THE DYING LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

THE DYING LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS, by Dennis Conrad, art by Andrea Alamanno

The globe-eyed thing screams and a thousand knives pierce the Crusader’s brain. He grits his teeth and tries to grunt through the agony. Tears flow down grime-caked cheeks and he wonders dimly if this thing’s psychic scream is turning his brain to jelly and his mind is the hot liquid running down his cheeks. The creature shrieks louder and the Crusader can feel something in that scream digging further into his mind, ectoplasm fingers burrowing into his brain, trying to seize it and tear it open. A surge of energy wracks him and he starts forward involuntarily. His sword leaps eagerly in his hands with more life than he has, wrenching him along, dragging him to face this thing that he’d almost rather succumb to than fight.

“No,” he whispers. He does not know if he speaks to the sword, the thing that assails him with these eldritch wails, or to his own tired bones dragging ever forward through an unending epoch of nightmare.

Nearly against his will he swings the sword. He feels the sudden stop as it bites into the neck-flesh of the screaming thing; its screams mercifully reduced to impotent gurgling once the throat is hacked away. The thing falls clutching at its neck, black blood spraying between its sharp talons.

The Crusader’s headache is ebbing. He hadn’t realized how much his vision was swimming until it now starts to come steady, until the blurred colors resolve into what relative clarity is possible in these murky surroundings. He looks down at the pitiful dying thing before him, throat laid open in a torrent of blood. His skull still pulses with pain from that otherworldly shriek. The sword leaps in his hand. He raises it above his head, gives a war-cry, and brings it down. Once. Twice. Again and again until he cannot tell what part of the thing he is hacking into, until the arcing black gore that comes away with each swing of the blade is composed more and more of what’s left lying before him, until that very blackness fills his vision, a void of demon’s blood swallowing all else he can see.

He loses himself in it, feels it envelop him, lull him, draw him in almost motherly. A light above shines upon him, shaped in a symbol he can no longer associate with a creed. A holy sign rendered abstract after untold years in darkness. More in reflex than in worship he stretches a supplicatory hand toward it.

The light explodes out of the sigil, buffets him like an ocean wave.

He comes clawing awake in animalistic terror, shuddering, eyes wide and darting about in the gloom.  The Greatsword already alive in his hand whistling heavily through the air, pointing at every twist of imagined movement in his confused vision. Scrabbling to a sitting position, the Crusader realizes he can make out his surroundings in a dim red glow. He’d fallen asleep amidst the remains of that screamer-demon, the blown-out ribcage, coal-black inhuman organs strewn about around him like offerings to a cruel pantheon, pools of alien blood soaking the walls and even ceiling of the tunnel. Some of it still drips from stalactites above.

He had not blacked out for long, at least.

The Crusader pounds a fist against his temple. He had not realized he’d fallen. To succumb to the crushing slab of fatigue ever-pressing him into the dust; to awaken in such panic he has lost more control, he has let more of the man he’d once been leak out into the darkness about him, let it take a little more of him away. More of him like that title and name he can almost remember, that flutters just beyond his grasp, still murmured to him in those dreams that feel more real than this reality.

He looks down at his blade and the black gore staining its length. Steels himself before looking closely at the thing he’s been trying to ignore; the tumorous growth of bizarre flesh that spreads along that sword from its handle, the flesh that pulses and quakes greedily as it absorbs the fresh blood.

The Crusader curses and moves to check the runes that hang from the handle of the blade. They are meant to stop this corruption, and they have ruptured and needed replacement in past times. Such a flaw could account for this new activity, this increasing loss of clarity and self.

But before he can check, he hears a sound and freezes.

Something is scraping against the other side of the stone chamber wall. The Crusader leans into that wall, inching his way along so infinitesimally slowly, ear pressed against the roughness, feeling the organic warmth of the deep black rock. Whatever is moving on the other side is alive and could very well be massive. His palms sweat, and he grips his sword tighter, feeling it pulse in his hands with cursed life, feeling it shudder in his grip. The tumorous growth pulsates as if rumbling with hunger. Even if he kills whatever beast he’s hearing now, it could very well be the one that gives the flesh-growth too much strength; he imagines the tumor bursting with growth, consuming the blade when it tastes the tainted blood, perhaps turning upon him as all cursed things must.

