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“…and please, I hope you forgive me. I did not intend to be rude,” said Lucatiel, stunning a dead-eyed berserker with the rim of her shield impacting his face. This was followed by an economical strike of her greatsword, the downward arc passing through the berserker’s leg unimpeded.
Her companion turned briefly away from her own exertions, having executed a curious spinning maneuver with her unwieldy halberd. It was nothing like Lucatiel had ever seen- not the lithe saber-dance of Carthus, the efficient swordplay of Balder’s knights, or the frenzied hacking of those blood-drinking dragon warriors. There was a torturous twang as the crossbow of one of the berzerkers was sundered, falling to the deck of the ship that was their battlefield.
Nothing about her companion made much sense. Her weapon was a grisly skull-topped staff, whose blade and enchantments made it suitable as both fetish and pole arm. The thing positively dripped with dark magic but Lucatiel could not deny its efficacy. Lucatiel herself wore the smart outfit that constituted the garb of a Mirrah knight. Fine but not ostentatious, though an argument could be made that that latter described the cocked hat she wore. Her companion’s garb was just as mystifying as her fighting style. Barefoot, with faintly luminous amber anklets. Though Lucatiel had yet to see her face, and her companion likewise, a long tight gown stretched over a curvy frame gave it away. The gown was purple, deep purple befitting a witch instead of the royal shade of a princess. Lucatiel’s clothes were dusty with travel but her companion’s were spotless somehow.
Lucatiel pictured the dress dusted with chalk as those hips erased the slate walls of a Melfian lecture hall. Or knocking over the intimate candles of a boudoir, or…
A deep breath. Light-headed. Thoughts foggy. She felt the floor beneath her buck and roll and she barely managed to flop down on the top of a nearby barrel. It reeked of stagnant water but that was better than fainting onto the slimy boards of the deck. Her companion grabbed another barrel and scooted it over before sitting across from Lucatiel. Close, and perhaps too close. The tip of the halberd’s handle slipped across the planks for a moment, but a casual gesture from its owner brought the damned thing upright and standing straight on the floor with no visible support. Then her companion scooted closer. Then closer again, perhaps uncomfortably so.
“Your mask. I have never seen its like.” This was true. “My own is traditional, the uniform of errant Mirrah. You must think me the odd one to wear a steel mustachio. It is the face of our ancient forebear, and the unified mien we traveling knights present to the world.”
Her companion stared but said nothing. She was as solid as Lucatiel herself, but as silent as those spectral intruders that infested these lands. Lucatiel’s spell of vertigo passed, but was replaced by something worse.
Her companion’s mask. Did it clash with the deliciously tight-fitting purple gown, or match with it too well? Lucatiel had no head for these things but the mask itself held her attention. It was the skull of some extinct ungulate, or an ungulate-headed demon. Probably this, as not only was the skull studded with rough-cut gems but the horns… There were too many of them, and they twisted in an evil helix, looking more like the cruel tentacles of a kraken than any kind of horn.
“Thank you for humoring me. I feel better- battling upon a ship is new to me. Your mask…” Lucatiel whispered it. “My knightly duty is to keep my own on in a foreign land swollen with enemies. Perhaps we shall fight again. We may become sisters-at-arms. I will let my mask drop then. It would please me if you would do the same. I would see your face.”
Her companion held Lucatiel’s gaze- with whatever inscrutable stare the horrible mask allowed. Lucatiel was not afraid of wizardry. Mirrah’s knights were trained to fight them, and Lucatiel had even hunted them. Mirrah’s own thaumaturgists confined their magics to the utilitarian, enchanting fortifications and defending against enemy sorcerers.
Lucatiel was afraid of the powers wielded by someone who took up that mask.
A thump and creak from below decks brought her out of her reverie, and the horned mask turned away. Their presence at this crumbling wharf was not just the whimsical slaughtering of empty-headed undead. No one sane was in Drangleic for any reason than to collect souls. Even the most hollowed-out wretch carried a wisp of the world’s own vital forces. Larger creatures were made stronger by accumulating souls, and the remains of veteran adventurers were often haunted by motes and whorls of the same stuff. The funeral pyres of saints and sages often held tiny crystalline souls amid the ashes, but even these were nothing compared to the true lure of this place.
