. An unearthly thrum resonated through the room that quickly built into a devastating hurricane force wind. It slammed against my sphere before I had time to act and sent us careening against the far wall.

My sphere bounced, and Yvette's previous spell broke. Space rebounded into its original shape.

I tried vanishing part of the ground below the Ratling to trip it, but it had already propelled itself into the air.

It was as if everything occurring had been orchestrated.

The largest issue was that I could feel it constantly trying to tie us in a performance of some kind. It took active effort on my part to sever that effect. There was nothing I could do to avert that if I was removed from the fight.

The rhythm of Ratling feet on stone within the distant tunnels changed once more.

"And he declared: 'Neither the Star Seekers nor the Hunger deserved to claim the win.'" Less than fifteen heartbeats had passed since it last spoke.

"Shut up and die screaming," Laurence called out from up in the air.

Despite the…boisterousness of her declaration, I could tell that she was beginning to flag under heavy exertion. Both of them were moving at speeds far beyond human. It was hard for my eyes to even follow what was occurring whenever they clashed.

The Horned Lord threw the crystal in its right hand. It hurtled through the air and struck a chunk of rubble from the lightning. The chunk bounced, rung out another note on a tree, then rebounded up into the air.

It flew towards Laurence and struck her on the arm, just slightly deflecting the aim of her blade as she tried for another strike. The Rat's head moved and its ears twitched. Laurence's blade missed by a hair's breadth.

The rod ricocheted off three walls before coming to rest back in the creature's palm once more.

This is complete bullshit.

How was a hulking mass over a hundred feet tall evading attacks?

I decided that it wasn't worth the risk of attempting brute force. If the malignant hunger didn't play the role of the coward, then the Horned Lord would definitely win the fight that followed in the aftermath.

I had only heartbeats to cushion the blow before the Ratling jerked forward abruptly and headbutted Laurence in mid-air with the shorter of its two antlers. She hurtled towards the ground. I vanished some crystals and created a massive pillow for her to land in, saving her a second time.

Feathers flew everywhere.

The arena was a mess of them.

Laurence righted herself and started to sprint towards the Horned Lord.

My daughter's spell finished. A black sphere materialized around us briefly, before a significant portion of the surrounding forest transmuted into a grey fog. The fog rippled around us for one moment, before billowing towards the creature.

The wind from the tunnels slammed into the fog, sending it hurting towards us.

I didn't know what it did, but I wasn't willing to find out. It vanished, and a phantom went with it.

Time slowed within the arena. Literally, not figuratively. I couldn't keep up with the pace that the fight was unfolding at. I suspected that only Laurence could. This way, I actually had time to think and aim with any precision. The effect wouldn't last for long, maybe two hundred heartbeats of real time at most, but that was forever in a fight like this one.

Yvette huffed, her cheeks puffing out. She looked as frustrated as I felt. Muttering under her breath, a new spell started to take shape.

The problem with trying to fight a Horned Lord is that it was almost impossible to find out more about them in advance. They attacked so infrequently that there were literally over centuries long periods where nobody saw them and records of what they could do were sparse. Heroes were the only ones who ever engaged them, and apparently they were useless at record taking. My only real source of reliable information on them had been Laurence, and what she had told me about the Eater was completely inapplicable to whichever Horned Lord this was.

I was betting on the Tumult, if only because the incredibly vague and cryptic descriptions people gave of the others didn't really fit.

Since I was essentially confronting an enemy where all the information I had been provided on it was useless, I would be using anti-warlock tactics against the Horned Lord. It was a different enemy, but the same principles applied. Direct attacks would not work, but indirect ones just might.

Experimentally, I tried to kill it by changing various laws of reality around it. If I was trying to achieve a specific result, I likely would have had a very tough time. I simply didn't know enough about the laws of Creation to achieve specific ends. Fortunately, I wasn't particularly fussy. I didn't need to know exactly what I was doing to the laws of Creation, so long as the end result was inimical to life inside the demarcated region.

I'd seen some extremely grizzly deaths when experimenting with this against regular Ratlings. What typically happened was a great deal of nothing until suddenly the Ratling died almost instantaneously.

I focused on concepts that I wanted to modify, then spun them like a spinning top. Hopefully, one of the outcomes ended up being fatal. I started by changing the boiling point of liquids, then by attempting to making it so that air could not be breathed. When neither of those worked, I tried other ideas. Each time, the giant Ratling either moved out of the affected area preemptively or was unaffected by the rule that I changed.

This Horned Lord was significantly hardier than I would have expected, even considering the tales that people told.

"For he had found his fate unjust, a doom that certainly hadn't been unearned." A rumbling began to echo deeper in the tunnels.

The tempo picked up. The pace of the music grew even more frenzied. If I didn't know any better, I would swear that there was a Ratling playing a violin deeper in the tunnels.

A rumble of footsteps from behind us. I turned just before a snarling Ancient One slammed into my bubble. We were sent flying off before I seized our momentum once more and held us in place.

I vanished the Ancient One with some effort, then looked further back. Hordes of snarling Ratlings were approaching from behind. They were pouring out of the many holes in the walls.

I focused on the region the horde approached from and changed the boiling point of blood within it. For just a heartbeat, blood would evaporate at a significantly lower temperature. There was no reason not to be indiscriminate here. Everything in my line of sight was hostile.

They died messy deaths as all of their blood vaporized.

I aggressively started to reshape the walls of the arena, cutting their point of entry off.

The walls shook. Claws struck against my hastily razed barrier. The Ratlings were doing what they could to undermine my defence.