The blade catches the dim red phosphorescence of a cooled magma vein on the cavern wall, one of the only natural sources of light in these depths. At one point the ancestral greatsword had glittered brilliantly, his grand weapon for his righteous mission. Now it is charred a greyish black, weathered and nocked with hundreds of imperfections; this one from an old gargoyle’s ribcage, stabbed after it had gathered him in massive talons, beat huge shadow-black wings in an effort to drop him into some unending pit. Another scratch from the stalagmite it had crashed against in a shower of sparks, as he’d made a panicked deflection from some great crustaceous claw. These are the only memories he has left; memories of strife, of chaos, of war and cursed blood and the unending quest for righteous death.

For that is all he longs for at this point: an end. He no longer remembers what he was before – vague memories of glories sought in a desert, howled hymns to a god long-forgotten, praises given to a king never seen. That name, his name, still teasing ghostly at the edges of his consciousness only to spiral into nothingness before it can cohere. Even the first of the monstrosities he’d fought down here had faded only into dim recollection, a hurried sketch of clawed fists, gnashing teeth, wild yellow eyes that does not form a whole image.

He lowers himself to the stone ground, still against the wall. Whatever he’d heard moving is stumbling away, now, down some twisting, endlessly burrowing corridor. He listens a few more moments, waiting for the echoing shuffles to die down, and listens a long time after they do, statue-still, frozen in place; yet his sword is ready to come alive in moments, hungering palpably at the promise of bloodshed. It stirs again, the cursed flesh that has gathered at its center grotesquely pulsating.

As the unknown thing’s shuffling fades, the Crusader finally has a chance to check those wards that dangle from the blade’s handle. There are three, at the moment, hanging from leather straps. There had been more at some points, less at others; his faith had waxed, waned and wavered over the countless years of his wandering torment. Each ward is a black stone pilfered from these cavern walls; upon each is a glowing rune. These runes are carved twisting patterns of old symbols that he no longer knows the meaning of, only that they come alive with blue light under his small carving knife as he finishes each one, and that they seem to hold at bay the corruption that is climbing along the sword’s hilt.

In his years in the shadows the Crusader has learned the efficacy of stealth. Once he’d worn rattling chainmail in these depths, scraping and jangling as he moved; now, he wears the pilfered scales and skins of monsters tied together with what dried sinews he can find. He wears the tough webbing that had once made up a gargoyle’s wings, one wing wrapped around his body and the other draped over his shoulders like a cloak, sinuous enough to mask much of his movement, but tough enough to match his old chain.

 

 

Crouching in silence, he crawls along the place where the wall becomes the floor, hugging up into cover at every sound and every perceived movement before moving forward. Fatigue is creeping back in; truly, it is always there, but there are those moments where it closes in more sharply, moments that divide his “night” from his “day” in this sunless place. Earlier, this fatigue had been a torrent that had utterly consumed him; now it is a waxing tide, lapping waves threatening to become a deep rush of black unconsciousness. Now that he has some warning, he takes the time to find a suitable spot to rest, scrambling amongst the black stone and dirt, the dim-glowing magma veins lighting his way in their surreal undulating red glow.

After a long effort – long enough that he can feel his eyelids dragging themselves down, can see half-gathered images forming before his eyes as the dreams swim from his subconscious – he finds himself a well-lit chamber with only one entrance. There is a great red glow in this chamber, cracks in the ceiling glowing red from magma veins pulsing far above. Anything that casts a shadow this light will immediately wake him in the flickering movement. Not only that, but there are stalagmites lining the cavern’s rear wall, and if he lies down utterly flat, he cannot be seen from the mouth of the cave. He does so, marveling at his luck. For every night that he finds something resembling shelter, there are a dozen that he simply falls asleep partway through the effort, awakening either at some ravenous thing’s movement or the leaping terror of the nightmares barely distinguishable from his realities.

He drifts to sleep in stops and starts, frequently shooting into panicked wakefulness just from the edge of sleep. Each time he wakes, he is greeted by the sight of the magma veins’ red glow in his vision and the cool weight of his sword’s handle heavy in his hand.

He awakes at a campfire. He doesn’t remember the name of the country that this desert is in, just that it was the last place he’d transitioned from this time before – this long-forgotten infancy, this briefest blink of a life before – to the life of darkness and terror that had defined it since. His armor is still bright as it had been in those days, though somewhat dulled by the corrosive sands. His greatsword sparkles, resplendent in the campfire’s light.

There are other crusaders like him there, but their faces are blurred shadows, their words babble that comes maddeningly close to resolving into something sensical, only to frustrate all the more when they spiral into nonsense.

