theFIRSTCHAPTER condemn the SAVIOR

A youthful world, void of any knowledge of its more rapidly approaching end, provides a joyful day of sun for the residents of Montierre. Birds of the sea cried softly to their cousins on winds nearby and the cool air breeze lifted the scent of daisies to the nostrils. Citizens went about their business in good fashion, granting smiles to their neighbors whom returned those smiles in kind. Demetri Vernholme ran down the beachside, yelling for his sister to hurry up and come home. The child didn’t understand what this day would mean to him.

“Katricia! Would you stop hiding and come out already? Mother wants us both home for dinner!” He was growing tired of chasing her and his feet hurt from the rough sand getting between his feet and his sandals. Demetri thought he had seen her run into the cave on the beach near the entrance to town, but a thorough search of the cave had been fruitless. He grumbled at himself for wasting time trying to catch his sister - whom he knew was much faster - and at her for running around like this. “Brother! Come quick!” Her voice was not frightened, but elated.

When he reached her he was stricken by a giant smile to watch as hundreds of men and women walked along the main road into Montierre. They all donned hoods of white wrapped in scarves of black and clothes of both. Gripped tight in hands of pale skin were white staves with silver head ornaments resembling roaring lions. Their steps were soft as the Silver entered the small city of Montierre to the sound of trumpets. People gathered into a crowd on either side of the street and awed at the Silver’s presence. As the trumpets slowly died a chorus of harps strummed the slow and somber Silver Anthem.

Their steady march brought them to the Central Square where they dispersed in columns, forming insulation to the wall of buildings that formed the center of the city. One man from each column stepped forward to the fountain in the middle where they bowed to one another and then proceeded away from Central Square out into the homes of Montierre. With the superiors away, the rest of the monks that were the Silver began to make their customary rounds throughout the city. Demetri smiled down at his little sister and then, taking her hand, lead Katricia back home for dinner. The sky above them churned clouds in from the sea.

A warm home with a loving, warm mother, was all that Demetri Vernholme had ever known in his short, but peaceful, life. That warmth felt strangely foreign to him today as he brought his sister in from the budding rain. “The Silver is here mother, someone must have been discovered with the Heart again, just like last time!” Demetri was excited to see that the monks had returned to Montierre. Last they entered the city they had cured Demetri of a scorching fever and one of his friends of a broken arm. That time they had also taken two of the children around Demetri’s age with them when they left. It was an honor to become Silver, so the elder’s said, but Demetri had yet to ever see or hear of those two children again. He wondered as he climbed into his seat for dinner whether or not those children were out there with the Silver right now.

Katricia was surprisingly quiet from the time they got home to the time their mother helped them away from the table and began to clean the metal dishes. Her face was reminiscent of the now pouring rain outside and Demetri wanted to comfort her, but had no idea what had caused her apparent sorrow. Whenever she looked at him or her mother she had a look of fear and the need to weep in her eyes, yet held the tears back with courage. As Demetri was beginning to wonder when the Ending Bell would ring, signaling the Silver’s exit of Montierre, his sister began to cry, courage collapsing in on her.

A slam on the door sundered her crying to shocked silence as they all remained quiet a moment before Demetri’s mother opened the door. Rain poured in and split the silence accompanied by the man’s arrival. He was a tall man, draped in the black and white attire of the Silver. He held in his hand the staff of a Silver superior, the same lion design, but the entirety of the staff was silver, not only the ornament. As well his robes were more intricate, decorated with designs resembling vines and branches of silver. His face was long and annoyed at the rain until he was allowed into their home.

Demetri understood why Katricia had been silent, but how she had known this was bound to happen he was unsure. The Silver had taken a seat next to the fireplace and was talking to their mother now, but he cast occasional glances back at Katricia who was purposefully staring out at the rain. Confused and worried, Demetri could only sit at the table and look at Katricia, longing to be able to support her in what would change both their lives forever. By what they presumed was night in the cover of this heavy rain, the Silver had stood up from his place with a bow and walked to Katricia with a soft tap on the back.

Parting had been an impossibility that neither Demetri nor his mother could bare as the Silver placed a black and white cloak over Katricia to protect her from the rain and escorted her from the home. She hadn’t taken anything with her, at the monastery she would be living in, in order to harness the gift of Silver, no one needed material things. Instead she took with her the memories of her brother, of her mother, of the home she had always known, and she cried as her tiny feet carried her away before she was old enough to understand that there was much more to the world than that first tiny home one lives in.

