Reborn as the Black Knight

 

It’s dark.

Dandy holds her cloak tightly over herself, keeping the chill of the night at bay. It feels like the sun should have risen by now… but it hasn’t. The night is very long. Crows craw in the trees nearby, sounding like a witch’s laughter as they pass, as if they knew something she didn’t.

The priestess’ eyes shift from side to side, watching the world with anxiety.

There’s something in the air tonight and it feels dreadful.

“We’re almost there,” says Hero, riding next to her.

Dandy covers herself tightly, a frigid breeze blowing through the air, its sharp whistling howl as it moves through the rustling trees sounding like the breath of a ghost. “…I can tell…” she says nervously, gulping. A shiver runs down her spine.

— Something hoots to the side.

Dandy lets out a yelp, jolting together.

“It’s just an owl…” she mutters, looking at the two round, golden orbs up in the tree, watching them ride past on a neck that turns their way without the body ever needing to follow. “Just an owl.”

“Keep it together, Dandy,” says Hero, before biting into a travel provision.

She looks at him and then nods, taking in a deep, slow breath and then taking just as much time to exhales as she calms herself down. The priestess looks back at him. “I don’t know where you put it all, Hero,” she marvels, watching him take another bite of the ration.

“Bottomless pit,” he replies, patting his stomach with his other hand and she laughs, covering her mouth with the curled finger of a lightly closed hand. “Sun should’ve been up by now,” he says, saying what she was thinking herself.

“I thought so too,” says Dandy.

A rustling comes from the trees. Her eyes dart over. Dandy lifts her staff, a soft glow coming from it to illuminate the darkness around them.

— A slime is rustling through the trees, chasing after a moth that now diverts course and follows after her rod.

She sighs, letting the spell fade out.

“So, what’s our plan?” she asks, her head still watching the darkness behind them. She doesn’t trust it. A memory in the back of her head flashes in and out of the monastery. She feels like if she lets it out of her sight, a shapeless, black thing is going to lunge out and rip her into the void.

“We keep going,” explains Hero. “The capital can’t be far,” he says. “If that’s where the Black Knight is going to be, then that’s where we’ll be,” he says, nodding confidently. “We’ll stop him and his treacherous master there.”

The two of them ride through the forest path, listening to the calling of strange things deep within the trees, until the road starts to rise and swerve along a snaking path that winds up a hill.

Finally, they reach the top and come to a stop.

“…I think that’s probably it,” says Dandy quietly as the two of them look toward the horizon from their vantage point.

There, off in the distance, glows a city like a sunrise itself. It’s like every single corner, wall, and house had been illuminated by a hundred lights. Orange and the gold of lanterns cast out into all directions, like the last barrier warding away the darkness.

— To the east of it, they can see fires on the horizon. Camps.

“Aren’t those our soldiers?” asks Dandy, squinting to try and make out the distant banners. “I had no idea we were this close already to the capital,” she says. “We should’ve just traveled with them.”

“No,” says Hero, shaking his head. A hand rests on her upper arm. “We made the right choice to go by ourselves,” he says. “We’re not here to fight men, Dandy.”

She looks at him and then thinks for a moment before simply nodding. “You’re right,” she concedes. “And this way, we got to know each other better. So that’s nice,” she says, turning her head the other way so that the night that never ends can hide her bashful expression.

“Yeah, we did,” he says. “But our little adventure isn’t over yet. So maybe we’ll have a little more time to learn about each other,” suggests Hero. He rides on at a slow pace, looking back at her. “My last friendships didn’t go so well,” he explains. “So I’m glad I found you, Dandy.”

Dandy doesn’t have a response for him, instead just squishing her own embarrassed face in her hands and mumbling like a weirdo.

— Which he thankfully doesn’t see her do, because he doesn’t turn around again, his eyes instead training toward the west, where something else moves within the darkness.

 

---

 

 

Bodies flow as water, seeping through the cracks of an underground wellspring. Dripping through the black rocks, they eek and press and move through the gaps in the night as they move toward the north-east, toward the glowing city that, from this place here, might as well be the last city on the world.

It shimmers, shining in the bleakness as a gem below a black burial shroud.

And that glimmer, that sparkling of its hundreds of thousands of lights that separate it from the darkness — it attracts shapes in the night. Some of the shapes take the form of people, of soldiers and knights. Other shapes are the shapes of hounds and wolves. Other shapes yet still are the shape of unimaginable monstrosities that do not fit into any of the categories of monster that man has created in his catalogues. — Shapes with the sharp, spindly legs of spiders but the bodies of crabs, yet with the faces of screaming women pressing out from shells too dense to fit organry into, despite their sickly bulging; shapes that resemble at first glance the trees of the forest they glide through if not for the fact that they remain in motion, skittering and skuttling on far, far too many legs to count and their branches reach down all around them like long, picking, sharp fingers that would grab anyone foolish enough to walk beneath them; shapes that fill the nightmares of every child within the city ahead, that would bring every boy and girl to weep for the rest of their lives at every nightfall to come, should they even see them but once.

Banners fly through the sky, held aloft by long poles that jut out amongst the pikes and halberds held by the tide of blackguards who march toward the capital, never stopping, resting, or making camp as they move along the empty, clear roads. They are unhindered by any fortresses, castles, or towers on the way, as all of these have been emptied out, robbed in the nights before, of their people.

