Shadows of Calendula: The Monolith
“With every step, the world shivers. Each tread in its warpath draws fire from the ground, and an inferno rages in perpetuity at its heels. We don’t know what it wants. We don’t know from whence it came. But we know one thing, and one thing only: It will stop for nothing.”
Karma found the description for his newest job, offered to him that very morning, incredulous; for all the ills and evils he had beaten down over his prestigious twenty years as a sellsword, especially in the wake of the Efflyxia Scourge, never had he laid eyes on one so ridiculous.
A titan. A bipedal monolith of stone, spewing fire with every step it took and leaving nothing but hellfire in its wake.
“If this thing is real, I’ll eat my own damn hand!”
Nyx had heard such a proclamation, and many variations thereof, more than she would have liked as the two raced to Notah atop their mighty six-legged Gryff – affectionately named Chestnut after the enchanting colour of his mane.
“Some dumb kid probably started a brush fire, and now apparently the whole world’s up in flames and stony giants are treading the earth and carving their own roads as they please! They ought to give me some real work one of these days, something other than wasting my time chasing fairy tales!”
She couldn’t fault him; the more outlandish contracts passed under the door of the Byron branch of Invidia Sanctum oft turned out to be exaggerated or fabricated altogether, as did the proposed reward. She couldn’t help but grin as she recalled one brave stud who wove tales of man eating swans in order to lure the most accomplished duo working under Invidia Sanctum into a trap, and take them on alone in a fight – Karma slew him before she could even begin to offer consultation.
But connected as she was to the dark energies drifting throughout the island nation of Calendula, and sharper than Karma’s knife when it came to matters of business, she was alarmed by the nature of this request, as well as the amount offered for its completion.
20,000 Oru.
After the Sanctum’s cut, that left the two of them with a little north of 17,000. Enough to buy a house in the radiant capital of Arden – not that either of them would be given to living amongst the self-important incarnate – with change to spare.
The amount was extraordinarily high, but not within the usual realm of hoaxes or hearsay. Legitimate contracts surpassing this prize were about as common as a Gryff living beyond two decades, but somewhere in her abyssal mind one or two hazy instances laid.
This alone wasn’t enough to incite concern, but as their destination rested only an hour away, she could sense evil roaring past her with the force of a gale; despite her insistence, Karma continued to wave off her misgivings. Brazen as he was, he was still usually in the right mind to consult her on matters pertaining to darkness. But the prize had hypnotized him.
The westward trip to Notah ought to have taken three hours via Gryff. But it came to an abrupt end after two and a half, on an otherwise unremarkable path between Notah and the neighbouring town of Silette. Chestnut came to a dead stop as they burst out of a winding forest path, and Karma lowered the hood of his dirty cobalt mantle, surrendering his drained red hair to the elements.
The titan was there, exactly as it had been described. Even as they stood a little over a mile away from the hulking monolith, the ground still trembled in fear every time its foot crashed back into the dry earth. Every tree around them strained as far as they could go without toppling entirely as waves of heavy wind soared through and past them. A wall of vengeful fire and stygian smoke raged where Notah once stood, accentuating the grey and lifeless behemoth that had wrought such lively chaos. Even the tides of the nearby sea had grown restless and violent, crashing against the landmass of Calendula with reckless abandon. Karma’s emerald eyes went sullen.
“I take it your hand is on tonight’s menu?” Nyx asked – she tried to smile, but the darkness emanating from the unstoppable monolith barred the effort.
“You know me.” Karma answered, one strategy after another assembling and crumbling in his head, “I’m terrible at keeping my word.”
On Nyx’s advice, the two of them hurried up the nearest hill, and Karma perched atop an ancient stone ring, glaring towards the stone giant through his battered binoculars without a word escaping his lips. These stone rings were prevalent throughout the hills of Calendula, although the knowledge of what purpose they served died with their creators. Nyx savoured the brief silence; with nothing clouding her mind save for the light tremors and distant booming of footsteps, she could properly assess their circumstances.
