FOREVER KNIGHTS: #13 Salvaging Souls

Peak Mountain, Black Mountains, Battling Border

CHAVIAS

Days had gone by with Chavias fighting the pain and the fever. Swallowing through a throat so dry it felt laced with razors. His abdomen seeped green drainage and smelled of rot. His unearthen healing kept sealing the wound under layers of new skin.

Ineffective against a wound this deep and my body this battered. Being starved and regularly drained made healing well nearly impossible.

Gritting his teeth, he used his fingernails to drag the sores open, yet again. Allowing the festering to leach. He involuntarily lurched upward and breathed out the toxins working through him in a puff of bleak smoke. Pain racked his body like a flood of heat. Making him so weak he fell out of consciousness.

Well-aware he’d receive no offer of a kind hand, he savored the sensation of Sabine’s tender touch over his fingertips and the way she’d looked at she sat at the table.

A mesmerizing feeling. The first offer of warmth he’d felt in years was what consoled him now suffering hour after hour of unending pain. Being bled soon after Rhyers had wounded him had only made the trauma to his body that much more threatening.

He groaned and rolled to his side on the wet stone floor, panting for breath. Too exhausted to crawl back onto the cot he’d fallen from in the throes of his fever. Now he quaked from the cold he couldn’t feel. Aching for a reprieve from the pain.

He’d strived to reach the pace he felt in seeing or talking with Sabine. But I’m too weak even to get to her.

I wonder if she’s missed me. If she wonders where I am? If I’m returning. He hoped she wasn’t afraid. His body was too ravished with sickness to do much more than fight for his life.

I could let go. I could fade away from all of this as easily as my spirit had from her room. He could leave the suffering.

But doing so would condemn Sabine to becoming a pawn against the Forever Knights. Another enemy they can’t afford. So, he kept up his fight. Despite all of the pleading his body did for release.

Captain…He thought. Wishing for some calm direction or tidbits of wisdom that their mentor had never failed to provide.

He taught me everything I know.

It had been Deragan that had taught Chavias to wield a weapon and had noted his great skill. Teaching him weapon after weapon until Chavias had mastered them all. Finding his greatest proficiency was with the thick curved sword he used now. Then Deragan had noticed that Chavias could switch the weapon to his other hand and defend with it every bit as smoothly as with his dominant side.

So he made me learn to fight on both sides. Then taught me how to do it at the same time.

Deragan had told him he was a warlord. “The greatest fighter I’ve ever set eyes on.”

And Chavias had taken those words to heart. Pushing to be better. From an orphan that had nothing. No one. To a fighter everyone admired.

They honored me. His brothers in arms had come to him to practice and to teach.

How much time did I spend teaching Teverius to wield his little hatchets. Chavias had pressed him to be faster and faster. Unlocking Tev’s great speed.

Okine came. Peering through the bars of his Chavias’ tiny prison cell. His hideous flat face and short pig snout huffing.

Glorying in seeing me broken on the floor, no doubt. But Chavias was too weak to even muster enough pride to collect himself and rise.

He could kill me here. I’m too tired to fight him. Chavias worried he would.

“Alive ye?”

Chavias wanly turned his head to look at Okine over his shoulder.

The pale green monster blinked beady black eyes through the bars. “Ah. There ye.” He chuckled. “That shame. Must say I enjoy hear ye moaning as woman. It does things to me…” He glanced down his ghastly yellowish body to wear bits of leather draped over his parts. “Don’t mind hearin’.”

He doesn’t deserve to be alive.

He’s likely tortured more humans then Radix has. Radix probably doesn’t know the half of Okine’s crimes.

“I’ll kill you.” Chavias’ voice was feral.

For everything you’ve done.

For everything you’ll one day do. One day you’ll bleed at my feet. Like so many have at yours.

“Quivering.” Okine snickered through his flat nose. Feigning an exaggerated shoulder shake.

Chavias blinked. But the icy look on his face said more than words could have.