And there within the host atop her anqa sits Acacia, far outside of her beloved city and domain, as she insisted to be here for the final assault.

It was all for this moment — everything she did, everything she was building and preparing — it all was a step in the ascension to her rightful throne as the ruler of this nation in full, and then the nations beyond. Her eyes look at the city in the distance. It’s changed so much; it never used to be this bright.

But the news her spies have given her bode poorly for the clarity of her brother’s mind. He had always been a firm, silent, but ambitious man somewhere on the cusp of depravity, having never fully crossed over the line as far as she knows. However, its seems that the pressure the world crashing in around him, and his unwillingness to give way to the realms of madness as a relief, have forced his hand nonetheless and he begun to unravel.

Although, the lights are a good idea.

He must have had informants in the city below the mountain; perhaps one of the werewolves escaped alive and turned sides or was captured.

Sir Knight can slink into any place that is dark or empty, so her brother has the right idea to stop an internal assault. He’s clever. Sir Knight’s powers are weakened when a place is full and brimming with light that floods every crevice, crack, and hole in the grout and brickwork. When there are no secret places to hide in, no empty pockets of darkness, then the possibility for him to simply manifest his army — her army — into the heart of the capital is nullified.

That is, of course, where her plan comes in.

— The support from within.

Acacia lifts her hand, and the entire army stop at once, without so much a single step out of place.

“We’re waiting here,” she says.

“Hey, uh, remember what we talked about the other day?” asks a voice from next to her. Acacia looks at Junis. “About looking too scary?” asks the elf, smiling pleasantly. Acacia nods. Junis’ face contorts as she points a hand up toward a shifting monster that looks like a tree full of hanging bodies, but all of them are black shadows, tearing at their own faces. “THAT’S WAY TOO SCARY!” she shouts desperately, as the shadows drip an endless ooze of black blood down to the ground below them, the haunted tree swaying as it tries to maintain its upright balance on ten-thousand legs of a centipede that never stops chittering. “You’re going to terrify everyone in the capital!”

Acacia sighs, looking at her. “Junis,” says the princess in a soft voice, shaking her head. Junis looks at her. “You sweet girl. My dearest Junis — juniper flower of the garden of my heart.” Junis raises an eyebrow as Acacia leans over toward her. “My most trusted friend and beloved companion.”

“…W-What?” asks Junis in nervous confusion, leaning back an inch and lifting her hands as Acacia leans in closer.

“You’re my favorite of them all, you know that?” asks Acacia with a prim smile as a dozen drooling shadowy bodies dangle behind her in the air.

“Wait. What about me?” asks Sir Knight’s voice from the darkness. The two of them look toward it and then back at each other.

“Yes,” reaffirms Acacia, as she hadn’t just heard that. “My favorite of them all,” repeats the princess plainly and leans over, placing a sisterly kiss on Junis’ forehead, the elf looking very bewildered.

“…Huh…?” asks Junis, not sure what’s happened here just now.

“This little army is for the capital, Junis,” explains the princess, sitting back upright on Pepper. “But not in the way you’re thinking, you silly duck.”

“You’re scaring me, Acacia,” answers Junis.

Acacia narrows her eyes, looking toward the city ahead of her. “Good. I’m practicing.”

Junis looks around, unnerved. “For what?”

Acacia crosses her arms and smiles. “— For about five minutes from now,” she answers vaguely, not even as much as a glint in her eyes because of the darkness all around them that swallows every single last droplet of light in the world that tries to come their way.

 

---

 

 

Men walk the ramparts of the capital walls, the fervor of the previous days having been suppressed now by the need to return to reality. However, the city has flooded with bodies — and perhaps rightly so in the eyes of the returned, because to the east sit dotted some thousands of fires where the enemy has made camp in preparation for the siege.

The Empire has reached the capital of the Kingdom, the borders have fallen, and the skirmishes have been lost. From both the west and the east, they’ve been crushed down into one single last point of resistance — the capital. Everyone, everything east of the domain of the black-crowned princess, is here and there is nowhere left to go.

Men man ballistae — giant siege-engine-sized crossbows that are built into the city towers — and run along its walls with pikes and bows in hand. Sorcerers and wizards begin projecting magical barriers along the ramparts, creating covered zones along the defenses. The city of lights is alive with motion, its defenses filled to the brim and soldiers of hundreds of different legions, whether sailors or mountain engineers, now work in a mad dash to fortify what remains because the fires in the east keep getting brighter and closer. Arrows are delivered by the cart fulls to the bastions, riders calling out through the night as church bells ring, calling the vulnerable people of the city into the shelter of deep catacombs and scared halls that have always been spared at the respect of the power of the holy-church. Houses are locked and children are huddled below beds as mothers and fathers know that the time of sword and claw has come to them in equal share. No hand of size and strength is spared a blade, bow, or staff depending on adequacy. Whether native born citizen or adventurer who had come to visit the city’s dungeon at such an inopportune time, all hands now rush toward the walls and watchtowers. Knights are posted at the dungeon entrance, to make sure that nobody tries to skulk away down into the underground and hide there instead of fighting the enemy. Even the prisons are emptied of everyone of native blood, the men brought to the walls and shackled there — each given nothing more than a bow and a quiver of arrows.

Bodies rush past each other, armor clipping against armor, as men pace in lockstep past one another over the weaving city walls, their eyes trained toward the east and to the fires that crawl toward them.