He is still holding his sword, feels for a moment as if he should drop it, but shakes it off. He thrusts the point down into the sand and uses it to hobble to his feet. The gathered forms around the fire look at him, but he cannot see their eyes, their expressions. A few of them scamper out of his way as he lowers himself to the fire, warms his hands against the howling winds of the desert night.

Someone says his name behind him, but he doesn’t make it out – never has, every time he comes here. Nonetheless, on some deep instinctual level, he recognizes it as his name, long-forgotten.

“Captain?” he asks, wheeling about.

And there he is. His face is still murky, but his eyes burn through like coals. A bearded face, a heavy brow, the Captain stands before him, so much taller than himself, clad in a white tabard and gold-lined armor. He clutches his own sword’s handle on his hip where it sits, sheathed.

“You have been raving,” the Captain says. “Tossing in your sleep. Howling of demons.”

“I…” the Crusader falls to his knees before the towering Captain. “I have been asleep so long.”

He looks up. The Captain is the Captain no longer – he has grown taller, his locks have grown longer, lightened into a blonde color. His tangled mane of a beard has been shorn away and the Crusader can see the features sharpen, can see the eyes sharpen. Yet still these eyes shine with otherworldly fire.

“Your sleep is almost at an end,” the Queen says. “You are on your way to the glory you seek. It is just around the bend – it is in your hands.”

The Crusader looks down at his sword. Where once a sickly, demonic heart beat it is now a golden, glowing orb, alight with divine power. It hurts his eyes to look upon it, like a sun itself glowing out of the steel. Shielding his eyes with his free hand, he looks back up to the Queen, only to be utterly blinded before what she has become.

For what was once the Captain and became the Queen is neither any longer; the thing that towers before him is so much greater and more terrible than either, dangling from the heavens as if upon massive puppet-strings. The Crusader becomes aware he is no longer in the desert, no longer around the campfire; he is suspended in an amniotic void, clutching his sword in hand but otherwise naked and defenseless against the shadow coursing about him, staring up at the resplendent angel before him. For this is God; a God whose name, if he ever knew it, he knows no longer; a God he worships and carves charms in homage to more out of instinct than true worshipful devotion; a God that even now he cringes toward like a moth to a cleansing flame.

This God turns one of its burning faces upon the Crusader, showing one of the many angles in which it manifests itself, looking down upon him with an incomprehensible gaze.

“You fight and you suffer and you scream and shriek in your agonies,” a million voices boom from a million mouths. “With your sword you sing praise to me that no prayer could compare to. Your salvation is at hand, my child. You need only reach out to it.”

An arm is extending from the teeming mass that is this God. All at once, it is the welcoming hand of a kind father, the inviting hand of a beautiful woman, the palsied claw of some old crone, a vast inhuman tendril writhing out of the void. The Crusader still grips his sword in one hand, extends the other, clutching desperately toward the salvation promised in that grasp.

At the moment he touches it, searing agony. Heat spreads from the point of contact, spreads flaming through his veins, boiling out of his eyes with glory. He screams.

He starts awake in the chamber, coming into a world of heat and chaos.

Something has burst through the fire-lined ceiling, raining red-glowing rocks down into the chamber. Struggling forth from it is a massive mad-eyed thing, a vast centipede more than three times his size. Four face-sized eyes glare at him in the death-red glow of the lava that it burrows out from, claws scrabbling for purchase as it bursts forth onto the stone.

The Crusader is already sprinting – feeling the heat of the fiery stones raining forth from the burst well, knowing that roiling magma must be coming down behind, fire already intense enough to roast his boots as he skirts it and runs full-tilt panicked into the dark corridor outside the chamber.

After the oven that his hasty shelter has become, the stale air of the outer corridors hits him like a physical wall of cold. He falls momentarily to his knees, breath exploding from his lungs, eyes wide and desperately searching about. He can hear the scrabbling madness of insect legs in the chamber he’s just left, turns back to see a moment’s glimpse of the centipede-demon finding purchase, coiling itself in his direction, eyes mad with animal hate, legs scissoring into the rock like scythes.

He runs headlong down the corridor, taking a corner so fast that he slams hard into the wall back-first on his way. For just a moment he has a perfect glimpse of the thing – teeth gnashing wildly, tasting his fear on the air, eyes fixed utterly upon him, massive foreclaws so terribly human in all but size surging forward, arrowing to crush him like paper.

He barrels on, sparing another glance at the thing as it rounds the bend after him, the second half of its segmented body slithering down after the churning foresection. It’s bringing down stalactites as it approaches, cracking new magma-veins into the stone as its clawed feet tear up the earth.