“You first, Nyx.” Karma said after he hopped down.
“Our biggest concern is the forest, or rather its breadth across Calendula. Its path so far has been light on vegetation; the most significant damage has come to Notah itself, but even there I expect the fire to be largely self-contained and simmer out with little in the way of collateral damage. But as it stands now, I give it another hour before that thing barges into the forest and a few days distant from that before every tree from here to Morys is reduced to ashes.”
Morys… Karma wasn’t the most geographically literate, but he followed the rule of thumb that if he hadn’t heard of it, it must surely be a considerable distance away.
“Ah… I hate jobs like these. Stakes are too high.” he said with a grimace.
“But we’re the most qualified to deal with them. Let’s get on with it or there won’t be a Byron to go home to.” said Nyx.
“Alright, Lady Gloom, you made your point.” Karma answered bitterly, “But I wouldn’t say we’re facing certain doom here. Only mostly certain doom.
“Each step takes roughly half a minute, and the ground beneath its feet cracks and breaks open for several metres around them on contact, and sometime afterward fire starts spewing from its seams. I was thinking we ought to draw one of your fancy darkness circles on the path ahead, but even if we could keep the ground intact, I don’t know if it would be able to seal that thing in place, especially if it’s giving you the shivers.”
“Indeed. The day is young yet, but what walks before us is an atrocity in spirit, barely distinguishable from the worst of the night and rivalled only by my- our benefactors.”
Nyx took a measured step towards the behemoth – her unfurled raven black hair appeared formless beneath the almighty glow of the midday sun.
“The time is by no means ideal for me, but we do not have the leisure of waiting. The core of its being resides in its head.” She said, casting her frail left hand towards the peak of the walking calamity – more of a stub than a defined humanoid head, but there came a scant blue glow from beneath it, “It would be convenient for us were the sun already far enough in its journey so as the smoke could blot it out, but save for a helping hand from the elements, the forest will be aflame before I can draw out Malpha.”
Malpha – hearing the Maiden of Misery’s name was enough to put Karma on edge, given the sheer discomfort she had instilled in the marrow of his bones throughout their sole brief encounter.
“Guess we better take our chances, then. We either walk away from this as the heroes of Calendula or get reduced to bloody pancakes. I’m sure the latter would delight you.” Karma said smugly.
“I would prefer to offset the wrath of Oblivion as much as is possible, Karma. You know as well as anybody that I didn’t choose this life; I never fancied myself dying in a battlefield.”
Karma’s last comment lingered in her mind as the two advanced towards the titan; she scowled as she contemplated the eternity of torment that she knew awaited her upon her inevitable demise. Her powers of nocturne came at a steep price, and did not come to her voluntarily; at the unfortunate age of 15, she ought to have died four years prior from the Efflyxia Scourge, as her father and every other man in the village of Maurdeaux had.
Yet she returned to life shortly after her passing, posthumously forced into a partnership with one of the many godlike entities swarming around Oblivion. Her skin turned pale as a drained carcass, her hair transmogrified from a golden blonde to an empty black, and she became naturally drawn towards darker clothing in spite of a strong distaste for it in life. Nyx, and every woman within the walls of Maurdeaux who had also returned from death, soon found themselves under the service of the Invidia Sanctum as Nocturnal Aides, their only alternative being execution.
The wiry, terrified Chestnut refused to approach the hulking monolith, and so Karma and Nyx were forced to make their way to the titan’s feet via their own. Their sprinting came to a halt in front of its path, and Nyx’s struggle to continue standing upright became more and more pronounced.
“Are you good, Nyx?” Karma asked calmly, though his gaze stayed rooted on their impossible task.
“I have to be; too much rests on our shoulders.”
