• • Raydorn: The War in the Black
• February 9, 2025

Raydorn: The War in the Black (Chapter 72)

“Sometimes the end, is only the beginning.”

Inu Amaterasu, a Ronin of Charisma, 447 A.C.A.

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Fadrian was a city lost under the sands. For hundreds, maybe a thousand years it lay dormant, undisturbed by the outside world. 

How special Malum should have felt to witness the first stimuli to touch it in so long, and to witness it from high above. 

With how long Malum has lived, there was an embarrassing amount of knowledge he lacked. So much of his mind was filled with ways to kill, to torture, and further blacken his soul. Yet, the hardlight that streamed into the sky was something he knew. 

He looked down at the city, waiting to be looked upon for the first time in hundreds of years, and decided it was not for his eyes just yet. 

He flew around the limelight, gathering his courage before he did what he needed to do.

Malum thought to himself, What are the odds that this isn’t that witch?

He answered his own question, “Low.”

Then he dived bomb and intersected with the limelight in an angle. When he hit the limelight, it was like flying through a waterwall. He flew with the flow of time and space, as if there was any other way.

Despite the fact that the light was far thinner than him, the space between worlds was vast. He traveled on a set road that flew through air as worlds with dying light were off in the distance. 

Everything glowed with this green hue, but truly, the world was dark, and dimly lit by a sun so far away.

Malum could see the world that he grew up on, and it’s two moons. He looked out and with the help of the stream of life, saw other planets that orbited the sun. 

But only for a moment. The path he traveled began to funnel solar winds under his wings and carry him towards a fork in the path. There were multiple places he could go that were available to the witch who he knew no doubt cast this magic. 

Of the paths ahead of him, only one led to a place of light. He came during the day, and as far as he was concerned, his odds were pretty good that the others had not traveled far enough ahead for it to be night.

The logic on which he made his decision was thin, but one could have made a worse decision in his place. In truth, sometimes all we have to go on is a feeling, and making a decisions based on a little more than a feeling can be better than making no decision at all.

Malum flew faster than anything else in the solar system, save for light itself. Quickly as he came upon the other end of this trip, he could see the dead valley that held his friends and his enemy. 

For only a moment he thought himself lucky to be right. 

As he sped closer, he saw Astrid stand alone over the witch, with a black mass creeping towards her. 

The assassin reached out his hands and flapped his wings. He called out but he flew faster than the sound of his voice could possibly travel. He saw the black mass that appeared like a spectre so much like himself, and yet, with its red eyes, so unlike him as well.

It was as Malum exited the portal, his wings outstretched, casting a shadow over the valley, that he inadvertently masked the dark swing of the knight’s blade.

The blade wrapped in the rainbow, shined without any color as it came down and cleaved Astrid’s head from her shoulders. 

And under a shadow cast by the spawn of Evil.

Whatever sounds Malum heard were defeaned by the ring of the void. His eyes could focus on nothing else but the way Astrid’s head flew through the air and bounced off the ground.

Malum was without thought as he landed.

The assassin could not tell which of his friends were screaming. He could not tell if it was out of loss, horror, or both. His mind struggled to a hold a thought beyond one. 

Not Astrid.

The mask failed to hide his anguish that day. While he fell to his knees, and the way from which he came began to call him back, the complete slump of defeat gave him away. The lifelessness with which his arms hung told the world what his face would not.

When the portal pulled so strongly that he floated off the ground, he finally regained some sense of consciousness. The Aurora Knight stab his sword into the ground and held his mistress by the waist as the assassin turned his eyes on them.

Malum was flying backwards and he tried to fight it with his wings. He tried to fight against the pull back into the void. He could not leave, how could he leave?

There was vengeance to be had, and vengeance should not be left undone.

But the time and space disagreed.

Malum toppled and flipped through the air. He looked wildly around him as his friends were pulled into the portal ahead of him.

He saw the tears fly wildly from Quintus’s face as he reached out all around him for ground that wasn’t that.

He saw Jack hold onto this planted sword, only to quickly find his feet leaving the ground, and no finger strength to hold onto. The world pulled him back with a snap, without his sword, without his lover, and now without his friend.

Lucy leapt into the void after Quintus. Her tentacles sought to wrap up him and his pain.

Astrid’s head flew between Lucy and her paramour, and when she could have reached for it, Malum saw how she let it slip away.

But one remained. 

Andy remained trapped in the wall, about to be left behind again.

Not another.

Malum pulled together all of the strength his father forced upon him and flapped against the winds to graze his fingers against the ground. He had to think faster than seconds, and reckon just as quick.

He flapped his wings madly like a bat to stay close to the ground but his fingers only grew farther and farther away.

