Chapter Forty-Eight Ruhlin
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ruhlin
The Vortigurn stood, arms raised and shuddering, while violence filled the streets of his capital from end to end.
When he finally lowered his arms and slumped, staggering close to the edge, Ruhlin tensed himself for a rush.
The gazes of the two Ventra before him never wavered from his stagna and he braced himself for what he knew would be an immensity of pain.
But, once again, the Vortigurn contrived to frustrate him.
Straightening quickly, he drew in a long breath and stepped clear of the drop.
Turning to Ruhlin, he revealed a face wearied by effort but also lit with exultance.
“Thus it comes to pass, at last,” he said.
“You can feel it, can you not, my son? Our world shifts as we draw them to us. The cohorts of chaos, flocking as moths to a flame.” As he spoke, he glanced up at the spiralling clouds.
The centre of the vortex had come to resemble a deep well of dark shadow now, one that grew larger by the second.
“What is that?” Ruhlin demanded. “What have you wrought here?”
“My escape, as I told you.” The triumph on the king’s face faded into a frown of nervous regret.
Gesturing for the two Ventra to stand aside, he stood before Ruhlin, speaking in a low murmur.
“Once, Moyirn over there did me a great but terrible service. I commanded him to find a means of reaching beyond this world. With typical dedication and, I suspect no small amount of treachery and deceit, he did as he was bid. At the time I thought him a great sorcerer, one the wisest sage in my court had scoured the world to find for me. Now…” he paused to direct a sour squint in Moyirn’s direction “… I know he was a fool fumbling his way through lore he barely understood, yet too blinded by his ambition and conceit to admit his own failings. Sometimes, I wonder if it had all been some wily scheme of his to orchestrate my end and seize my throne. But I doubt it. Moyirn, in his faltering, idiot’s way, had truly found a source of vast power and wanted very much to claim it for himself. Did you not, old friend?”
Glancing at Moyirn, Ruhlin saw him maintain the same twitching indifference to his king’s taunts. Although, this time his eyes darted about within the shade of his cowl. Like a rat seeking a drain to hide in, Ruhlin thought.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Vortigurn went on with a shrug.
“None of it mattered, in truth. My kingdom, my kin, the loyal servants who had followed me into exile, nor the wars and many misdeeds that preceded it. That, my son, was the greatest lesson I learned that day: the utter insignificance of our existence. For, when Moyirn conjured his portal, I stepped through it and, for the briefest, most blessed moment of my life, I beheld perfection.”
The king’s eyes widened and mouth opened in an expression of distant, wondrous remembrance.
“You cannot know,” he told Ruhlin in an awed whisper.
“You cannot comprehend what it was like, my son. For which I am sorry. If you had but seen what I saw, you would forgive all of this.” He flicked a hand at the chaos-ridden city behind him.
“You would understand that any price is worth paying. It changed me, you see. All of me, down to the very bones and beyond. Endless life was the least of the gifts bestowed upon me, gifts so powerful they were more a curse.”
Now! Ruhlin thought, allowing his anger to rise, feeding the monster. This was his chance to kill this mad tyrant while he lost himself in his delusions.
Yet, even as the first flare of heat blossomed in his core, the twin Ventra lit his stagna.
The instancy and depth of the pain was beyond anything Ruhlin had felt before.
He stiffened, clutched in an unseen vice of agony so fierce it wouldn’t allow him to fall.
Every muscle and tendon tensed and stretched, his mouth clamped shut.
He could feel the monster fighting the stagna’s grip, its growls loud as the fire within continued to burn, but not fierce enough to summon the transformation.
The Vortigurn barely noticed, the distant cast to his eyes lingering as he spoke on.