With that, she put her all into standing upright, staring down the monster that towered above even the Invidia Sanctum’s illustrious Byron headquarters. Its diminutive head arched down ever so slightly, mystified by the ants flailing around at its feet, but the rest of its body acted undeterred. Nyx understood that its capacity for evil was so great that it hardly even registered the virtuous; if they remained rooted to their spot, whether it trod on or past them mattered for nothing to it. Evil so callous and dismissive was exceedingly rare. But so long as the sun obscured Nyx’s true nature, it also proved to be the creature’s greatest weakness.
Her hands stretched outwards, her left towards the vast skies and the right towards the depths of Oblivion. As the two of them slowly moved counter-clockwise, each ending where the other began, a chant that was music to Karma’s ears left the Nocturnal Aide’s mouth.
“Iena crasso il Munadei shakkom!”
With the final syllable escaping her blackened lips, an elegant circular sigil spawned from nothing as her hands came to a stop. Containing a multitude of indecipherable inscriptions, its perimeter was lined by coherent phrases of their underworldly tongue, one Karma gave up on learning many years prior but still looked at with a curious glint in his eye.
Karma took a cautious step back as he heard an ominous rumbling; it wasn’t from the titan’s footsteps, but instead from a space that did not exist within their world. Sure enough, only a moment passed before an abyssal ball of black fire emerged roaring and convulsing from the shadowy sigil. As the sigil faded from this realm, the fireball arched towards the peak of the grey giant, and the infernal impact that shattered its entire head could be heard from Byron. The stygian meteor dissipated without a trace, and in its wake the core of the stone titan was clearly visible, casting an optimistic blue light against the backdrop of immortal smoke.
But this light was transient; as soon as Karma and Nyx had assessed its damage and prepared to ascend the titan, an indescribable and awful sound of stone shuffling and scraping in perpetuity forced them to cover their ears, and they could only watch as the stone body of the titan shuffled around, reconstituting its head into a jarring shape that seemed to peer down on them with ridicule.
“Iena crasso il Munadei maritas shakkom!” Nyx cried out as soon as her hands left her ears, forging yet another black sigil from nothingness.
“Nyx! Hold on a-!” Karma said, though his tongue was rooted in place as he watched a wretched creature force its way through her second sigil.
The sigil expanded well beyond Nyx’s control, and her arms ached and stretched just short of drawing blood as her summon unfurled from its abyssal captivity. Karma had only heard this particular chant twice before, only in circumstances where the alternative was a horrible death for the two of them, and neither time had it left Nyx unscathed. For her to unleash it so soon… he knew then and there that he had gravely underestimated their situation.
Nyx’s arms went limp once the tip of her summon’s barbed tail finally emerged from the fading sigil. Bathed in a black so stark that not even the sun could dispel the shadow that consumed its entire being, and covered from its wolf-like head to its four razor-coated claws in bristling, prickly fur, such a thing was only material in the darkest of nightmares before the Nocturnal Aides came to be.
In a flash, it took off towards the beast, kicking up a torrent of dust with every impact against the ground, as impressive in speed as its target was in its sheer mass. At last perturbed, the docile colossus swung one of its enormous arms that up until then had laid idle by its sides, just barely missing the encroaching beast but cleanly carving a chunk out from the earth.
“Go!” Nyx said, “The opportunity will present itself with time, but you must be ready for it!”
Karma stood there for a moment, a cocktail of bewilderment and genuine concern for his companion’s wellbeing restraining him momentarily, but as the titan’s left foot came crashing down upon the earth, he sprang back into action.
By the time Karma began clawing for a foothold in the monster’s legs, Nyx’s summon had already raced up to its head in record time. The ceaseless stone creature continued to act in its own defense, swinging its body around at a speed that seemed sluggish from a distance but just fast enough for the unfortunate sellsword clambering up its waist to scream for dear mercy as his fingertips were all that saved him from an early funeral.
Nyx watched silently as the abyssal beast spewed a torrent of purple fire wreathed in black into the titan’s new head. The rocks covering its precious core melted beneath the volcanic pressure, and the creature’s grotesque arms kept its self-reconstruction at bay.