If the entire city could, it would hold its breath in anticipation, but there is no chance for such a thing to happen as the sprinting and running and climbing has no end. It all moves with people.

And the fires come closer.

The first bows creak, their taut strings being pulled tightly as arrows are nocked and aimed toward the night. The first spells are channeled in preparation, and the men watch and wait.

Sparks drift through the air like fireflies, rising up toward the night only to suffocate into nothingness. But before they die, the evidence moves there within themselves as they shift from side to side, disturbed by the subtle wind of a passing presence.

The first thing that comes to sight after that are wolves.

The faces of wolves in the helmets of the vanguard are etched into the metal of their breastplates as they march forward.

And then the battle begins, a single hellscream filling the night as the flood surges forward. Thousands of extended spears press forward at once, thousands of men with ladders and ropes behind them as out of the darkness lumber engines of siege like giants clad in the shroud of the night. Massive, wooden towers and battering rams are pressed forward, pulled by teams of trained monsters. Behind them begin to illuminate the night thousands of lights of glowing magic as spells crystallize and form in the hands of sorcerers and battle-mages, and behind them further still comes a great creaking as thousands more pull their bows to the ready.

On both sides comes the scream, and on both sides comes the frenzy of warfare as arrows shoot through the night, tearing the blackness as the magic that coats them on the way sets them afire like meteor-hail-shards the rain down in all directions. Bodies screaming and falling as explosions crater the ground and the walls, sending shrapnel and clouds of burning debris and burning bodies out in all directions at once. Fire crawls toward the hearts and eyes of men as metal glints in the night, patches of burning pitch that had stained the ground outside of the walls being lit afire with superheated combustion magic to burn the attackers alive. But surges of frozen ice magic come in counter, extinguishing it and the wretched afflicted who roll and writhe in agony within the aftermath of casehardened liquidation of the metal they’re wearing.

Fairies shoot over the walls, flying past the defenders, but are intercepted by teams of fairies from within the city. The sky begins to crack with lightning as they dart amongst themselves like flocks of competing birds, shooting arcs of wild magic at one another as they vie for dominance of the above.

Men scream and fight, pushing ladders off with their halberds, only for two more to prop up on either side as a collective, dense glow begins to grow on the horizon that would feel any heart into thinking the sun is finally rising again, if not for the fact of the wrongness of its color. Magic swirls together — reds, blues, greens, and hues of a thousand spells more as the casters of the assault combine and condense their spells together in a powerful coalescence of energy that swirls in a whirlpool in and of itself that shines like nothing anyone here has ever seen before. Fire and ice, lightning, and holy, and every school of magic there is presses its power together from every single wizard, sorcerer, priest, and more of the assault as the light grows.

Clawed hands of metal gauntlets climb up over the tops of ladders, as the gate below starts to buckle from the first hammering of a pillar against it as the arrow-pelted battering ram finds its position, the men inside holding firm as a defending water mage floods the front of the gatehouse, the silty land becoming mush by the second. The heavy thing begins to sink down, the angle of its striking is wrong and out of balance. The walls shake as, on one end, a siege tower docks with a crash. A ramp falls down and men in wolf’s armor flood through onto the walls, only to be imprisoned in their own entry way by a series of magical barriers projected by the defenders, creating a wall that cuts off those who had exited from those who had yet to do so.

And all the while, the spark on the horizon grows brighter and brighter and brighter, blinding the men of the east until suddenly, it becomes too bright to look at. In that same instant, it breaks and gives way.

The world shudders, a roar running through the continent itself and shaking awake the bones of every grave that has been made within the span of the war as raw, uncontrollable energy rushes forward in the arc of a single blast that carves through the dirt, through the sediment, and through the world like the devil’s knife, slashing straight through the end of the city. The multi-layered wall glows, a hundred bodies on it flickering for the flash of a second, before everything vaporizes into dust. There’s not even sound anymore, as if that too were simply taken from the world in the flash of an eye.

Then the light fades, revealing to the unguarded eyes of the defenders a gap where there was once nothing.

Walls ten meters thick and towers tall enough to spite the heavens are simply gone, as if they never were. One wouldn’t ever believe they were, if not for the fact that the melting stone that remains was drooping and dripping as magma, half of a watchtower falling into itself in a desolidified state.

The attackers scream, pressing through toward the fresh gap as the faltering and pause amongst the soldiers of the Kingdom leaves a clear opening. There’s a direct route now, past every barrier, every wall, and every man, that leads right into the heart of the city itself.

It buckles. It all buckles. Soldiers fall into disarray, the legions of the defense out of order after such a shocking display of power. The enemy surges. Men fear for the end.

And then a glint of gold confuses the eyes of everyone as the first man in wolf’s armor sprints straight into a wall that wasn’t there before.

— A wall made out of solid, pure gold that fills the smoldering gap.

A fresh marching fills the air, metal against metal, as the terrible night is filled with a new shine, the shine of fire glinting off of a hundred golden bodies. Knights, clad in gold armor rush forward, not onto the walls but ahead of them. They jump, sprinting without fear before leaping off in full armor to a fall that ought to kill any normal man.

The attackers vanguard scatter, pressed back as the men fear the sudden resistance they don’t understand.

Sparks fly through the air as boots clack against the metal floor atop the golden wall, soldiers with faces covered in black and blood looking her way as she walks past them, her hands hands at her side glistening with a shine so vivid that it does well to out-compete the enemy’s prior display, and it is all golden.

