Chapter 39
YUMA
The Grim King’s soldiers guarded his castle day and night.
Its thick walls were impervious to the cannons of the Fifth Legion, repairing themselves at the slightest hint of cracking.
When Yuma arrived, the gates had opened as if recognizing her by sight, but even those gates had vanished into the wall once she passed through.
In the six months she had been in this obsidian castle, the Grim King had never once spoken of her rebellion, nor did he even question her motives in coming here.
Yuma had a feeling that he already knew.
When she had first arrived, she had simply been led by a skeletal servant to a large room devoid of decoration.
There was a modest yet comfortable bed, a chair, and a beautifully carved obsidian crib with Tychon’s name inlaid in Mersehi.
All of the furniture seemed to sprout directly from the room’s floor.
The Grim King, always in the same robe woven of fire and shadow, did not seem to sleep, eat, or drink.
In Danras, rumors had abounded that his castle was filled with bloodless, beautiful corpse concubines, but she saw none of that.
Perhaps it would’ve been less chilling if she had.
What had brought the Grim King here, all those years ago?
Why did he stay? He had no family here, nor did he bring his people from wherever was his homeland.
He had perhaps the greatest stronghold in the world, but there were no riches inside, no hedonistic pleasures.
Just corpses, rocks, and himself. And now Yuma.
Yuma occasionally touched the nullstones he had given her. When she had asked him one day if they could defeat the Imperial legion, he had scoffed.
“To think such a thing would be possible!”
“Even if I used both of them?”
“You could stop a few chariots. But two, or even ten, stones wouldn’t be enough against an entire legion. And there are not ten such stones in all the world.”
Cannons had then fired again, sending dull echoes through her chambers. Although each shot seemed futile, they would inevitably amount to the doom of Eldred.
She spent the rest of the winter in her room, sometimes wandering around the castle until she was gently brought back to her room by a servant.
Then, when the earth thawed, she was allowed to wander the vast space outside surrounded by the castle’s walls.
She rode Aston sometimes, longing for the steppe that she knew she would never see.
The Grim King visited her as often as once every five days.
First he would throw sarcastic censures at her, how she had brought the bane of nations to Merseh.
She would snap back with accounts of his tyranny.
But even that didn’t last long, and the Grim King would ask after her health and pregnancy, staying in Yuma’s room just long enough for her to finish the strange herbal concoction that he brought every time he visited.
She was under no illusion of the Grim King being anything other than a tyrant, but she learned not to fear him anymore.
In this castle, at this moment, they were just two people waiting for the end.
Yuma was surprised at how well she was taking it.
Perhaps it was because of Tychon inside her that she never felt alone here.
Toward the end of summer, Yuma gave birth to Tychon as she listened to the sounds of battle happening beyond the wall.
The skeletal midwives received him in their emaciated hands and passed him to her to hold.
Days later, when her milk turned white, the Grim King came to her, the fire in his robes merely embers in black, like the starry night sky.
Yuma sat up to greet him, and Eldred stared into the obsidian crib where the baby slept.
His expression was unreadable. But he had silenced his steps and was visibly careful with his hands, even though they were not even close to Tychon. This sight softened her and made her ask him how he had come to settle in Merseh all those years ago. He became irritated.
“Why are you yourself here?” he snapped. Finally, he had asked the question that had been on Yuma’s mind for months. “When you are not even here to join my side.”
Yuma stroked the baby’s hair with her fingertips and said, “There is no place for me in Danras.”
“That is true. But do you think there is a place for you here?”
Yuma shook her head and looked into Tychon’s sleeping face.
“Are you here because of your old Host’s prophecy?” he sneered. “That my apprentice shall become the King of Merseh?”
“This child…” She took a deep breath. “You said come autumn, not even this place would survive. Mersia will fall into the Empire’s hands then. But if Tychon became the Grim King’s apprentice, maybe Danras could become free of them again someday.”
“How utterly convenient for you. I will fall by the hand of the Empire regardless, and your son will take over Merseh. Is that your calculation?” A bitter laugh.
Yuma smiled. “How could there be calculation when it’s prophecy?”
“Or are you afraid your child will become that ‘Power generator’ they speak of? Or, how you will no longer be Chief Herder?”
Was it such hubris that brought her here?
This was a question she had asked herself several times over the past six months.
She had always had a suspicion this might be so.
But that suspicion was her burden to bear, and she would not have to bear it for long.
The Grim King reached out toward Tychon and paused, his head turning to Yuma.
She stared at his hovering hand, thinking of what Aidan had said in the past. Of why Eldred had not accepted Aidan as an apprentice, and why he hadn’t been killed … She nodded, giving permission.
The Grim King carefully lifted up the baby, who was wrapped in the blue receiving blanket the Host had given her.
“Little one, my name is Eldred. Three thousand years of legacy flows through me. Now kiss my hand.”
He gently held out the back of his hand to Tychon’s lips. Tychon woke, looked at Eldred’s hand, and grabbed one of his bony fingers.
In a voice softer and more pleasant than Yuma had ever heard him use, the Grim King said, “You are hereby apprenticed to Eldred. And you shall become king of this land.”
He lightly lowered the baby back into the crib and covered him up to the chin with the small orox-hide blanket.
“The flowers embroidered on this blanket used to proliferate on the steppe,” he observed. “Now they are no more. They used to bloom only for a few days in the summer every year, but they disappeared around fifty years ago and not a trace of them remains.”