In years to follow the youthful world was becoming stretched with wrinkles known as Wars that drained the time the planet had left to thrive. The Church had headed what was called the Ambrosial Contention, a holy war to prove to the Gods that their people were the only followers worthy of their love. During which time the Silver, a sect of warrior monks from the northern mountains were all but wiped out save for a few hundred who were scattered to the winds. When a thirteen-year-old orphaned Demetri Vernholme heard the news he was stricken with tears for nearly a night till his eyes dried up and he lulled to sleep.

Worries for his sister drove nightmares like nails through his brain nightly till his eighteenth year when he left the safety of the Montierre orphanage to search for her. The Ambrosial Contention had shattered the world and all the land was dangerous to stride in this precursor to the end. Darkness was the ruler of this world that had already seen so many wars in its short time. Demetri walked his path admirably, but it was only admirable in the face of intense hatred and greed. He, who once swore himself to pacifism in the presence of his sister and the shining stars of night, walked with mercenaries and cutthroats. The Hollow had always been a possible threat, but only recently were they amassing in the cities, Castingrad was already vacant of human lives, having been evacuated earlier, when the mercenary troupe entered its tarnished grounds.

To paint the town red would refer to paint, in Castingrad the walls were stained crimson. Demetri walked the cobble streets with three other men, forming four pentacles that covered each of the four directions. He took north which was the direction of their goal and represented the leader of the squadron. Their footsteps were heard by ravens, stray dogs, and the ears of the Hollow leering at them from the shadows. A moan and the chattering of teeth moving independently in twisted jaws stopped the footsteps, weighed down the breathing.

There were no figures to make out in the long daylight shadows that stretched across the street. Night’s domain was fear and wherever there was fear the sun was wan to tread, darting behind buildings or slinking beneath trees so that shadows could grow. The Hollow were not nocturnal, they didn’t sleep, only hunted for the positive energy needed to sustain their limited thought, energy only found in the living. Fears being the night’s domain and the Hollow’s greatest advantage, the demons were only seen at night or in the casting shadows. In Castingrad great walls of stone surrounded the city for protection from outside terrors, the long shadows they cast were a tribute to the enemies within.

Essentially the goal was to progress to the back of the city where a group of citizens had holed themselves up after being left behind in the Hollow City, as Castingrad had been christened. Mercenary teams were sent in daily to escort small groups of citizens outside the city walls, few had made it past the stone barriers of the tomb that Castingrad had become. Until the State deemed every citizen evacuated from the city limits, they would continue to pay for the lives of men that were constantly being snuffed out. In the end the rescue teams only added to the number of Hollowed dominating the city as the mercenary bodies were drained of their positive energy and left to be consumed with blind hate.

Hollow dotted the shadowed cobble streets far ahead of them, more slowly coming into view through the thick blackness of shade. Demetri stopped, holding up his hand with a signal for pause. The group laid low to count the Hollow ahead of them, but the numbers were too high to calculate and more and more came in through the darkness. Demetri pointed up to the rooftops and the man on west point darted up a few stacked crates and barrels to scout ahead. A thin whistle confirmed that there were no Hollow above and the way was clear. The group proceeded to join their scout and progress across the rooftops towards the northern wall.

Stone clattered from the walls below as the corpses clawed away buildings to try and reach the positive energy that bound across the rooftops above. The Hollow below moaned and wailed, but could only claw feebly in attempt to reach the humanity high above them. It was a sight that Demetri would never forget, one of many to come, the helpless corpses of men with nothing but hate and greed scrambling over each other to reach a goal their feeble minds could not achieve. He shuddered at the sight, but kept running, leading his men closer to where the only living beings in Castingrad had taken refuge.

Never before had their been such an uprising of Hollow, an army such as this was unheard of. Ceremonies were always taken to relieve the bodies of the negative energy that did not Ascend, thus putting the corpse eternally to rest. Occasionally a body was left untreated and eventually animated by negativity. It was the responsibility of the Silver to rend the body immune to this negativity, but with the coming of the Ambrosial Contention there were none who could perform the act. Many ignorant Bishops and Priests had tried to commit themselves to learning how to properly disperse of the hollowing energy, but without the Heart - the very gift that made the Silver divine - their attempts were always fruitless.

