Eryn
Come on, Silas, Eryn thought, hearing the clapping of boots on the marble floor, getting closer to where Silas was kneeling. She knew she had to take the risk. She stuck her head out from around the column, so she could see what was happening.
The Overlord's advisor was only two columns away from where Silas was kneeling, his head still in his hands. Her heart pounding, Eryn pulled her sword from its scabbard, and smacked it against the column, as if by accident.
The man's head snapped towards her, and a look of confusion crossed his brow. "Assassin," he called back. "Come out and die like a man."
The sword came to his hand so fast, she didn't even see him move. Behind him, she could see the Overlord and the soldiers shifting to see what was going on. The soldiers started to move, but he put his arms in front of them. A smile extended across his face.
Eryn stepped out into view, but she had no intention of attacking. She only had a couple of months of training, hardly enough to beat anyone of real skill. She needed to distract him until Silas recovered. If he recovered.
She ran towards the swordsman with her sword up, the way Silas had shown her, and screamed. He smiled at that, and set his blade back in preparation. When she was still twenty feet away, she turned to face the throne, a large, ornate wooden chair at the top of a tall set of carpeted stairs. She ran for it.
She could hear him laughing at her back.
"Where are you going, boy?" the swordsman shouted, not following after her. "You must have some skill to have gotten in here unseen, and they saw fit to arm you with an ircidium blade. Why don't you come down here and try your hand? If you're good enough, I'll forgive you for coming to assassinate the Overlord, and you can join my battalion."
Eryn reached the throne and ducked behind it. The man was a soldier. No, more than a soldier, he was a commander of a whole battalion. She had been right not to challenge him. Now she just had to keep him busy.
"I don't want to fight," she said in her deeper, boy voice. "They said the Overlord would be alone. 'Just sneaks up on 'im and poke 'im with the sword,' they said. 'You'll be a hero,' they said."
The man's laughter got louder. "A hero, eh? I'm afraid the Overlord isn't as easy of a target as he may look from down with the rest of the commoners. How old are you, boy?"
"Feng, stop chatting with him and bring him down here," the Overlord said. He had left the balcony, and was approaching the swordsman. The two soldiers stayed behind, watching the crowds.
"I'm fourteen, My Lord," Eryn said, coming out and standing next to the throne. "Been thieving my whole life. There's nothing I can't get into." She looked over to where Silas had been kneeling.
His boots and empty scabbard were there, but he was gone.
"There's something you can't get out of," the Overlord said.
"Iolis," Feng said, "I've made the boy an offer. I'm a man of my word."
The Overlord shook his head. "Fine. Come down here boy, and show the General what you can do."
Eryn started to step forward. Then she saw Silas.
He was charging at them from the side, out from behind the closest column. He had removed everything but his pants in order to be as quiet as possible.
"No, My Lord. I can't fight you. You'll kill me for sure." She took her sword and threw it, so that it rattled and clattered down the steps. Their eyes followed it while Silas got right up behind them, his sword raised to slash the Overlord across the back.
Feng turned, his own weapon coming up impossibly fast, and smacking Silas' out of the way.
Silas rolled away from the return cut and got to his feet.
"Ahh, there you are," Feng said. "You've been a hard man to find."
Silas stood with his sword raised; his chest heaving, his eyes on fire.
"You don't remember, do you?" Feng asked. "Your own brother."
"Talon," the Overlord said, looking over at him. He turned his head back to Eryn. "I didn't think you still had it in you, to use a child to try to draw me in. Feeling more like yourself these days?"
Silas didn't say anything. He just stood there, looking at them.
"Nothing to say?" Feng asked.
"You aren't my brother," he said.
Feng laughed. "Not by birth, no. We all took an oath, Talon. Don't you remember? No, you don't. If you had remembered it from the beginning, we wouldn't be here now."
"It was already broken," Silas said. "He broke it."
"Your son was Cursed, Talon. He didn't make it happen. You did what you had to do. Blaming him, or the Overlord isn't going to help anything."
Silas shook his head. "You don't know?" he asked.
"Know what?" Feng replied.
"The Curse. It's a sickness. Aren wasn't born with it. He gave it to him." He motioned at the Overlord. "He injected it into him, to make him sick."
Eryn couldn't believe it. She was sick? She remembered Malik's journal. Was that what would happen to her? She felt the fear starting to overwhelm her, and she forced herself to be calm. Silas needed her right now.
"Is it true?" Feng asked Iolis.
The Overlord nodded. "It's true. But don't you think he had his reasons, Feng?"
Silas looked at the swordsman, his eyes pleading. Feng looked back and forth between him and the Overlord.
"I'm sorry, Talon," he said at last. "Your grief has overcome you, and your loyalty has fled if you don't believe there was a good reason for what he did. He didn't break the oath. You did."
Silas lowered his head, still shaking it. "Why would he want Aren dead, when he has a cure?"