Just as the Crusader seems to be breaking for another path, he wheels about, sword aloft, stabbing up toward the onrushing thing. As he turns, the demon flies at him, slashing one of its foreclaws savagely as it does so. He feels the beast’s talon cut deeply through his gut, feels the claw scrape against his spine, feels his entrails spill from his belly in a wet flood of gore. He feels the agony that he has grown so used to, feels the crushing weight of the demon falling onto his sword as it charges. He has stabbed it in the eye, or it has stabbed itself in its eye, running like a mad blind thing into the blade. The Crusader feels his arm plunge shoulder-deep into blood and brain, deep into the demon’s eye socket. The demon gives a last death-groan; the Crusader collapses beneath it as it crashes to earth.

Silence, for a time. The shadow creeps in as the demonic phosphorescence of the thing fades, as it slowly dies.

His arm emerges first from beneath the massive corpse. The arm is mangled and broken, but as it clutches about desperately for life it is cracking, twisted, reforming itself whole. The pulverized warrior is pulling himself inch by agonizing inch out from under the bulk, breaking his body even as it reforms, his guts sucking their way back into his open wound once he has escaped from the crushing deadweight bulk.

He chastises himself. He had allowed himself to hope that this death would be his last. As he always strived not to do, and always could not quite achieve.

At his first step his left foot collapses like a watery sack beneath him and he falls clattering to the stone; he lies there a moment, feeling the shattered bones in that leg re-forming, watching them throb and move beneath his skin, stitching themselves painfully back to life.

He hauls himself to his feet – gingerly testing the just-healed one – and stumbles over to lean against the wall, still feeling the deep ache in his newly-healed body. He looks back at the huge corpse that he has crawled from under, looks at the red-black gore that spills from the huge burst eye socket. Looks at his arm, slick with the stuff. Then looks at the sword that he grasps.

The corruption – that fleshy tumor sprouting from the blade, it pulses with more life than he’s ever seen in it, it’s nearly glowing as it writhes and twitches, absorbing the monstrous blood that covers the sword. He can feel it as if it has eyes, staring at him, mocking him, laughing at him.

Cursing, the Crusader clutches for the charms that dangle from the handle and sees that one has gone dark. The carven rune upon it has cracked into an unrecognizable pattern. The two that remain are flickering, their strength faltering before the consuming flesh of the corruption. He scrambles along the rocky floor, looking for a properly-shaped rock as the pulsating mass glows and thrives, taking in more of the cursed blood by the moment. After a frenzied search, he alights upon a palm-sized rock; at the spot he drops to his knees, begins muttering chants that he remembers more as movements of the vocal cords than as words with any true meaning, drawing his carving knife and tracing the symbol into the stone.

And freezes. For just as before, he hears something in the corridor directly parallel to his. A scrape – a sharp exhale – a clattering movement against the stone.

Immediately he ceases his carving and his prayers, flattens up against the wall they share. The cursed sword twitches in his hand, mocking him, but he cannot attend to it now. He strains to listen to what is coming. It starts and stops erratically, moving in bursts of ponderous slowness and sudden speed. The Crusader pictures some misshapen dragging beast, some chimera from hell of those sorts that will endlessly and tirelessly fight him and kill him again and again. It is moving – moving toward the horseshoe bend at the end of that corridor, where it turns into this one. He has been that way – he knows there is no other destination. He knows that he could run – or that he could creep alongside it as it approaches, stealthily waiting to get the first strike. Painstakingly he follows the thing’s bizarre, halting progress, wondering what sort of creature could behave so strangely.

He takes up positioning hiding behind an outcropping just before the bend, taking an opportunity to assess this new threat, to determine a weak point before he strikes out at it. He crouches in a defensive position, ready to strike in any direction. As the twisting shadow throws itself on the wall, too twisted by the cracked and guttered stone to give any hint of the monstrous form that casts it, the Crusader finds himself swooning in a rush of intense fatigue. A deep, existential fatigue, the looming weight of eternity crushing over him. This scrabbling in the dark, this staggering rush from monster to monster, from death to death; it has continued for an unfathomable time, and he cannot imagine an end to it.

In just that moment, the thing rounds the corner, and his heart leaps into his throat.