The gap between the final rooftop and lookout tower of the inner city wall was a difficult one. Ominous due to the hordes of Hollow below, Demetri feared one of his men might not make the jump and it wasn’t till they had all safely crossed from the rooftop into the tower that he felt his tightened chest relieve him of its pain. Their landing had merited a great deal of noise and it was little more than minutes before Demetri could hear men rushing up the spiraling tower stairs. A powerful blow jolted the trap door open and three men entered with an uproar, swords drawn. One of Demetri’s men caught a good slash across the arm and were it not for his own reflexes he might have gained a similar wound before the guards came to their senses.

Many apologies and blessings were passed between the two groups before Demetri and his men were lead down from the tower to the refugee camp stationed within the inner city. The sight was more than Demetri could bare and he was forced to take a seat on a nearby barrel. He had expected a few people, possibly sick and elderly. What he got was nearly the entire inner city of Castingrad, from youths downtrodden by the firm grip their parents kept on them, to veterans, now too old to put up a fight. He didn’t have the men to escort this many people out of the city, half of them were either too young or too old to make the leap from the tower to the rooftops and the other half were too frightened to leave.

“I knew this job was paying too much…” one of his men commented absent mindedly as he stared out at the people in the streets. Another man only shook his head, resting his hands on his hips as he looked at them all, “This isn’t impossible, we get the able up to the rooftops and out of the city, then carry the others out ourselves, one at a time if we have to.” The other three men began to argue about plans while Demetri left his seat nearby to walk amongst the scared and downtrodden people of Castingrad. They had only a spark of hope in their eyes and it waned as they watched the mercenaries at the tower squabble hopelessly about plans that none of which seemed would work. Demetri could see a church in the distance, it’s doors did not look like they had been opened in ages and none of the people went near it.

Asking an elder man if he knew why the people were so opposed to the presence of this church, Demetri got a rather befuddling answer. “That church was possessed by demons long before the Hollow came to Castingrad, the Priest who attended it went mad, still lives in there most people say…doing who knows what…” The man cast baleful glances at the church as he spoke, obviously worried that the demons he spoke of might rise up from the church and strike him down at any moment. The specifics of the mission were to evacuate all survivors from Castingrad, duty obligated him to investigate the church for this Priest and find out whether anyone was still alive inside.

Each step he took towards the church filled him with a foreign dread, as if the chill from the cobblestones seeped through his boots and crawled to his heart. It was an uncomfortable sensation, something he failed to entirely grasp, like he was certain that the Priest was watching him from the church windows as he approached. The sun had gone down behind the city walls and people were starting to enter their homes, casting worried glances at the man now approaching the forsaken church. Their hearts went out to him, but they immediately closed their doors and drew shut their windows. Fear is dominant in the mind when it’s source is in discussion, but when pushed out of thought it is only an irritant in the back of the mind, ignorance was a bliss that unimportant people could afford.

The dread that welled within him only multiplied in the confines of the elaborate stone walls of the old Castingrad church. Dust dominated his senses, made it hard to breath and smell, left a thin veil of grime over his skin and irritated his eyes. Trying to regain his senses, Demetri examined the innards of this demon with expertise, if anyone walked its lengths, he would be able to spot them. Across the floor between the walls was a trail in the dust that lead from one door in an arch to another. Obviously the Priest spent his time in the back, for no soul had entered the audience hall for many years. Something fluttered in the back of the church, the sound of muffled feet on stone flooring alerted him to the Priest’s presence, or at least he presumed it to be the Priest.

There were no signs in the inner city of Castingrad that Hollow had made it past the center wall, so he found no need for precaution. A shriek so inhuman he thought that he must already be dead to hear it echoing in his brain shot out from the shadows of the room he had followed the Priest into. His sight was covered with flapping, whipping, darkness that suffocated him and tore at his flesh and brought him to the ground in a shockwave of dust. The Priest had hurled himself so hard at Demetri that his long black robes had flown over the victim’s eyes as the Priest’s weight brought him to the ground. The tearing Demetri felt had been the insane man’s sharpened nails ripping his flesh from his arms.

