“Ready yourselves for a fight then,” Yollah said, “because whoever this is, he’s always been heavily guarded.”
I drew the Dragon Sword and gripped it loosely in both hands. As I exhaled, I stood on the balls of my feet, my muscles tensed.
“Open the door,” I said.
Yollah flung the door open, and beyond it we saw a large chamber with a number of prison cell doors lining the walls. Also, inside the chamber were a dozen elite guards.
No words were spoken from either side; we all knew that this was a fight to the death, with no quarter asked or given.
I charged in with the Dragon Sword, with Yumo-Rezu’s enchanted arrows streaking through the air ahead of me. The assassins’ Death-enchanted throwing stars and throwing knives flashed in the torchlight as they sped toward their targets. Friya transformed into her werewolf form and pounced on a guard, and the assassins leapfrogged off walls or dived acrobatically under sword slashes, drawing their long knives to stab through tiny chinks of the guards’ armor.
As for me, I needed no such precision, not with the Dragon Sword in my hand. The enchanted blade could slice through almost any substance on earth. When one of the guards came at me with a roar, swinging his greatsword in a whistling arc at my chest, I simply flicked the blade of the Dragon Sword in an aggressive parry and cut his blade in half. I flipped the sword in my hand, darted forward, and slashed diagonally downward. The sword sheared through the guard’s entire torso from the top of his right shoulder all the way down to his left hipbone, cutting through armor, meat, and bone as if they were wet paper.
I jumped over another greatsword slash aimed at my midsection, and when I came down for a landing, I brought the Dragon Sword whistling down in a downward slash, splitting the next guard’s body from the top of his cranium down to his balls. The two halves of his body peeled grotesquely apart and flopped to the floor in a gush of blood and cascading viscera and organs.
While the assassins, Yumo-Rezu, and Friya dealt with the remaining guards, I headed straight for the cell at the very end of the chamber. The lock was enchanted with Light magic, but it was no match for my Dragon Sword, through which I channeled my own magic. I slashed the lock off the door and kicked the door open to see who the prisoner was.
The cell beyond the door was a small, dingy space. In the darkness, a skeletal figure cowered, wheezing pitifully. His body trembled with both fear and weakness. It was clear that he was barely clinging to life. I couldn’t make out his features in the gloom, so I grabbed a torch off a nearby wall and stepped cautiously into the cell.
When the firelit revealed the prisoner’s features, I recognized him immediately, and so great was my sense of shock and surprise that the torch fell from my hand.
“Fuck me,” I gasped. “Holy fuck … what the fuck is this?”
Cowering before me like some starving beggar on the street was a figure whose face was known by every citizen of Prand.
The pathetic, emaciated prisoner at my feet was none other than the Lord of Light.
“Help me,” he wheezed. “Please … help me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The emaciated being trembling before me looked nothing like the regal god depicted in so many paintings and statues, at least not in this state, but there was no mistaking the fact that this was him. In these artistic renditions, his skin was always yellow; not the fleshy yellow tone of Yengish people, but rather an unnaturally bright, vibrant yellow, like a sunflower or a ripe banana. Now, his flesh was bone-white. The paintings showed his eyes as pure white, without irises or pupils, and were usually illustrated as shining out beams of light, or at least glowing. Now, however, they didn’t even have a hint of a dim sparkle to them. He was always painted or sculpted as a powerful, muscular figure, the epitome of manliness and masculinity, but he was so skinny my undead rat probably could have lifted him up and carried him.
Even though I knew it was him, I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “You are the Lord of Light, right?”
“I am,” he wheezed, barely able to utter the words.
It didn’t take long for my disbelief to turn to righteous wrath. “What the hell are you doing down here?” I demanded. “You’re supposed to be the most powerful god who ever lived, but I find you locked away in one of Elandriel’s secret dungeons, looking like a crazed beggar dying in some tavern back alley?”
“Elandriel,” he coughed, struggling to raise his head to speak. “That … viper. He tricked … me. Fooled … everyone.”
I peered closer at the Lord of Light’s body and saw scars all over him. They were all the same size and had obviously been made by the same instrument each time. It didn’t take long for me to figure out what had been going on here.
“Fuck, Elandriel’s been slowly draining you of your blood, hasn’t he?”
“Y-yes,” he gasped. Then his eyes rolled back in his sockets, and he flopped into a heap on the urine-soaked stone, rattling out a weak breath.
The Lord of Light was dying in a puddle of his own filth in front of me. Part of me was happy to let it happen; so much evil had been done in this god’s name. So many people had been persecuted, driven from their homes, and died because of the Church of Light. He