At first, that appeared to be fine. Malum managed to twist in the air and set himself up on a collision course with Andy’s unconscious upper torso. He realized his mistake when they collided. 

He nearly slid off Andy, and just barely managed to get a grip on her arm. 

When her fingers gripped his wrist, he realized that she was not unconscious, simply devoid of strength.

He grabbed onto her wrist with both hands as the vortex of space and time tried to take hold of them.

The world wanted to rip Malum away, to send him back the way he came, but he refused to leave without Andy.

The witch, in her madness, stood in line with the vortex.

She screamed through her broken teeth and mangled mouth, and held her scepter up with her maligned shoulder. She spoke no spell, but she let loose magic so tainted and potent with hate that it was more than a malevolent force of wind.

Amidala would curse herself for days to come, the memory of the temple walls cracked and collapsing, and Andy’s body being freed would haunt her as one of her biggest mistakes.

Andy, as the last known descendant of the Faedrielle with true fae blood, was her key to everything. Without Andy, Amidala had no way to ascend beyond a position that was already the closest one could be to a god. 

And she sent Andy free with a boneheaded mistake.

Malum did not hesitate to pull Andy to him, and through the portal they went. As soon as they did, time and space snapped back at him like rubber.

One hand immediately lost its grip on Andy, and as they spiraled around through the air, he could see how the life was drained from her… how her soul was… stolen from her. 

Astrid made her pay, Andy, but I don’t know if it was for you.

Malum could not perceive the space between as he could before. Where he could see the cosmos when he entered of his own volition, now his vision was marred by the various lands of the world he called home. 

They shot over the deserts of the Aruban Texts, soared over the molten lands below the Vile Line, and descended into the monstrous nighttime jungle in the middle of Krone. They pinged across and through the planet, the cosmos doing it’s best to break the grip of a demigod around Andy’s wrist.

Malum sought to show the cosmos that it had set out to complete an impossible task.

The cosmos laughed.

With a hint of effort, time and space pulled Malum one way, and Andy in the other.

They went in two different directions, each towards their own nothingness.

By the time Malum knew that he had been humbled, his world was smothered in darkness, and the world had already finished its deep and thorough bout of laughter at his expense. 

*****

Neither the sand nor the salt water in his mouth woke him. It was the sound of a fist meeting a face.

That made Malum’s eyes flutter, but he did not yet stir. 

The sound of a struggle atop sand, someone saying something they’d regret, and the fist that sent another to the ground. None of it made Malum stir.

Someone kicking him in the face did.

Now it wasn’t a harsh kick, nothing that would leave a bruise, but it was a hit. It was in his side first, then his mouth.

Why do I…?

Ultimately, what woke Malum was a foot touching his chin, and his lower lip, revealing to him that his mask was not as it should be. 

He opened his eyes and thrust himself up onto all fours before he started grasping at his face. His felt his mask over his forehead, but it was cracked and broken over his mouth. Instead, he felt the skin of his chin.

He looked around to find the broken peace, but stopped just as quickly as he found himself looking at greaves, and the tip of a sheathed sword.

Malum slowly picked up his eyes to see who the greaves were attacked to, and whose hip the sword sat on.

It was an armor strangely familiar to him, one he had known many moons ago. It was heavy, made of iron, leather, silk, and lacquer.

Yoroi, he remembered its name. 

It was thick, powerful, and capable of standing up to the blows of his own sword. His hand snapped to his hip to find that it was not there.

Fuck.

He was unarmed, and at the mercy of what he concluded to be a samurai. It wasn’t until she tilted her head with curiosity that her ponytail shifted behind her head and under her helmet. 

She raised her arm at a perpendicular angle and slammed her fist into her chest. She introduced herself in fluent Neonese. “<I am Inu, Ronin of Charisma. From where is your stock?>”

Malum coughed into his head, internally scratched his throat, and tried his best to remember the tricks to a language he had not spoken in many, many, many years.

When he couldn’t quite remember, he went with an easy answer. “Raydorn.”

“<The land of the white men, from across the sea?>” she ascertained, and then arched her brow as she looked at the Malum’s brown skin of Susanna, then across at his darker skinned compatriots. “<Escaped slaves?>”

Malum shook his head.

“<Then why is the night-skinned man atop the white man?>”

Malum turned around to see Quintus atop Jack, his hand around his jaw, keeping him quiet as he muttered what Malum could only assume to be the most hateful words Quintus has ever uttered. 

Behind them both, Lucy sat in the sand, with a head in her lap.

Oh… it was real.

Malum turned to the samurai who introduced herself as Inu, and told her, “The white man’s name is Jack, and the black one, Quintus… Jack’s boyfriend… cut off someone’s head.”

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THE END OF ARC ONE. THANK YOU FOR READING.