The struggle could only last so long until Demetri flung the emaciated man from his back and turned on him, drawing his sword in the same fluent motion. As if it were air, Demetri found that he could no longer hold onto the sword, it’s cold steel clanked to the floor. Shock had gripped him so at the sight of this man, such shock he thought his heart might have been stopped. The upper half of the Priest’s head was hidden beneath a broken porcelain mask that ended at his cheekbones. Beneath that the skin around his mouth was loose so that his teeth were always visible, what there was to see through the filth and rot. His arms, which protruded from the immense darkness of his robes, were stick thin and adorned with large hands that donned razor sharp fingernails. There was nothing of his feet, lost in the darkness of his robes along with his torso, but the depth of the blackness that was his robes seemed to pull Demetri into them and devour him slowly with the Priest’s own insanity.

His failed attempt to take Demetri off guard had proven he had no chance to defeat this foe head on, but the Priest was a man of many personalities and his anger soon subsided, “Oh, glorious savior! Spare me, he struck you in such an awful, awful way!” There were no others in the room for which Demetri could account for so he presumed the man was indeed insane. “Tell me why you’re still here…why you haven’t left, even with the coming of the demons?” Demetri asked in a stern voice. ”Oh, but the demons are all within these walls, I keep one of the wretches down the stairs master! Always down the stairs…” The Priest’s eyes seemed to dim and his consciousness faded away. “Downstairs? Take me, priest…show me this demon so I may look upon it and judge it with my own eyes…” Demetri wondered if this demon were even real as the man was lifted up by the dark robes and carried towards the back of the room, always mumbling about ‘down the stairs’.

The Priest was not so much a guide in that he showed Demetri the way, but that he continued to be lead downstairs as if by some internal entity. Following darkness into darkness is something thought to be impossible, but the depth of the Priest’s robes was so intensely void of color that Demetri thought himself unable to ever lose it, even if it were to be ripped from his sight forever. There were no signs of life in the impending darkness of the cellar Demetri was being lead down into. No sound touched his ears, no smell entered his nostrils, it was all as if the darkness had devoured everything. And then suddenly there was life, as they rounded a corner at the bottom of the stairs light seared Demetri’s eyes with its vile contrast.

Shining through a hole in the ceiling, the moonlight cast itself down upon a sight so obscene that Demetri could only stare, vomit did not come to his lips, for the grotesque substance would not want to be in the presence of something so awful. All around the room were rotting corpses, some of them pinned to the walls by nails pierced through their limbs, others still hanging from the ceiling by manacles clamped around their wrists. Blood covered everything Demetri could see, caked onto the walls and corpses like a second skin. Lying in the protective arms of formerly living parents were the rotting bodies of small children, their flesh whipped from their backs by an unrelenting master. His head spinning from the smell of death that now rushed his senses in a violent attack, Demetri reached out his hand to steady himself on the wall. He had not noticed the very thing the Priest had brought him here to see.

Bobbing up and down in the flowing darkness of his robes, the Priest made his way to a corner of the cellar, pulling forth a corpse. Or so Demetri had thought it to be at first, but the corpse stood on its own, barely, and was breathing with a determined effort. Tossing the thing to the ground, the Priest pointed, “This is the demon I speak of, sir! She is of that unnatural sect of cultists who call themselves monks! It is the Gods’ will that she be tortured!” Suddenly Demetri felt very afraid, in those once uncertain and confused eyes he could now see that the Priest was indeed very sane when he spoke of the torture he had inflicted upon this girl.

Swelling from broken bones untreated and bruises from many thrashings were present all about her. The once clean and beautiful hair she had loved to nurture was now matted and disgusting, so long it covered her face and fell down about her collarbone. Looking at this place and this poor soul, Demetri suddenly was overcome with rage, he wanted to rip the Priest to pieces and force him to watch as he set this demon free. He had left his sword on the floor above and the smell of this room was causing him to sway back and forth in a feeble attempt to keep himself conscious. Through the fog growing around his eyes from mental stress, he could barely make out a hideous smile forming on the Priest’s grotesque lips.

The darkness attacked him in a dizzying rush of cuts and tears, spinning him about in every direction. Struggling to throw the Priest from himself Demetri was suddenly aware that the madman was no longer wrought with schizophrenia, this man thought him an enemy and was attempting to kill him. Adrenaline began pumping through him and his mind grasped its surroundings hard, forcing the fog away, but not the darkness. His hand brushed against the wall and he could feel the Priest’s toenails digging into his back. With a grunt, Demetri slammed the frail man as hard as he could between his armor and the wall. He heard bones crack and then a scream similar to when the Priest had first attacked him. Darkness fell away and the Priest slumped to the ground behind him.