A soldier takes his helmet off, dropping to his knee before the oldest princess of the nation.

Manchineel stops, looking at him as her legion of knights rushes into the offensive, buying the faltering wall some time. “Hey,” she says, almost aloof, as if she were standing amidst a swathe of bodies and mangled screaming faces. She drops down, gently taking his helmet from him and placing it back onto his head. “Keep this on, okay?” she asks, smiling and tilting her head. The man opens his mouth and stutters out nothing that makes sense. She points at her smile. “Always be safe at work!” says the princess, helping him back up before humming to herself as she walks through a rain of ash and arrows — none of which ever seem to touch her, as if she simply didn’t recognize any of it as being real, as if it were all just a dream.

“Oh my…” says Manchineel, shaking her head. “Brother is so careless,” she remarks, looking at a broken tower and then shrugging as if it were just some forgotten, broken infrastructure she saw on her way. “I suppose he needs me still. Such a silly boy,” she says, covering her laughing mouth with one hand as her other projects up toward the lost tower, filling it to the brim with gold that takes the shape of a roar. A giant, a golem, larger than the tower itself breaks forward with a metallic screech as it lumbers alongside the golden legion of her protectors.

Does she even know what’s happening around her? Likely not. She’s in that special place of hers.

But the men of the wall don’t know that as they regather and reform atop the reconstruction and resume the defense with a vigor stronger than the desperation caused by the loss just before, because if the princess herself is here with them, then they have no excuse to be afraid either.

She looks with a happy smile at all the people around her. Everyone is working so hard!

But even if the east is now held, the north begins to glow alight. Something is happening there too.

“Oh…?” she asks, puzzling as she scratches her cheek. “Hey, excuse me,” says Manchineel, staring at the distant lights for a moment as she pieces things together in her head. “Is there a festival tonight or something?” asks the oldest princess, turning her head to look at a golden knight who has crossed blades with a man in wolf’s armor standing just behind her.

The golden knight turns his head toward Manchineel while still holding his enemy off. He quickly looks over to another golden knight, who vigorously shakes his head from side to side, having heard the question too. Looking back again at the princess, the golden knight answers. “Yes, Your Highness.” His knee kicks the enemy in the gut and knocks him off balance. The enemy in wolf armor screams a dreadful scream, cantering off of the side of the calling and crashing into the mess below. “Tonight is a festival of… uh… friendship,” he answers. “Held in the honor of, uh…” He looks around the battlefield as men clash out with steel and teeth at one another, with blood of different soils coming to spill here together. “— you?”

Her eyes light up like the shine of excited wisps at dawn. “Yaaay~!” cries the oldest princess enthusiastically, clapping her hands together excitedly and jumping up and down in a circle. She runs past him, waving her arms out over the wall and laughing giddily. “Let’s all have a good time, everyone!” calls the oldest princess out into the anarchy. Fire streaks across the northern horizon to their left on the other end of the city like a dragon crashing over the soil, splintering into a thousand fireballs that rain down like the first signs of the sky breaking during the apocalypse.

The golden knight looks back to his partner, who gives him a quiet nod and thumbs-up.

Elsewhere to the north, soldiers do their best to fend off the scouts and probing attacks that had come from the enemy in a much smaller intensity than in the east. It was all fine and well, until the fire appeared.

The defenders scatter, diving to cover as fireballs rain down toward them from some sort of powerful magic that they’ve never seen before — some secret of the Empire that involves a combination of up to hundreds, if not thousands, of casters to create a single, powerful spell that breaks the scales of what has been done before.

Men shout alarm and messengers ride in a frenzy, as below the fire to the north, something that seems impossible happens.

More soldiers.

The enemy charges from the north, the few defenders that are here well beyond being outnumbered. The Empire is a much larger nation than the Kingdom, which had always held itself through advantage in geography, skill, and resources. However, what the Empire does have is bodies and momentum.

It seems lost, the few there barely able to counter the assault as they remain in cover from the spells and arrows that come from outside, the stampeding of boots becoming louder and louder, loud enough to overtone the prayers being said by those too scared to move.

If there had been stars tonight, if there had been a moon — tonight being the night of the new moon — then the men of the attack would have seen what they have otherwise never, ever missed.

Floating high above the city are two islands, with two towers. Both of them are frozen over, massive, broken chains dragging along the ground from the mountains they departed from days ago and carving a scar through the world. But then a dim glow emerges on one of them, and then the ice crackles and shatters as a stream of red, gooey heat rushes out in a flood that had been suppressed for the sake of stealth.

Fire spouts out in all directions at once as a hundred furnaces are re-lit and flames lick the empty sky.

And two bodies float there, paler than usual, but there nonetheless. “F-f-finally,” shivers out Princess Parsley Odofredus Krone, rubbing her arms. “It was so, so c-cold,” she says.

Her twin, Hemlock Odofredus Krone, sighs. “Oh, I enjoyed it so,” she says, as if having to now relinquish now a great luxury. “I finally started to feel like it was cooling down,” she bemoans, shaking her head.

“I finally started to feel like I would freeze, Sister,” replies Parsley.

“Should we handle this matter then?” asks Hemlock.

Parsley nods in agreement. “I believe that we should, yes?”