Aidan had managed to pass every trial the Grim King had put before him, only to have his Power taken away and to be banished.
That the Grim King considered him unworthy but allowed Aidan to survive simply to leave behind progeny—Yuma did not believe this anymore.
After all, the Grim King hadn’t cared about the lives of the other children who hoped to become his apprentice.
Maybe Aidan was special in that he had passed the tests, and to Eldred was no longer as insignificant as the forgotten white summer flowers of the steppe.
The Grim King nodded to Yuma and left the room.
That night, a bell that had never rung since Yuma’s arrival rang three times.
She could hear the roaring of the legion outside.
But this was not the roar of attack upon a fortified wall.
It was the roar of victory. Yuma was trying to look outside the windows when one of the skeletal servants entered. It bowed and gestured to her to follow.
Yuma then knew that this was the end. She took her time dressing herself in her riding gear, held Tychon close to her, and followed.
The Grim King sat on his white throne of bones, his robes burning silently like hearth fire, a large crystal ball in his hand.
Through it, he could see everything the stormbirds that patrolled Merseh saw.
Yuma walked up the dais to him. Eldred gave her a glance and said, “Chief Herder of Danras, I believe what we have expected and feared for so long has finally arrived.”
Peering into the crystal ball, she saw a lone legionary with a strangely shaped body.
Why was the stormbird flying so close to a single soldier?
Then, she realized what she was really seeing.
This wasn’t a soldier. It was a giant made of iron, as tall as the smaller towers of the castle. It was walking toward them on two feet.
“What is that?”
“The Empire’s ‘gigatherion.’ A machine titan running on a Power generator.”
“I never would’ve imagined such a thing would exist.”
The roaring outside coalesced into a single discernible name.
“Apollyon! Apollyon! Apollyon!”
“It must be that thing’s name,” mused the Grim King.
“Is it all over?” She was almost relieved.
But the Grim King floated a mischievous grin. “We shall see. I am not finished yet. I have prepared something for this very occasion.”
His mouth made a sound no human mouth could have made.
Flinching, Yuma covered her baby’s head.
The floor shook, the throne of bones rose upward, and the ceiling above them split and opened like the double eyelids of a lizard.
The Grim King and Yuma now looked down at the battlefield from a great height, the Powered chariots and soldiers of the Fifth Legion looking like ants compared to the gigatherion Apollyon approaching from afar.
The Grim King held out his arms to the sky, dark clouds gathering to cover the starry night.
His robes burned brighter, flames threatening to lick the sky itself.
Yuma caught glimpses of stormbird shadows in the clouds.
Then, lightning flashed, lighting up the night sky.
One of the lightning bolts hit Apollyon squarely in the chest, but aside from a loud mechanical screech, it seemed unaffected.
Rain began to pour. It was thick and black.
Her body battered by rain and wind, Yuma turned to the Grim King.
“My young apprentice,” he said, “you don’t think all I’m about to do is throw a few lightning bolts, now, do you?” His words were for Tychon, but his eyes were fixed on the sky. “Behold. Your master’s final wonder.”
The rain thickened into a dark cloudburst, and the wind threatened to blow Yuma’s hat away.
She pressed her hand on it. Four bolts of lightning crashed down between the approaching Apollyon and the legionaries.
There was a rumbling separate from the thunder, and the earth shook.
All the legionaries looked behind themselves.
High up in the sky, the air rippled like a pond disturbed by a pebble. The ripples slowly merged into a violet swirl, a veritable maelstrom of magic. A fearful murmur rose among the soldiers.
Something red and black sprouted from the sky, a hand or a paw, neither human nor animal.
The legion began to retreat, their cries for the gigatherion turning into screams of fear.
Yuma stared at the monster emerging from the sky.
Like Garamund, it was made of orox bones and flesh, but this creature was as tall as the gigatherion.
It had a long neck; a head of countless eyes that glowed green; sharp sword-like teeth made of bones; front paws with huge, curved claws …
It even had a pair of bat-like wings made from orox leather and stitched together with thick tendons.
The Grim King, his arms stretched before him, kept making strange vocalizations. Yuma did not know whether it was the language of his birth or that of another world. He never did answer Yuma’s questions of where he had come from and why he chose Merseh as his conquest.
The monster struck Apollyon’s shoulder with its clawed paw. The sturdy gigatherion, which had looked unstoppable, fell backward from the force. The monster immediately pressed down on the machine with one paw and ruthlessly struck down with its other at the machine. The Grim King laughed excitedly.
The retreating soldiers regrouped, but they dared not attack the monster even when it was showing its back to them. The blasts of the chariots didn’t seem to register with the monster at all.
Every time the monster’s claw struck the gigatherion, there were sparks.
Yuma looked back at the Grim King. His gaze was on the battle before him.
“Are you afraid I shall win? Do not fret. This is the end of my strength. Even if I’m lucky enough to win now, they will soon bring two.
And if I bring down two, they will bring three.
To defeat the Empire, I must myself raise an empire, and that is not something I can do. ”
Apollyon, still on its back, grabbed at the monster’s wings and ripped them off. They were like paper in its grasp. The monster gave no sign of pain, but the Grim King grimaced as if a part of his body had been torn away.
“Thirty more years—no, had I just ten more…”
Apollyon let go of the torn wings and grabbed the torso of the monster. The gigatherion’s body turned a bright red, and a ray of light pierced through the monster’s chest into the sky.