A consecrated spring in Mirrah cured every ailment from gout to apoplexy, but not the curse of undeath. Only souls could fill that hole.
The moment’s respite was effective- Lucatiel found herself standing with rekindled confidence. After a brief stretch she quickly wiped off both blade and shield and was ready for action. Her companion’s grisly halberd enjoyed no such niceties- the blade and skull remained coated in the thick fluid that spilled from an undead’s desiccated veins. Was it blood? Ichor? Funerary balm?
The mask turned its gaze back to Lucatiel and nodded. A thumping and low moaning issued from the narrow door that led below decks. She could feel it even better through the wood of the deck, into her feet and reverberating in her shinbones. Her companion moved towards the opening without a word and Lucatiel hustled behind her, into a cramped dark turn of wooden steps, where she was assaulted by the thick, humid miasma of an evaporating tide pool, mixed with… something.
The floor of the lower deck was flooded with the murky water that lapped around the pilings all over this wharf, and the bestial noises intensified, coming from the next room. The two stopped for a moment and as Lucatiel tightened the straps of her shield, her companion hefted the halberd over one shoulder and produced a delicate wand of black branches, resembling nothing more than the switches her hard-nosed grandfather was always threatening her and her brother and their cousins with.
Sorcery, the dark kind. Favored by unsavory magicians seeking a shortcut to power, but also by those brilliant outcasts who had already mastered what other mystic arts had to offer. Mirrah’s martial culture frowned on something seemingly dishonorable, but was not victory as honorable as sorcery was not? One might as well flip an electrum piece.
Soaked to the knees. they moved as one through the doorway into the chamber beyond, the womb of a watery hell.
Before them lurched a great beast, the source of the thumps and groans. It staggered the imagination as to what purpose such an abominations served- for it was most certainly a creation of some twisted power. No natural creature appeared to be a twisted synthesis of armored giant, lizard, and baluchithere. One half wielded a pair of bludgeons, the other a pair of curved swords. Was it sentry? Prisoner? Two shadowy figures flanked it- their presence could support either theory.
The beast roared and stomped, bringing a spatter of water dripping through the hull, and the water began to rise. Lucatiel’s companion swished her wand in the air, a curiously whimsical gesture considering what magic she unleashed. It was a vaporous sphere of intensely luminous darkness, like the afterimage of staring into the sun, as some devotees of the sun cults did. The sphere was in existence for only a moment before it launched itself at great speed towards one of the shadowy rogues. It impacted with the force of an avalanche, blasting fragments of the enemy all over the far wall. Lucatiel’s ears popped.
She was already moving in a low run slowed considerably by splashing through the foul water, and stopped herself from instinctively performing an evasive roll as one of the scimitars slashed her way. Instead she threw herself backwards in an uncomfortable bend. The scimitar missed and the thing growled in displeasure as it followed through clumsily. Lucatiel barely righted herself before something flashed through the air.
It was fast, but Lucatiel was faster. She batted it away with her shield, but it didn’t deflect- it was stuck in the shield- a wicked looking dart, and no doubt poisoned. She looked at the dart, then towards the rogue near her. A pair of deep-set eyes widened in surprise, but he couldn’t even react before Lucatiel had closed the distance with a leap out of the water, bringing her greatsword through the air in a pattern of swings that should not have been possible with such a long blade. Horaria, as the technique was called, “the hourglass.”
The rogue’s sand had run out and it fell into the water in pieces.
Self-satisfaction was the bane of the successful combatant, and everyone knew what the fables said about overconfidence… Lucatiel recalled that platitude as the beast performed a surprisingly acrobatic spin and the dense head of a mace landed on the small of her back. Flung against the wall, Lucatiel experienced a blast of pain and heard a wet crack that she was sure was her spine snapping. Looking up from where she had fallen in the water, she could see now that the crunching was due to a compressed spot of splintered wood where she hit.