The two of them hold out a hand each, the others grasping their sister’s hand, and a light shines within their grasp, before two streaks of flame and ice streak out of their palms, spiraling around each other like two wingless dragons that crash through the enemy host, writhing from side to side as the colliding forces burst within the mass of bodies.

Fresh reinforcements rush to the northern wall, their sprint slowing however very quickly as they reach the end and look over the edge at the twin-tails cutting through the horizon.

And the defense resurges once again, and one would think that the night was won because of the holding of two fronts.

— However, wolves hunt in packs.

A fresh glow, missed in the frenzy of the battle, blasts from the north-west — another cannon-charged strike that cascades directly into the islands above the city. A massive explosion rocking them to crash into another with violent force, the towers falling apart, the leviathan chains whipping through the city from the force, tearing down thousands of walls and roofs as they carve a groove through the streets. The explosion fills the sky, the ice and fire magic sparking into the darkness of a cloud as the explosion spreads dust and rock in all directions. Shards of ice and magma fly wildly around, the air hissing as they collide and rain down to the world as dead comets.

A fresh army of men in wolf’s armor charge from the north-west, nearly uncontested now as the third section of wall has no real numbers left to defend it compared to the enemy’s numbers. Even with all the returned people, the city is just too vast and the enemy too many.

Bells ring all around the city, signaling attacks from too many sides, and the defenders panic in their mixed orders to protect too many places at once. Men run, abandoning their posts as, despite everything, the tides just keep rolling in, bodies moving like the waters of the ocean in infinite supply, crashing against the walls again and again and again until eventually, they start to give way.

“Your Highness,” says a golden knight, gesturing to the side as a team of them ushers her along. “We must leave.” Soldiers run around them in all directions, the lines falling as the enemy starts to climb up the ladders once again.

“But the party!” she argues.

“— It’s continuing at the castle,” assures the knight, the princess clapping her hands together in excitement as they begin to walk away.

“Oh, good!” she says. “I really do have to talk to Brother about the state of this place,” she laughs.

Fire grows around the last of the nation, the city ringed by lights on all sides as lanterns and torches move in closer by uncountable amounts, pressing forward with a final crushing pressure that threatens to break the siege in their favor. Yellow and orange flames glint off of the wolf-motif helmets, reflecting like shining eyes in the darkness as they come circling in for the kill, a great screaming filling the air.

But it… comes from the wrong side of the walls.

Men climbing up ladders stop and listen, looking behind themselves as if they felt an inexplicable need to do so. Some old, innate human sense that is nested deep within their bodies tells them to look, to listen, to feel.

It’s an old feeling, one that most people aren’t in touch with anymore in this day and age.

It isn’t fear; something so simple is common for all men regardless of era. No, it’s something older and more primordial. It is the deeper base down below fear that can’t really be understood in an explanation as this one if one hasn’t sensed it themselves before.

But when the last star dies, and the night becomes dark beyond all darkness that has ever been, when there are no more birds in the trees and no more voices in the wind, and a man feels an inexplicable need to look behind himself into the darkness that he is deep, deep inside of, then he will know the feeling by its name.

Dread.

It sounds so simple and understandable. But that old sensation, that old companion of man, doesn’t mind being forgotten, because it knows that one day it will burn alight again with its dark, black flames that can be felt in the gut, in the rising of the hair on the back of one’s neck when they realize that something in the darkness is staring back at them — it has been doing so for a long, long time.

And now, you only see it because it has let you.

The screaming of the attackers falls confusedly quiet as they look at their brothers who have fallen silent, and their others look at them, and so on it spreads — a quiet.

The quieting infects the attackers.

The quieting infects the defenders.

The fairies in the sky stop fighting, the men of the walls and the wolves freeze in place — as if some voice in their guts told them not to move, or they’ll be seen.

Because, there, in the far back of the attacker’s siege lines, the lights have gone out. The voices have fallen silent.

And then, the next just… vanishes. Watched by several thousand people at once, they would all swear that these missing souls just disappeared into thin air, as if the night itself had just fallen over them and never pulled itself back up from the surface of the world.

This doesn’t just happen here, in the east.

It happens on all three fronts of the attack — the silence, the dread.

And then, they hear it — all of them.

The dead battlefield, having fallen impossibly silent, listens to the climping and clanking and clampering of hollow metal, moving as if possessed by a ghost. It comes once, and then twice, and then endless thousands of times more as they come into focus.

Empty, hollow suits of armor marching with black pikes and black swords, only letting their march have been heard now on purpose as they emerge from the darkness where once endless numbers of the Empire’s soldiers stood but have now been swallowed. The tattered banners of the black-crowned princess billow in the night, propelled to movement by a wind that nobody can feel on their skin, as if it were never really there.

“The princess!” calls a voice from the city walls, men gathering and returning as they hear the news, staring out into all directions as they look at the banners lifted up behind the banners of the enemy. The jagged crown on them overturned, like the broken jaw of a sick animal still on the hunt. And the more invested ones of them realize that it only needs the one to chew them apart because the wall is blocking them from going anywhere else.

The wolves look between themselves, the bravest of them remaining all making the same mistake of lifting their lanterns to the black-armored legions to better observe them in a misplaced curiosity.

Because what their lanterns reveal are not soldiers but rather, horrors.