Karma saw his opportunity; having at last clambered to the titan’s shoulder, its core glistened in his eyes as the orchid flames dissipated. Nyx’s… employer was most fond of these, and the two of them had claimed many of them from the abominations slain in their travels, though none had stood so titanic as this one. The summoned creature scowled at Karma, urging him to act with haste. Karma took a step forward, ready to claim the prize, up until Nyx caught his eye. She was frantically leaping up and down, as if trying to warn him about someth-
CRASH!
Nyx’s summon burst like a bloody balloon as the titan’s left arm soared into its own head, eviscerating much of its upper body along with the beast. Karma just barely avoided becoming mincemeat himself, though the hail of stones raining atop him made him hardly any better for wear; he soon lost his footing and slipped from the titan’s shoulder, though his quick wit allowed him to bury his Cordum knife into the titan’s lower body. Adhering to its legendary status, the Cordum metal held firm, surviving its elongated scrawl down the titan’s solid body with its dark green blade bearing only a handful of scratches, but its scraping could never have overpowered that generated by the hulking monolith reconstituting its head.
Nyx stood there, petrified; she felt as though all of her strength had been drained through a straw, and even that wasn’t enough. Even if Karma could make his way off of the worst ride in all his life, she was in the monster’s immediate path and had no capacity to bring herself to safety. She was ready to collapse, awaiting her prickly seat in whatever circle of Oblivion Malpha had earned her. But it was as despair crept beneath her skin that she felt a change in the air itself; the winds were slowly turning, accelerating towards her.
Her strength recuperated in a flash; the land around her enveloped in shadow, exclusively and dimly illuminated by the eternal wall of fire behind the stone titan. The midday sun had become one with the smoke, and stars glistened in Nyx’s hair, as if every strand were a world of its own. Reinvigorated, Nyx rose to her feet, setting her hands into position for the final act.
“Iena crasso il Munadei maritas shakkom!
Ao muno, muno maritas!
Iena crasso il Munadei Meidra!
Meidra Malpha!”
The sigil between her arms was formed by the end of her third sentence. By the end of her fourth, her arms plunged through it with demonic speed, transporting themselves to Oblivion. The world rumbled, and not because of the titan itself.
Karma was certain the mission was a bust; he crawled all the way back up to the monster’s shoulder with not a single plan in mind, given that the walking mass of stone had fortified its head stronger with each beating it took. He had no hope of taking the core from the beast… but what he saw next would burn itself into his mind for the rest of his days.
Mere seconds had passed since Nyx’s chanting came to an end, but already the skies had turned an ugly grey, barely distinguishable from the endless wall of smoke. As a symphony of thunder beating the earth like hands upon a drum tore through the sky in every direction, a pair of black sigils ripped open in the ground at Nyx’s feet. And from them… arms. Giant, pitch black arms, decorated each by six golden ringlets adorned with red gems not of this world.
Karma could just faintly feel rain pattering atop his dishevelled red hair as the arms began their assault; with one blow from each, the titan’s legs from the elbow down were shattered completely. His eyes widened as he felt his living platform collapse to the ground. All he could do was hold onto its back for dear life, hoping he wouldn’t set a new personal record for bones broken at once. But his worry was needless; before the booming impact and the resulting wave of thick dust could envelop the earth, one hand of Malpha’s plucked him from the beast’s back and set him not so gently next to Nyx.
Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been shy about complaining over his treatment, but he had no time to score the scorn of Oblivion as Malpha’s arms started tearing the titan’s stony head apart, effortlessly delaying its regeneration by pushing away all encroaching stone.
“Karma! Get it!” Nyx cried out; Karma could tell she was at her limit, despite her turn of luck.