The undead were curiously dense. Something about the darkness that suffused them. You could incapacitate an undead by kicking them off a cliff into a deep enough river. It explained their ability to lift and wield weapons fit for a giant, and their propensity for smashing helpless barrels and crates. In her last few days in her homeland, Lucatiel had felt a brief vertigo and leaned against a bookshelf. It had immediately broken apart with her weight and dumped her on the floor. When Lucatiel had risen, she’d caught a glance at herself in the mirror and started. There was something she would never have seen in the copper mirrors at barracks, but it was all silvered glass and gilt frames in the world of a knight. She had seen a tinge of gray on the skin of her face and the faintest beginnings of a dark spiral around her eye…
Lucatiel jolted from her reverie. The density of undeath did nothing to stifle pain. She was a knight. Of. Mirrah. She stood, raising her greatsword with both hands, shield having floated away somewhere.
Her companion’s wand had suffered a similar fate and she was now wielding the halberd in both hands, trading blows with the beast and darting backwards from the beast’s answers. There was sizable patch of wet darkness on the front of her gown that seemed to widen even in that instant.
The mask turned towards Lucatiel and in that moment she knew what had to be done.
The beast began to pivot slightly to build momentum for new strikes, and as soon as it presented a portion of its flank, the two warriors attacked. Her companion brought the skull blade down into the middle section of the thing, roughly tearing a chunk of flesh and gout of blood as she swept upwards. Lucatiel felt as graceful as a dancer with her own fluid cuts at the same part of the beast. It roared in pain and staggered on its ungainly legs, and they continued their assault until it was two beasts connected by strings of Volgen’s traditional delicacy, minced raw beef.
The two warriors panted in mutual exhaustion across the huge dead bulk half-covered in foamy water. Lucatiel remembered her drills and forced her breath into a regular cadence until she could summon it for speech.
“This place. So strange… the rumors truly did not prepare me. Even when-” She stopped as the slain beast began to give off a rill of steam.
No, not steam. Souls.
Souls were the reason so many undead thronged this land of Drangleic, not only from neighboring countries, but also other times and other worlds. Lucatiel lost count of the aggressively mindless former humans she had dispatched, but even the lowliest gave up their vital force upon their destruction, where it broke free to settle upon the architect of that violence. This fast, furtive sprite would be barely visible, even to those cursed undead whose lust for the stuff lent a keenness to their vision.
There was no mistaking this soul, though- the body seemed like one of the sun cult’s toroctonies, hot blood steaming in the cold dawn air. The bulk of it immediately blew on some silent wind toward Lucatiel’s companion, but a noticeable fraction of it came towards Lucatiel herself. Her body absorbed it, and then she felt… more.
The rush of a large souls was like standing in a geyser of euphoria- no, ecstasy. A dose of paregoric or a swig of estus let one feel the pain of consciousness disappear, but this- for moments Lucatiel felt as if she had never hurt at all.
Then just like that, the oily water and rotten planks reassembled themselves from the blurry edges of awareness.
The horned mask was turned her way and her companion moved close. Very close. Lucatiel saw her companion’s hands reach out to clasp her own. When one of them moved away, there was a sizeable pile of those funerary crystals, so full of vital essence. A precious gift from one undead to another. “This- I-” Lucatiel could no longer speak at all.
Her companion’s free hand reached slowly up Lucatiel’s front, through her collar and to the back of her neck- where the grip tightened just on the edge of being uncomfortable, the thumb slipping beneath Lucatiel’s mask. She gasped at the touch. A long moment, mask to mask, then the grip released and her companion spun about, retrieved both wand and halberd, and disappeared up the stairs.
***
“The longer I remain in this land, the more madness I discover. A wretched place!” Lucatiel was only slightly short of breath as she and her companion shuffled and danced in a circle around a terrifying figure, moving like the hands of a clock wound widdershins.