One shaking man in particular holds his light out, looking into the face of a creature that has no shape, no form, no nothing. It’s empty. It’s just empty. And then he realizes, looking around himself, that everything here is — the air, the gaps between people, the sparse second between which his heartbeats strike in frantic rhythm. And the creature reaches out with a long, curved, gnarled hand of a witch and, with its sharp finger and its thumb, reaches in through the glass of his lantern and grabs the burning flame inside of it.

Every single lantern outside of the city’s walls goes dark in an instant.

Soldiers watching the walls stare off into the darkness, smoke and rubble rising around them as from down below comes nothing but a horrific screaming and clashing of metal. Sparks fly out in all directions as weapons clash, and spells try to ignite long enough to illuminate the darkness, but all of them are swallowed with a breath’s instant and made null and void. Even the screaming voices just somehow fall silent one after the other.

And soon, as endlessly impossible as it might be, the fighting stops.

The men on the walls look between themselves, not sure, and then back into the darkness below them that seems too deep and endless to just belong to the night itself. A man leans over the wall, holding a lantern in his hands to try and illuminate the ground again. But the light never finds anything to touch, and it just dissipates after a few meters.

The only thing that remains in the distance is the banner of the jagged crown.

A final bell starts ringing to the south. The main gate. The alarm is signaling out for one last approaching army.

The defense, weary, wounded, and exhausted, reroutes one final time in their confusion, manning the wall to the main road.

And they look as down the way rides a single figure all by herself — no. That is only a trick of the eye.

She’s on the front and the darkness is behind her. But the darkness is moving, swirling, and marching as if it were attached to the very same fabric of her cloak, which flows behind her over the back of the black-feathered anqa she’s riding.

The princess, Acacia Odofredus Krone, rides at the head of her host, who march behind her with weapon and banner proudly displayed as they move toward the gate into the city.

Her anqa comes to a stop. She lifts her head, looking up toward the soldiers of the wall, holding bows and pikes in hands that shake and shiver in uncertain fear, her eyes scanning over them.

“I was born here,” says Acacia up to them. “Aren’t you going to let me in to my own city?” She closes her eyes and crosses her arms. The soldiers of the city look at each other for guidance, but there is none left within the ranks. There’s been chaos and all that’s left is a mismatched bundle of bodies that only fit together in purpose but not in order. “Or am I not welcome home anymore?” she asks.

A boy inside the gatehouse, recognizing her and her banner, runs to the side and grabs hold of the mechanism. He was one of the saved, brought back to the capital city by her mercy that he would very much like to have a second time.

The portcullis raises, the drawbridge slamming down in an instant.

Acacia doesn’t flinch or move as the dust of the fall blasts out past her. She rides on, over it, and into the city. Her army is marching behind her with banners held in hand aloft toward the many lights that shine everywhere still.

There’s a silence, confused, as nobody rightly knows what to do.

Acacia smiles to herself, holding Pepper’s reins as they move down the main road and people start to emerge out of houses and hiding places; they start to flood out of the church — drawn by the sudden quiet.

“It’s the princess!” says a girl excitedly, pointing out of a window her way. Acacia smiles and waves. And people start to mutter amongst themselves, and the muttering becomes chatter, and the chattering becomes talking, and the talking becomes shouts and then cheers and then yelling and celebration.

“Princess! Princess!” yells a priestess, waving her way with both arms.

“She saved us,” sighs a man, his brother clapping him on the shoulder.

The lights of the city flood as people converge with their lanterns toward the main street, and Acacia waves and talks to every one of them she can without stopping. “Long live the Queen!” shouts one man, wearing a banner of a distant fortress.

She stops for him.

— He has the right idea.

The people mutter amongst themselves, but then agree as the next one shouts and then the next one, all of them chanting after her as she rides toward the castle and the peak of the city, windows and doors opening wide to look at her and her soldiers, who begin to diverge in all directions. This is terrifying at first, for the inhabitants of the capital, who think for a moment they’ve made a terrible mistake.

But then, the black-armored soldiers begin to unload carts of medicine and food. Healers from Acacia’s city in the west pour out of caravans that had been lying in wait, and the mark of the jagged crown is given to every man and every woman, whether as a bandage, as a meal, or as a rescue from below the collapsed rubble of so many different things.

Her eyes wander up to the broken islands, drifting aimlessly above the city.

“Sir Knight,” she says, sighing.

“On it,” says Sir Knight, a shadow drifting up toward the sky as she rides on by herself toward the castle gate.

As much as she hates them and has often wanted them dead, it won’t do if the enemy Empire are the ones to have killed her sisters. Although it would give her an excellent pretense for the war to come against them, it seems a little too cruel for her newfound magnificence.

It’s much better if she can make her sisters grovel at her feet.

She’d like that.

Acacia nods, smiling as she thinks about it. She’s going to make them switch names and identities, just to screw with their heads. Maybe she’ll even make one of them grow long hair and shave the other bald, just to tell them apart.

“…No…” she mutters, rubbing her chin as she thinks. "Too mean."

 

---

 

Sir Knight floats up to the darkness above on the islands and finds the two of them, looking as good as they did the last time he saw them. That is, catatonic and needing to be carried away, but still somehow clinging to each other even if unconscious and bloodied.

“Weird family…” mutters the man, shaking his head to himself before carrying them down to the church.

 

---

 

Acacia gets off of Pepper, standing at the gates to the castle. She rubs his beak, the animal purring as he rubs his head against her as she walks forward toward the doors where her brother’s royal guards are standing, blocking the entrance.