“The realm I saw was not like ours. I have not the words to describe its wonders, nor its difference. How to explain to an unenlightened mind a realm where pain does not exist. Where all is beauty. Where time itself can be moulded, shaped like clay by beings so far above us they make the gods we created seem like maggots squirming on a corpse.” His face changed again, lips curling in disgust. “For that is our world, Ruhlin. A bloated, corrupted corpse that never truly dies. I saw it all so clearly as they cast me out. I, you see, was not worthy. I could not exist there. I was weak, diseased, just another maggot. So repellent must I have been that they shut the door behind me, so that we could never again reach their realm by the same means. You must try to understand.” He reached up to caress Ruhlin’s shuddering face.
“Try to grasp the agony of continuing to exist in this world having tasted theirs. And, thanks to their blessing, to know that you may linger upon this fetid carcass until the last days of its putrid existence. I knew in that moment that this world is my prison, and escape my only task.”
Ruhlin tried to move his arms, hoping to clamp his hands around the Vortigurn’s neck, let them expand as the monster’s wrath took hold.
He would have taken savage delight in the spectacle that followed.
But his arms, like the rest of his body, remained rigid, locked in place by the searing torment of his stagna.
“For so long have I crafted this exact circumstance,” the king said, stroking Ruhlin’s chin.
“Constructing this city beneath a suitable veil. Building a nation mired in cruelty and greed. Then, when they were ready, launching them across the ocean to my former kingdom where, I knew, a great many souls steeped in a warrior’s ethos could be roused to the most terrible vengeance.
All to craft the door.” He inclined his head at the ugly spiral in the sky, before looking deep into Ruhlin’s feverish gaze.
“Now I must craft the key. Many fire bloods were tested over the years. All found wanting. But when Moyirn advised that we were likely to find more on the other side of the Fire Islands, it all made sense. Of course I would find you there, confirmation that all of this is destined. It needs to happen. You, my son…” Tears trickled from the Vortigurn’s eyes as he smoothed his palm over Ruhlin’s brow.
“Only you have the strength required. Only you could carry me through the portal. I knew it would take more than just that fragment of a greater soul you carry within you. To bear me hence from this world required yet greater strength, a strength so few possess. But you showed it to me in the wuhltra. Now, you must show me once more.”
Removing his hand, he stepped back, all vestige of sorrow leaching from his face as he snapped out a command: “Moyirn. It’s time.”
Unable to turn his head, Ruhlin couldn’t see the ancient wretch approach.
He did see the metal band he held in his wizened, spotted hands, identical to the one Ruhlin had seen him remove from Hulyk’s corpse.
Even through his pain, Ruhlin felt a spasm of disgust at the feel and stink of the old man’s breath.
The sound of his grating voice was soft in Ruhlin’s ear but he heard the deep, judgemental bitterness it held.
“I told you to die,” Moyirn whispered before placing the band firmly on Ruhlin’s head.
“Crafted from metal scavenged from all the veils I could find in this land,” the Vortigurn explained as Moyirn stepped back.
“Some are so small as to be little more than pinpricks in the surface of the world. Others, like the one you encountered in Morvek lands, are far more substantial. It was from the Morvek that we obtained most of the material. The only truly important aspect of the pact they struck with me, not that they knew it.”
Ruhlin expected a second wave of pain from the band, but it exuded nothing that could penetrate his ongoing torment.
Still, he had little doubt that his survival, and much else, depended on getting this thing off his head.
Please! he implored the monster. Please, give me your strength!
In response, the fire within flared, sending a jolt of power through Ruhlin’s spine, enabling him to jerk his head.
But it was little more than a brief spasm, quickly ended by a fresh wave of pain from the stagna.
“So strong,” the Vortigurn said, shaking his head.
“Any other Kelven would have perished by now.” Coming closer, he placed a tentative hand to the metal ring upon Ruhlin’s brow.
“I feel it,” he said, a smile playing over his lips.
“Centuries of power leaching from their world into ours, caught within the fragments welded into this band. For once, Moyirn, you appear to have done something right.”
He didn’t see the change overcome Moyirn’s raddled features then, the careful indifference that shifted into deep, baleful hatred.
Poised only a step from the Vortigurn’s back, Moyirn’s hands disappeared into the sleeves of his robe, unnoticed by his king who had once again turned his attention to the roiling spiral in the sky.