This warrior they faced was a discovery in madness as well. The lanky figure loomed over the two despite its hunched posture. It bore a pitted, chipped sword the length of a lance, and between a morion and rags and chains it offered no trace of identity, other than the energy of one who once wielded the power of the ancient lords, but was overwhelmed by insanity. Like a great golden idol submerged at the bottom of an algae-choked tarn.
The prisoner was still powerful. When engaged at little distance it would leap out of the fray and across the wide chamber with the lightness of a cricket. It swung its huge blade with great speed and moved in unpredictable ways. Lucatiel and her companion bore the cuts and nicks of having lost the upper hand multiple times. Their secret weapon had not manifested itself yet, as it had in earlier fights.
Lucatiel parried a truly crushing strike from the prisoner, her right arm reverberating like the gonging of some sinister bell. Then her companion parried a similar blow with the butt of her staff, though the force of this had staggered her and she almost fell. They needed to rally.
There was a creak of leathery muscles and the faint odor of funerary spices as the prisoner bunched itself and leaped away. Strange, but…
Lucatiel and her companion locked gazes- through masks, of course- and then their weapon revealed itself. The prisoner leaped again, in an arc designed to land right on them with a devastating downward strike.
The duo waited still until the last moment, then leaped forward toward the spot where the prisoner was due to land. The collision happened in an instant. Lucatiel’s companion buried the blade of her halberd into the back of the prisoner’s head. Lucatiel’s right hand thrust her greatsword up through the gnarled flesh of the prisoner’s torso, going right through and out the other side, where it momentarily and bloodily skewered the skin at the top of her companion’s neck and tipped her mask off.
Lucatiel was not able to see any more, as an awkward angle had allowed the prisoner’s sword to come down, severing Lucatiel’s left arm through simple force of gravity.
***
Lucatiel woke to a curious sensation- numbness and agony, the sensation of both being under a blanket and being the blanket. As her consciousness resolved she could see that only one part of each pair was true. They were still in the wide, vaulted room where they’d slain the prisoner, though all trace of that was gone. Her companion had built a fire in the center of the room, and Lucatiel lay not from it. Under a blanket.
On top of the blanket, straddling her, was her companion, doing something to Lucatiel’s shoulder. Lucatiel turned her head slightly and through a film of pain saw that her companion was deftly weaving a large curved needle through the skin that once covered an intact shoulder, and was reattaching her arm. But-
Lucatiel had seen something but some part of her hadn’t been able to understand it. Her companion’s mask was off.
Her features were somehow not what Lucatiel had expected, based of course on no information at all. She wasn’t some goddess of love- an unhealthy moon-tan, dull hazel eyes, black hair slicked down from being beneath a horned mask, a neck crusted with a ribbon of dried blood, but Lucatiel was full to bursting as she took her companion’s face in, and was glad her severed arm preventing her from making any untoward moves. A distraction was just what she needed.
“I was trained in war from childhood. If your family was poor, then that meant you were taken to the children’s barracks, and only the best students were allowed to try for distinguishing themselves on the battlefield. Of those, only the best were granted knighthood. My brother and I did just that, and suddenly it was if our family had been a proud noble house all along. One day my brother disappeared, and I…” A jolt ran through her as a stitch pulled too tight. Her companion looked at her with eyes widened, expression unreadable.
“The knighthood had scarcely seen skills such as mine before, but my brother Aslatiel was something else. We trained together, mastered the battlefield together, but I could never beat him. He received all the glory, was allowed to practice one of the forbidden fencing maneuvers, and given an ancient traditional greatsword. It was a worthless relic, compared to my newly made geisteel blade, but…” She stifled a laugh, barely, and a wave of pain synchronized with a thin hissing moan that escaped Lucatiel’s lips.
Her companion’s lips. One side of her mouth partly turned up in concentration. Life was a tunnel and her companion’s lips were the light at the end of it.
The surgery over, the hips atop hers shifted, and her companion reached a hand beneath Lucatiel’s neck, but gently this time, fingers settling against sweat-soaked hair. She brought Lucatiel’s head up slowly and with her other hand pulled up Lucatiel’s mask just slightly, before pressing something to her lips. Lucatiel drank.