They salute with their hands over their hearts.

“Move,” orders Acacia.

“I’m sorry Your Majesty,” says one of them. “But the king has exiled you. We are not allowed to listen to your commands,” he explains.

Acacia steps forward toward him. The man stands up straight. “Hmm, I see. I see,” she says, tapping her chin as if she were thinking. “And… if I were exiled… I would be distant and gone, or?” asks the princess. “I wouldn’t be here telling you to let me in to my own family home?”

“I…” He looks over to the other guard at the door. The second man just stands up straight too, pretending he hadn’t just made eye-contact. “Forgive me your highness. But I’m not allowed.”

Acacia holds out the finger that was tapping against her chin. A black dot starts to swirl around its tip. “Look down around you, gentleman,” says Acacia. “You see that?” she asks, gesturing the black blood that seems to be flowing through every street — her soldiers. “I own this city. I own these streets,” she starts, looking back at them. Her finger presses against the man’s breastplate. “And, as queen, I own the good people who reside inside of it.” Acacia smiles. “So, please move,” she asks with a pleasantry to her voice that seems entirely unfitting for the situation that just unfolded. The smile on her face is wide and flat

The man gulps. His armor rattling. “I…” stutters the man and then clenches himself together to prepare for what’s to come. “— I can’t!” he insists, knowing that in defying a royal, he just gave his life up for spiteing them. But what choice does he really have?

A good knight never defies an order.

He flinches together.

Acacia sighs, patting his breastplate consolingly. “I’ll take the side door then,” she says as a note, just turning around, her glowing finger pointing at the wall next to them. The bricks there simply vanish, sucked into a pinprick black void that crushes them into fine dust. “Keep up the fine work, good knights,” says Acacia, impressed with their loyalty, waving to the two of them as she steps over the garden flowers and walks into the hole into the castle. “I shall need honorable men tomorrow too,” remarks the princess, entering the castle.

“That was pretty scary,” mutters the second knight lackadaisically after she leaves.

The first one falls down to the ground, covering his visor and crying.

Acacia pops back out of the hole again, looking at them. “Oh, but when I’m queen, nobody is allowed to do this either,” she explains, gesturing broadly to the new entrance in the wall.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” replies the crying knight, saluting with a shaking hand.

 

---

 

Acacia wanders down the familiar halls of the capital palace, looking around herself at familiar sights that seem… different than they used; last she left. It takes her a while to figure it out, staring at the embellishing in paintings and the grand archways as she holds her hands behind her back, strutting down the familiar corridor to the throne room.

She’s gotten just a little bit taller than when she left. Her better posture, born from good confidence, doesn’t go awry either in helping. Acacia smirks, her rapier at her side as she moves.

Whispers come from the doors as servants talk to each other, recognizing her. Seeing her smile seems to unnerve them more than anything else could have, and several of them cower behind corners. The princess stops, looking back at them. “Don’t worry. I have no grudges with you,” she explains, looking at a few maids who are trying to hide behind a statue. One of them screams and runs down the hall, flailing her arms and leaving her compatriot behind. “Just with my brother,” notes Acacia, turning back around.

She lifts an idle hand over her shoulder. “We’ll settle the day-to-day business tomorrow. Go get some rest,” declares the princess, strutting down toward the massive, ancient doors at the end of the hall, her boots sinking down into the velvet-red plush of the long rug that stretches through the entryway.

And then she reaches the end.

Acacia stops there, standing before the door to the throne room as her mind goes back to the last time she saw it, when she was thrown out of the castle and into exile by her brother. She was given a pittance and cast out into the world.

Not understanding how anything worked beyond the palace grounds, she took that money and went as far away as she could and it almost ended in one of many potential terrible disasters that could have come to pass. It’s like taking a pet that had lived its entire life in pampering and bedding and then one night simply dropping it off in the woods.

It would never make it past the first night, let alone out of the forest.

For her to have not only made it out, but to have done what she has done… in less than the span of a few years, she — a crooked, broken, sickly wretch of a girl — became a crooked, broken, sickly wretch of a woman, a queen, and all thanks to one thing.

— She would love to say 'herself' here.

But Acacia knows that she can’t.

Sir Knight’s hand presses against the door, his palm lying flat on the wood.

It’s all because of him. It’s all because of Sir Knight.

“Thank you, Sir Knight,” says Acacia, her hand rising up and lying on top of his as the two of them push together and the door starts to swing ajar. It creaks and groans, hinting at a lack of oiling and maintenance, as if it had been used less and less in the past months. “I could have never gotten this far without you.”

"Forget it." He shakes his helmet. “I’m just nobody at all,” replies the Black Knight and she feels his other hand on her back, nudging her forward the last few steps.

The throne room stretches on far, suits of armor lining in on both sides, the grand ornamental rug and windows flowing together toward a single focal point at the very end. A small rise, a handful of steps, and there sits the throne of the Kingdom of Odofredus Krone.

And on the throne, one leg strewn over the rest, his face held between his fingers as he looks down toward them from the distance, sits a man. A young man with regal, white clothes. His hair looks to have once been short and trimmed well, but has grown now in length after months of paranoid that kept him distant from everyone and everything. There’s no beard on his face; his features of skin and complexion are one and the same as all of his sisters.

The King — Odollam Odofredus Krone.