The music became more discordant. I heard the earth tremor as the Horned Lord ran and worked to fix the noise.

Laurence and the Horned Lord started another exchange. It would shift its bulk each time the sword was swung in such a way that her attacks only narrowly missed. The ground trembled as it moved.

Even in a field of slowed time, those two are moving ludicrously fast.

I started to experiment with attacks once more while I thought. I'd already attempted changing many of the rules of reality to kill it, and that hadn't worked out. Could I kill it within those laws? Electricity and directed beams of light were avoided preemptively. I even tried direct imprisonment. Despite having a solid block of titanium materialize around it, the damn thing still broke out in mere moments.

Increasing the effect of gravity within the region did nothing to the Horned Lord. It just shrugged it off. I was starting to realize exactly what it would take to kill the Ratling. I would need to use something both indiscriminate and exceedingly lethal, to the point where I risked hurting my allies in the process.

With each piece of the massive instrument around us that vanished, the song that the creature kept trying to tie us to became slightly more discordant. It took more effort for the Ratling to correct my interference, and the disapproval that I sensed from it grew.

It was going to take using more finite resources to end its life.

Whatever I do is going to have to be unavoidable.

Laurence and the Ratling continued to trade blows. Despite how fluid both of their motions were, I had to save Laurence more than once. It was as if… She was listening to whatever the Ratling was doing and being manipulated by it. Her grace was actively working against her.

"Laurence, stop listening to it. It's playing you!" I shouted out.

The chanting from beside me grew louder.

What about that song?

Could I… change something this fundamental about Creation entirely?

That song seemed to be a tool it relied on heavily. A tool that it kept trying to subvert us with.

I also suspected it was something far more fundamental about Creation than rules like gravity or space. Those were suggestions that even sorcerers modified. This felt like trying to tell the narrative to sit down and be quiet.

My second spectre vanished, and parts of the exotic instrument went with it. It worked. The song no longer existed within the confines of the arena. Air was still there, vibrations within matter occurred, even sounds still existed, but the song just didn't happen. It didn't happen because I didn't want it to.

The working was exhausting, and I realized I would not be able to maintain it for long, but immediately I noticed the difference.

Laurence was an excellent swordswoman, even without her Grace guiding her. Now that she was no longer being manipulated, the fight became much more even. The first of her blows landed, although I was certain it was by accident.

The Horned Lord brought its rod down to crush her, and she moved aside nimbly, then carved through it with her blade. A fragment of it bounced off of the floor and embedded itself in the Ratlings' right eye.

It reeled backwards.

My vision started to darken.

The Saint ran closer and took off one of its toes in the moment of vulnerability. She attempted to take off a leg as well, but lost the opportunity. The Ratling recovered too fast.

I sat down on the floor of my bubble. It felt like I had been running non-stop for a week.

Unfortunately, this working was not sustainable at all. The world really did not like me interfering with whatever this song was. Reluctantly, I released it. That didn't mean I was out of options. There was more than one way for me to prevent the Horned Lord from manipulating it.

What do I want to turn the instrument into?

The Horned Lord completely ignored Laurence for once and leaped directly towards my bubble instead. I threw the bubble away hastily, ending up near where we had arrived to begin with. Both of my passengers let out cries of surprise as I did so.

I released my temporal interference as well. There was no point in maintaining it now that the Horned Lord had left the effected area. What was left to try? I decided to take my own earlier advice to Yvette. A ghost disappeared. The rest of the instrument vanished.

I felt a flare of barely restrained fury and the deepest hunger I could possibly imagine from the creature.

My daughter's vocalization started to reach its conclusion.

"Creation is a canvas

And I hold the brush-"

Not this again.

I'd excuse her given the circumstances.

My repurposing of the instrument started to materialize. I was imbuing the air surrounding the Horned Lord with Fléchette's power. The intent was for the air to collapse inwards and annihilate the creature a heartbeat after it completed.

I had been worried it would pull out something I couldn't react to before in retaliation, and hadn't wanted to try it until all other options had been exhausted.

The Ratling's eyes started to cloud over once more.

"Neither Hunger nor a return to madness appealed-"

A smothering force slammed into all of us. My latest working shattered, as well as all the other effects I was currently sustaining. We started to fall out of the air. I tried to suspend us all once more, but it was like grabbing at smoke.

"-he would struggle and suppress the din."

Its eyes cleared up as we began to fall.

Yvette's concentration lapsed, and her spell fizzled out. The entire arena turned a neon pink for one moment, before fading back to normal. There was a thunderous detonation as all the air around where the Ratling and Laurence fought seemed to vanish for a moment.

How was Laurence even still alive?

Her blade rose up to meet the descending shockwave and sliced right through it.

"I can't reach for my magic!" Yvette wailed from beside me.

I fumbled against the world. The amount of effort it took was frustrating. It felt like my senses of the world were muted, like I was looking through a dense fog and trying to make out the shapes on the other side.

Sweat beaded my brow. I settled for what would usually be a simple solution and merely tried to slow our descent. The effect barely took. Me, my daughter and our horse slowly descended.

A massive paw slammed repeatedly into the ground far away from us.

Once.

The ground trembled.

Twice.

The ground cracked.

Thrice.

The floor fell in.

Almost in slow motion, a shard of shrapnel flew towards me. It was the broken remains of the crystal tree below us. I tried to reach out, I tried to do anything.

I was not nearly fast enough.

Not even a heartbeat later, it slammed into me and I blacked out.