Warming, healing estus. After a healthy swig, vision clearing, Lucatiel started to acquire more details. Her mask was on, but looking on the ground next to her were Lucatiel’s sword, shield, pack, and… clothes. Hastily mended clothes. So her companion had cut her clothes off her but left her mask on. Out of respect?
Her companion set the flask down and lowered Lucatiel’s head back down to the floor. Lucatiel could do nothing but gaze into those eyes, and could not even begin to articulate what it was she was feeling then. Even overwhelmed, Lucatiel went to speak again but her companion set one finger firmly over Lucatiel’s lips, shushing her and allowing the mask to slip back down.
The warmth of the estus and the exhaustion of the procedure began to overwhelm Lucatiel, and before her eyes slammed heavily shut, she saw her companion lay next to her on top of the blanket.
When Lucatiel woke, her companion was gone.
***
“I’m not sure I trust all what that wizard promised,” Lucatiel said. She didn’t like this place, how it muffled her voice and how the shadows seemed to creep about. “I’m not sure that one can fight darkness and also receive darkness? I do appreciate the challenge these wild chases offer.” She and her companion were squared off against two spectral warriors, with a spectral archer far behind them. The three were clearly another from another world- they appeared quite strange in the queer light of the chasm. Were they solid statues of obsidian, or insubstantial indigo illusions? Lucatiel knew that the answer was complicated, but there was an answer.
An uncomfortable silence dominated the rugged cave environs. None of the combatants wanted to be the first to move. Lucatiel- confident but not overconfident- spoke with a loud, clear voice. She wanted time to study their morale.
“You’re far from home, gentlemen. As are we. Your garb is not familiar to me- I suppose the garb of Mirrah I wear is not to you. And the color of your auras? Hmm.” The warrior she faced wore the fine clothing of royalty, but was tough stuff intended for combat, including the metal helmet that obscured his features. His hand rested calmly on the basket hilt of a rapier.
The archer wore strange and unfamiliar garb, but the warrior opposite her companion was not someone to be trifled with. The army was bulky and concealing, enormous plates everywhere, and a crested helmet, but it was all made of stone. Lucatiel had seen this before- in the Capitol Armory. It was so ancient it defied any conclusive dating, and it was so heavy it took multiple men to move even one piece. The strength this warrior must have had to wear it- and to wield his giant club made from a stalactite- would be staggering.
“You have heard of Mirrah, I believe? A land of proud knights, of veteran loremasters, and constant war.” The two warriors across from them looked at each other in what might have been confusion. “Thousands of years at war. It’s not possible for any nation to remain intact through that. But Mirrah… the secret of our success is also the reason for our bedevilment. Our loremasters discovered the key to a door that opened on other worlds, and to visit them, and receive visitors… Who could withstand an army that doubled or trebled in minutes, sellswords and myrmidons appearing out of nowhere? So every nation outside our borders came to steal our secrets, and they were all eventually defeated by it.” Tension built and she wanted to keep them on the hook long enough to discomfit them.
“…silvery dragon-headed foes. Red phantoms from worlds of violence. A golden army of sun-cultists bent on mute alliance. But I do not recall much about your hues. The codices surely have record, but I am ashamed to admit that I often shunned the library to spar on the proving grounds.” She unsheathed her greatsword and held it high. Her companion twirled her vile halberd around- showing off. The purple gown showed the movement of every curve and muscle and Lucatiel refused to be distracted. The fop drew his rapier with a flash, and executed a series of truly fast jabs and cuts in the air. Lucatiel laughed out loud. “Enough words, miscreants!”
The stone-armored warrior had raised his club, and slamming it to the ground, shook all of them, the vibration of the stone floor rattling Lucatiel’s shinbones. Then the fight began.
An arrow whistled past Lucatiel’s head from farther back in the chasm. She’d have to be careful of that. She started to close on her foe, who bounced lightly on his feet.