The core wasn’t set in place by anything in particular, instead floating inside a hollow space within the creature’s head. And so, Karma brought an effortless end to their most tumultuous contract yet by merely pulling the radiant blue sphere out of its nest. Malpha’s arms faded into nothingness, Nyx recoiled as her arms became hers once more, and Karma watched with a smug grin as every stone in the creature’s body became inert, as they ought to have always been. The light pattering he had felt just a minute ago developed into a torrent of heavy rain; the inferno created by the stone titan would rage on for only a few minutes more before fading, the smouldering ashes it had buried until now being the only evidence it was ever there.
Ordinarily, that’s where the tale would have ended. Chestnut would have ridden a worn out Karma and Nyx back to the Invidia Sanctum, they would collect their prize, Malpha would receive her shiny new core to bargain for better post-mortem privileges for Nyx, and all would proceed well up until Karma spent all of their hard-earned Oru on some bone-headed personal project that turned to vapour.
But this time, their return trip was interrupted, mere minutes away from their home.
“Nyx, darling.” A cheery voice said, coming from one of the many trees surrounding them. “May I have a word?”
Half-asleep, Karma looked towards where the voice had come from, not expecting much – only to lock eyes with Nyx’s employer.
Queen Malpha.
The Maiden of Misery.
Casually sitting atop the thick branches of a Vorian tree, dressed in an otherworldly mixture of red and gold that coiled around her pitch black skin. Her pure black eyes were most offputting to Karma – he couldn’t help but cast his gaze elsewhere as Nyx hopped off of Chestnut, bewildered by the sudden visit.
“M-My Lady? ‘tis not often you grace us with your presence.” Nyx said, bowing her head – Karma could never discern whether her demeanour came from fear or genuine admiration. “Whatever brings you here at a time like this?”
“I merely wish to speak with you about this.” Malpha said, revealing the very core Karma had ripped out of the stone titan inside her hand.
“Ah… w-was it not to King Belgor’s liking?” the paralyzed Nyx asked, a cold sweat trailing down her face.
“I didn’t get so far as to ask him, though I imagine that had I offered such a thing to him, he would have ordered you spend all eternity at the bottom floor of Oblivion starting at this very moment, and all of our hard work would have been for naught!” Malpha answered, growing increasingly exasperated.
“M-may I ask what the issue is…?”
“It’s manmade!” Malpha said petulantly, “Didn’t you take a single glance at it before sending it through one of your beautiful sigils? Sloppy work, Nyx!”
Karma turned his head in surprise.
A manmade core?!, he thought to himself, knowing better than to get between two women so temperamental as Nyx and Queen Malpha, Who the hell’s making more work for us?!
“I… I don’t understand!” Nyx said, “Who could possibly create a core, and why would they wish to create something so destructive?!”
“That’s what you need to find out for me, sweetie. We don’t want some frivolous human abominations being mistaken for our runaway pets now, do we? They’ll think we’ve raised them badly!”
Considering there’s an entire industry around putting them down, you most certainly did raise them badly!, Karma wisely said only to himself.
“Now, sweetie, I can only stay in your realm for so long. The King is impatient, you see? Let us hope that next we meet, you and your handsome friend over there are one step closer to tucking this issue to bed, hm?” Malpha said, winking at a disinterested Karma. “Goodbye for now, darling.”
And with that, Malpha disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving behind nothing except for the discarded blue core, which landed on the grass with a dull thud. But the task she had placed upon their shoulders… it was monolithic. The weight of a task given by Queen Malpha herself would have crushed any normal human.
“Did you catch all of that?” Nyx asked of Karma, her soul having drained from her eyes.
Karma contemplated their circumstances for a moment, before answering with his usual brazen confidence, “Let’s collect our payday, get a week’s worth of drink in my system, then we can play pin the tail on the calamity creator. Sound like a plan?”
A smile returned to Nyx’s lips; despite the odds, Karma always made their upcoming tasks sound effortless. After all, she was working with a man almost 20 years her senior in a line of work where most never lived to celebrate their 20th birthday.
“Your plans haven’t failed us yet.” she answered as she clambered back atop Chestnut.
“And they never will.” Karma said definitively, gazing up at the moonlit sky.