A Lectern of Hate

A Lectern of Hate

THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH HATE, LIES, DECEPTION, AND ULTIMATELY—DEATH.

In the infinite complex of universes, perhaps there exists a single one of which the fundamental sum of all creation isn't the eradication of itself. However, that world must exist abundantly far from ours. It was with that thought in mind that Freth Charmant crept along the ragged brush in a crouch, his boots scraping across the uneven stones.

He gripped his hands solidly across the hilt of his Winberg "35, an all-purpose sword designed for Adventurers. The sword itself was nothing fancy—though the blade itself was machined with such care that there was no play in its design. It fit his hand as if it was meant to be there.

The shoulder-high clearing was just short enough that he could pull his body onto it without much noise. The trees around him were so densely populated with moss that even the Firbolg had long since given up. Freth peeked through the criss-crossed branches and staggered towards the densely populated forests as fast as he could, Sergius's arm draped heavily over his shoulders. He was the only prisoner alive to rescue; the other captured men were beyond his help. Their seal-marked bodies were left in heaps, like rubbish.

Damn Divine Cult. I'll make sure you remember this day, just you wait.

The ground trembled heavy with the footfalls of Gadencian mechs. Within the prison walls, the gunfire was clearly audible, but Freth had not felt the shaking. There would only be a little farther to go now. He did not doubt that he would remember the smell of that room for a long time—the way it brought a sickness to the back of his throat. It was a fight to keep his hands steady to free Sergius from his bindings.

Freth craned his neck. He poured as much energy as he could into his Divination while still being able to remain upright and barely noticed the thin outline of a convey unit far in the distance—the same one he had arrived in to save Sergius.

Damnation. Their position had just become "behind enemy lines".

Freth turned back towards Sergius. His eyes regarded him with an uncertain, unfocused sort of demeanor, but amazingly, they were open.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" Freth choked out, holding up his hand.

"T-Three...I think—…" Sergius rasped.

"Remember your name?"

Sergius smiled, wincing very slightly, "Sergius Olibarri." He looked up at him, and his face contorted into his usual smile. It was possibly the bravest thing Freth had ever seen. "Remember yours?"

"Freth Charmant, and I just saved your life." It was hard to tell how far the battle had taken the two mechs. Rubble and dust still permeated the air like a thick miasma, with the war-driven devastation cracking through the landscape like an outstretched claw.

"You know, dying out here—...sure beats dying in there."

"Don't talk like that—the Commander will come back for us."

"S'all right if they don't—..." Sergius's eyes drifted closed. He almost looked peaceful. "Least I'm not being used as some kind of...host."

The Divine Cult. A branch of the Nine Fingers which had invaded the Misthaven Everglade like a plague. They were only supposed to reside in The Final Empire—not anymore it seemed. Whether Sergius would've truly been used as a host was still up for debate, but there was one thing Freth couldn't deny.

Sergius was the only youth serving under the Holy Knight Order with access to the True Source. It wasn't confirmed, but it sure was likely.

"You're not about to die," Freth chided him, "You're with me; you've got nothing to worry over."

Sergius's smile faded a little, "I wasn't afraid, you know—...When the Masked One came for me, I thought it was 'cause—...they knew we kept one of the Faceless in our village."

Freth grimaced.

Most villages did back in those days; some do still. The religions of the two empires had the same root after all, though Gadencia broke the power of the Dark Temples centuries ago, and The Final Empire allowed theirs to evolve into the current monstrosity, where stealing is considered a sacred privilege instead of a perversion and an abomination. Freth imagined the pile of seal-marked bodies and gagged.

Under The Final Empire's rule, Empyrean serfs are still stuck in superstitious dark ages where they are trained to see face-rippers as blessed and deserving of reverence. Even (perhaps especially) when the face-rippers steal the life from their bodies.

Gadencia, in contrast, had entered an age of reason (despite the words for old concepts, like "hell" and "damnation," still lingering in the language as curse words) and the educated no longer blindly followed the nonsense once believed by their medieval ancestors.

Still, a form of face-worship does flourish in some of the backward colonies, and can even be found among the lower classes and country folk of Gadencia itself. Some people consider it harmless. Others claim it is a smokescreen for the same face-ripping horrors that go on in The Final Empire's lands.

"Some of the villagers said our healer...was a face-ripper, that they all were," Sergius said. "But that was absurd. She was good...and kind, and still they said it, so I wasn't afraid when the Masked came to drag me from my cell." He paused, one hand drifting to touch the blood-red marking on his chest, where a face-ripper sucked his life through his skin to nourish itself. "I should have been afraid."

"I do not believe the act of face-ripping, in of itself, is a condemnation of Divine Cult worship."

"I see—…"

Nearby, artillery roared almost overhead, causing Freth to jump nearly out of his skin. The two looked up in alarm just in time to see a hail of bullets hit the lip of the ravine. Boulders poured down like a waterfall—too fast for Freth, and especially too fast for Sergius—to scramble out of the way of. The last thing Freth had time to comprehend before his vision went black was a cascade of stone striking Sergius’s fragile form.