“Brother,” greets Acacia coldly, stepping forward into the final chamber by herself as Sir Knight trails in after her.

This is hers to deal with now. He’s done his part to get her here.

The princess walks down past the darkened windows of the throne room, moving between one suit of armor after the next before she stops at the base of the stairs and looks up at the man who has yet to stir. “I’ve returned to you, and I will only ask you to please leave peacefully once,” starts Acacia, casting a hand through her hair as she strolls toward him. “Abdicate the crown to me and bend the knee, like our sisters have done, and I will spare you the same just as I have them. I think you know wh—” Her voice trails off, falling quiet as the sentence comes to an end. “…Why…” she finishes in a mutter, her eyes looking down at the base of the stairs, at the squishing of her boot as it presses a foam out of the rug. Her eyes wander back up toward the throne, following a trail that leaks down, drips down, drop after drop after drop.

Blood.

Acacia’s eyes go wide as she looks at his face covered by his hand, and his leg over the arm-rest, not where it had been leisurely cast across. It looks more like he was trying to press himself back away from something as far as he could until there was nowhere left to go before it got him.

“BROTHER!” shouts Acacia, running up the stairs in a scramble, grabbing him and shaking him.

The King’s body slumps to the side, lifelessly. His blood trickling down the steps.

“…No…” mutters Acacia.

This is wrong; this is all wrong. How? This wasn’t her plan. Who did…

“— SIR KNIGHT!” screams the princess, turning back around and still holding his shirt. “GET CHICORY! NOW!” she orders the black shadow behind her, turning in a flash, to hurry back into the city.

The castle shakes.

The door to the throne room explodes open off of its hinges, the massive things breaking off of their hinges and smashing into the stones walls on either side of the throne room, one of them breaks through the exterior castle wall.

Sir Knight’s shadow swirls, remanifesting in front of Acacia, shielding her from rubble and debris with his cloak, the two of them watching the entrance.

Two other silhouettes come, forming in the smoke and dust that clouds the air.

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?!” screams Acacia, nearly frothing at the mouth as she steps forward past Sir Knight, drawing her sword out with a rage-shaking hand and pointing it toward the entryway. “GET OUT!”

There is a clinking as metal strikes against metal and a man moves forward toward them.

“We’re too late, Hero…” mutters a delicate voice at his side. “They’ve already killed him…” she says — a priestess of the holy-church, some young girl. Her inexperienced eyes trail across the throne room toward the towering shadow that is Black Knight and the princess next to him with a jagged crown on her head, her hands covered in the red blood of the king who lies dead behind her.

The new man in an armor so brilliant and silvery-white that it seems like the otherworldly shimmer of a ghost pulls free from his sheath a sword that has at first no shape but then takes one as he arcs it forward at the ready for a fight.

“We’re not too late, Dandy,” affirms the stranger, taking a step forward, his eyes looking back toward her with confidence. “We can still save the rest of the world.”

She stops and then nods, fervor burning in her eyes. “Right!”

He leans forward, readying himself. “Let’s run together one last time, Dandy,” says Hero.

“At your side, Hero,” says the priestess, holding her glowing staff next to him, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder.

Who the hell are these people? “What do you want?!” shouts Acacia. “Get out of here!”

“Justice,” replies the man at the end of the hall with a firmness in his unshaking voice. “Surrender, you wicked creature, and the heavens may yet show mercy for your twisted soul.”

The princess casts her arm out, walking down the stairs, blood pressing out below her boots. “Are you with the Empire?” asks Acacia with a sharp hiss between her gritted teeth, narrowing her eyes to seal there within them the freshly bubbling venom of her soul as she recognizes the priestess’ accent. “…You did this…” says Acacia, stepping down the stairs and pointing back at her dead brother. “— YOU DID THIS!” she screams, clenching her fists in rage.

They must be assassins. They killed him, and now they’re trying to get her too as a last ditch attempt at salvaging their failed siege.

She was too slow, too late. If only she hadn’t waited so long, she might’ve gotten here sooner. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Acacia was going to take her brother prisoner until his pride buckled and he gave in like her sisters had, not kill him.

Acacia, her eyes twitching. “SIR KNIGHT!” howls Acacia with every last drop of hatred in her heart that was left for this, for the situation life had put her in, for everything that she had collected and intended to reconcile in this very moment that has now been stolen from her by the hands of some people from another nation who she doesn’t even know.

She steps down the stairs, her hand clawing at her face as her other squeezes the grip of her rapier so tightly that the metal begins to shake. Acacia falls silent, reaching the bottom of the steps, the dust settling in the air from the broken doors. “…Get these things out of my kingdom…” she orders in a hiss.

A black shadow lunges forward, the specter of a man in black armor behind her pressing onward toward the intruders in a wisp that takes on a thousand shapes as it moves, the shadow swirling into the shapes of wolves and animals, of monsters, of men and demons, of everything that could ever haunt the visions of a horrible nightmare. It forms into a black-edged sword, wielded by a shadow in an armor of the same empty hue and the blade meets a shining counter.

The stranger swings out, and otherworldly metal strikes against its own.

An endlessly blinding flash of light fills the air, swallowed in counter by an endlessly dark abyss, the two energies spiraling and crashing up through the ceiling of the castle.

The Black and the White Knights clash, their weapons pressing in against each other as an all-destructive force bursts forth and rips the throne room apart.