“A fencing-master? Well-trained. Lightly armored. A finely crafted blade. You must be sure of victory. But I am a knight of Mirrah. I have mastered six of the seven sword-arts, so I am sure as well.” Was she? For a moment she wondered if all this lore was remembered correctly. Or was it even real at all? The rapier snaked out to probe her defenses. “I see. You’re a fool. You expect your speed, your dancing movements to tire me as I swing a huge blade about? I am a knight of Mirrah.As children we practice with wooden swords- carved from an exotic wood. Not cheap.” She dodged another series of probing cuts from the rapier. He was good, and he was fast. “They call it ‘axe-breaker.’ Harder than steel. And heavier! This blade’s geisteel is half as heavy.” She let loose a series of thrusts and cuts to the air, exactly as her opponent had done before. “So let us fence!”
***
The knight stirred where she had fallen, slumped into the corner of a drafty shack. A fire burned in the center of the shack, ringed by stones and lighting things a warm orange. She hadn’t lit it, she thought, and doubted she had the strength to at the moment. Then who?
She looked up and a queen of demons loomed over her, with a face of bones and devilish horns. The knight started, and felt a stomach plunging wave of fear that seemed like it should have belonged to someone else. She closed her eyes, the darkness behind the lids dancing with strange colors, her head swimming.
The knight opened her eyes again, and looked up. A woman in a dark dress stood over her. After a moment the face became clearer- it had moved closer or the knight’s vision was returning.
“Who are you? Who-” The details of the face continued to appear, their positions and proportions starting to make sense. “Oh- my dearest one. Of course it is you. Come closer.” Her companion crouched lower, face flickering between intense glare and bittersweet smile. Lucatiel reached up to touch her face- or tried to, the limb not quite obeying her will.
“Dearest one, how is your journey? I don’t know the goal that brought you to this horrible land, but I hope you have fared well. Perhaps we should journey together?” Lucatiel smiled and the room spun. “Oh, I… I must have told you once. If I did not, I should have. You are the sweetest balm for me in this poison place, but I have battled so long not to lose myself. To no avail… and have become desperate. So caught up in the idea of myself, of losing my memory and my mind. Avoidance of loss is no reason to live.” Her companion knelt beside her and cradled Lucatiel in her arms. Lucatiel’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “If I were told the cure to this curse was to cut your throat, your sweet throat… I would do it.” Her companion held her still. Tears streamed down Lucatiel’s face.
“Why would I come here? For souls? No, not only… there must have been something.” Her eyes darted about, barely focusing, until her gaze came to rest upon a curious object. “A boy! No… a man. He looked just like this. But… why?” The object was a metal mask, cast in the image of a man’s face with beard and mustache. “Who?”
Lucatiel scrunched her face together, closing her eyes as hard as possible. The flickering colors pulsed behind her eyelids, and she chased the thoughts and words that floated just beyond her brain and tongue. Lips brushed her forehead and she relaxed her face, and after a moment opened her eyes.
“Your journey is not finished, dearest one. I can barely stand to see you go, but I pray for your safety.” She gestured vaguely at the metal mask. “Perhaps if you see this man, tell him I seek him? Tell him…” The knight wept again, soundlessly, sinking heavily into the arms and breast of her companion, forehead brushed by lips and strands of black hair.
“Lucatiel! My name is Lucatiel. Please remember me… for I may not remember myself.” She said nothing more, but closed her eyes, thoughts fading.
The knight opened her eyes. She first saw a fire across from her. Her head was resting on a rough haversack, and she was covered in a blanket. The knight turned her head and a queen of demons loomed over her, with pale skin and dark hair. The apparition didn’t frighten her, and she felt this might be someone she’d seen before. The knight smiled.
“Your mask…” A hoarse whisper. The knight gestured to her face. “My knightly duty is to keep my own on in a foreign land… perhaps we will meet again. We may become… sisters-at-arms. I will let my mask drop then. It would please me if you would do the same.” Her vision blurred. Time itself wavered. Memory faltered. She looked at the fire. She looked around, and was alone here. The knight closed her eyes, to rest, just for a moment.
“I would see your face.”