Eryn's heart lifted. A cure? She didn't have to wind up like Malik. It was a sickness they could fix.
"I'm sure there is a good reason, Talon. Have you ever thought that your son was a rebel, a traitor? That he was trying to undermine all of the hard work we've done?"
Silas' head shot up. "He knew. The truth that I refused to see. The truth that you refuse to see." He looked at the Overlord. "Freeze me, Mediator. Hold my body so that you can end my life. If you don't, I'm going to kill you."
The Overlord smiled, and held out his hand. Eryn could see a gold stone sitting on top of an ircidium ring. "He's given me permission to kill you, Talon. It didn't come easily, but I talked him into it."
Eryn's heart jumped into her throat. The Overlord was Cursed? She had to do something, or he was going to kill Silas.
She saw the stone on the ring begin to glow. Silas' sword came up, and he hopped forward, a quick slash intended to cut Iolis' finger off. Feng's blade met his, and batted it away.
"Don't make him do this, brother," Feng said. "We can work it out. It's all been a misunderstanding."
Silas was the one laughing now. "A misunderstanding? He killed him!" He went for the Overlord again, but Feng intervened. He blocked two quick thrusts and went on the offensive.
Eryn closed her eyes and tried to picture the bellows. She couldn't bring it to mind over the cracking of the blades, in a pattern so fast she could barely believe the two men could follow one another well enough to avoid being cut.
She gave up on it, and focused on her breathing. She didn't have much time.
Clang, clang, clang, the swords smacked together at a dizzying pace. If she had opened her eyes, she would have seen Silas and Feng dancing around the room, twirling and slashing, parrying and thrusting. They were both Generals, both masters of war and battle. Brothers of a sort, according to Feng.
She took hold of the sound in her mind. The rhythm of metal on metal, like the hammer folding iron on the forge. She found her place there, and began to feel the tingle between her ears.
"Enough," she heard the Overlord say. She could sense the power feeding out of him and into the ring. She could feel it amplified by the stone and pushed at Silas. A moment later, the fighting stopped.
She fought to hold onto her own power, and hoped that the Overlord was too concerned with Silas to notice her. She kept the ringing of the blades in her memory, held it tight and kept it beating away, feeling more energy rushing into her body, pooling throughout her limbs.
She had sped herself up once, to save them from the monsters of the Rushes. She said the word then, hearing it escape her lips at hyper speed.
"Incitat."
She opened her eyes. As she expected, Silas was frozen, held by the Overlord's power. Feng was frozen too, or at least he seemed that way, stuck in a slowness of time that she had either created, or escaped. The Overlord was equally trapped, as were the two soldiers, who had come running at the sound of the fighting.
She ran down the steps, bending over to pick up her sword on the way down. Her head was starting to hurt, and she could feel the blood running from both eyes. She couldn't hold this for long.
She went for the Overlord. If she killed him, his power over Silas would cease. She ran right up in front of him, drawing back her sword and pushing it forward, to stab him in the stomach.
He moved.
He stepped to the side, and grabbed her wrist, squeezing it so hard she dropped the blade. It fell so slowly, it was almost as though it was floating in the air. At the same time, the glow from the ring faded.
"You?" he said, surprised. "You're a child, and you created a distortion field?" He held her wrist, looking down at her, fear and blood in his eyes.
"I did what I had to do. I'm not going to let you kill Silas." She struggled against his grip, trying to shake herself free. Her headache was getting stronger.
"It took me twelve years to make a distortion field," he said. He held her while he leaned over and grabbed her discarded blade.
"Let me go," she cried. She bent her head down and tried to bite him, but he tugged her off-balance.
"You're the reason he kills our kind," the Overlord said, his anger obvious. He lifted the sword up, but Eryn could tell he was straining to do it. "Cursed like you can't be allowed to live, if you refuse to be loyal."
His voice, and his grip were weakening. Eryn was feeling dizzy herself, her eyes blurring while she looked at him.
"Loyal? How do you expect loyalty, when you murder people's families?"
She tugged her wrist again, and this time it came free. The Overlord fell to his knees, the blood pouring from his eyes so quickly that it created a regular trickle to the floor.
"You don't understand," he said. "It has to be this way. You don't know what you're doing." The sword fell from his grip, back towards the floor, the distortion causing it to move ever so slowly.
"I know what I'm doing." Eryn walked over and took the hilt, feeling her power beginning to fade, along with her consciousness. The Overlord watched her, leaning on his hands to stay upright, his entire face red with blood. She raised the sword up, to stab down into his back, and then saw that he had frozen.
The Overlord would be too weak to hold Silas again, and she only had seconds, she knew, before her power was gone. She twisted around and plunged her sword into Feng's stomach. She felt a hint of guilt and sadness at it, because he had at least seemed like an honorable man, but he had become the biggest threat.
She let go of the hilt, and fell to the floor.