It appeared to have lowered in height, the fast swirl of ugly cloud descending towards the tower.
It continued to cast out a steady patter of drizzle rather than the deluge that its gloom portended.
But it was the deepening darkness in its centre that captured Ruhlin’s notice.
At first it appeared a void, darker than any shadow, but then he saw something move within it.
It was only a flicker of dim light shifting as it caught the shape of a moving body.
Meagre though it was, the sight stirred an instinctive repugnance in Ruhlin, a certainty that he looked upon something that no human eye should suffer.
“You see them, don’t you?” the Vortigurn said, turning back to Ruhlin.
“You feel them, their hunger. I said all was beauty in that other realm, but there is ugliness upon its borders where the hungry things abide. Denied the bliss of the inner realm they endlessly prowl its edges, seeking a way into our plane, drawn by conflict they sense on the other side of the veils. Sometimes, one of them makes it through, like pus dripping from a festered wound. Ever they try to sow more discord, for it feeds them, though their hunger is never sated. There have been times throughout the span of history when they have been given a feast, such a glut of violence and suffering that their ravening desire allows the veil to be pierced in full. And when they come, when they feed, that is when I shall finally be free of this cage, for the door shall be open.”
His gaze was fully centred on Ruhlin now, eyes wide with a need for understanding, as if his chosen son could grant some form of absolution for the enormity of his crime. So intense was his need, that he failed to notice Moyirn slipping a knife from the sleeve of his robe.
“You do understand, don’t you, my son?” the Vortigurn said, raising both hands. His fingers shook as he pressed them into Ruhlin’s face. “You do know that this has to be…”
The Vortigurn moved without warning, whirling to snare Moyirn’s wrist just as the ancient began to raise his blade for a strike. “A knife in the back, old friend?” the Vortigurn asked him, his tone one of mild disappointment rather than anger. “How depressingly ordinary.”
Letting out a wordless snarl, Moyirn tried to wrest his arm free of the Vortigurn’s grip only to find himself further confined when the king clamped his other hand upon the old creature’s neck.
“This is madness!” Moyirn stuttered. His pockmarked jowls quivered, eyes bulging from their dark, recessed sockets as the Vortigurn lifted him up and moved to the aperture in the tower’s floor.
“You ensure only our destruction.” The words came in a wet babble, Moyirn’s spindly legs kicking when the Vortigurn dangled him over the drop.
“No,” the Vortigurn replied, voice soft with reflection. “Yours, certainly, but that was always going to be the case. I’m afraid I simply couldn’t depart this world in the knowledge that you, like many forms of vermin, would find a way to survive what follows.”
Ruhlin found himself both surprised and grudgingly impressed by Moyirn’s defiance in this moment.
Instead of terrorised grovelling he emitted a thin, enraged howl.
Fixing the Vortigurn with a hate-filled glare of his bulging eyes, he grunted, “You miserable, worthless ape! All the power you were given, and you wasted it on centuries of vain ambition. You are no more than an ungrateful child. Had I been blessed as you were, I would have made myself master of this world.”
“Possibly,” the Vortigurn conceded, pursing his lips. “But you weren’t, and so you aren’t. Goodbye, Moyirn.”
The decrepit, degraded weakling that was Moyirn fell to his doom screaming a final insult, but the distorted echo as he plummeted through the tower’s innards prevented Ruhlin from discerning its meaning. It ended shortly after, the depth of his fall too great for Ruhlin to hear the final impact.
“Of all the trials I had to endure these many years,” the Vortigurn said, wiping his hands on his robe, “he was assuredly the worst.”
Moving to face Ruhlin once again, the king’s expression took on a purposeful frown that made it clear the time for any distractions was over.
“I…” the king said, swallowing hard, “I don’t know if any vestige of you will remain.
But know this: having finally found you, what I must do pains me more than I ever thought it would. I am sorry, Ruhlin.”
With that, he placed his hands upon the band on Ruhlin’s brow, and all the world turned black.