It is a woman – a tall, dark-skinned woman. She is not wearing plate armor, nor any kind of garb that he could identify; instead she is clad in all beige-and-brown, what looks to be thick, fabric padding, crisscrossed with some intricate pattern of those alternating colors. She carries herself unmistakably as a warrior. He has a vague memory that women did not fight in his time, but it’s clear in every movement that she can fight, and fight well. It is in the cautious, defensive shuffle that she maintains as she slowly moves down the corridor; in the fiery awareness in her eyes that only barely fails to mask her fear; in the way she carries some strange piece of machinery, that intricate iron thing that looks so heavy in her hands as she hefts it about nearly effortlessly. This is another thing that he can immediately identify, despite its strangeness; it is clearly some sort of weapon, a weapon of a far different age than his. For a moment he grows dizzy at the realization of how long it must clearly have been since he stumbled into this hell; long enough for women to take up these strange, alien arms in whatever wars still rage. But then all he can feel is joy – joy that there is another human in this awful place, another who can fight alongside him, who can take watch while he sleeps the first sound nights he can fathom.

“Th-th-th-thanks be to God,” he stutters, rasping in a voice that has not spoken to another human in eons.

The woman screams. She wheels about, looking directly into his eyes, and he sees no recognition in them; nothing but pure, reactive horror. She raises the thing she carries and it bursts in a great booming, echoing explosion and a puff of grey smoke. Sudden sharp pain unlike any he’s felt before blooms in the Crusader’s shoulder; he grasps it, falling to one knee, as the woman warrior runs off back from where she came, the echo of that explosion still dying in the shadows around him, his ears still ringing with the piercing sound.

She is frightened, of course. The Crusader knows she will see reason. He removes his hand from the sharp wound on his shoulder, expecting to see it healing like so many others have; but it still bleeds, it still throbs. He has a moment’s confusion, realizing the wound that this woman has inflicted may not go away. Blood is pouring freely from the wound; he stumbles forward, falls to the ground in surprise. Sees a glinting before him; some small, golden cylinder, left behind from the woman’s weapon. He reaches out to it, touches it, recoils as it burns his fingertips; gingerly draws it to himself anyway and looks closely at it.

The Crusader has not seen his reflection in centuries. He sees it now in the glittering cylinder that the warrior-woman left.

Two mismatched yellow eyes stare back at him, reptilian eyes. His jaw hangs open, filled with sharp tusks. His body is utterly twisted; a left arm still human-sized, dangling almost uselessly from a grotesquely over-muscled shoulder; black blood drips down that arm from the new wound. The right arm is completely fused with that cursed sword, the corruption that he thought he had fought against seeming to have climbed up and consumed his arm. The tumorous nightmare-flesh pulses with his own cursed heartbeat. His feet do not wear the scavenged boots that he’d made some years before; they’ve merged into them tapering down into savage and monstrous talons. The hides he’d stitched together to make his armor had become his flesh, cratered, scaly and heavy.

So this is why she flees, he thinks. This is why she fights. I have become just another of these beasts to be vanquished.

The Old Crusader bleakly reminisces over the horrors he has experienced these eons: the endless tests of mettle against the grotesque denizens of this hell; the jerks of panic at every moving shadow; the relentless fatigue never quenched by more than an hour’s tortured sleep. At such thoughts, he feels some pity for the New Crusader, knowing her terrors-to-come so intimately; but so, too, does he feel a massive burden lift from his misshapen shoulders with the beautiful realization that he is now not the only one that struggles righteously in this dark. He wishes her luck, this strange New Crusader with that deathly bursting fire-iron in her hands. A great, profane power floods from the blade that sprouts so grotesquely from his arm, a narcotic burst of energy flowing straight into his veins from the heart of the cursed sword. The things which he has only just begun to recognize as his massive yellow eyes widen, pupils narrowing to savage animal slits. This New Crusader will have her endless trials, just as he did.

And he shall be one of them – perhaps even her first.

As he starts the chase, he raises the eldritch sword over his head and gives a triumphant war-cry. It is the most terrible sound he has ever heard.

 

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In addition to writing dark fiction, Dennis Conrad does standup comedy to a captive audience as a high school English/Special Education teacher. His publication credits include “The Incredible Machine”, published in Third Flatiron Publishing’s “Brain Games: Stories to Astonish” collection; “Aethernaut”, “The Christmas Errand” and “The Herald” have been published in the “Gather Round: The Internet’s Scariest Campfire Stories” collection by Outside Your Window Press; “On the Threshold”, published by Timber Ghost Press; and “Monologue: Forces and Counterforces”, published by Gypsophila Zine.

Andrea Alemanno  is a compulsive illustrator  who fills the line spacing, preferably at 300 dpi.
He’s  from Italy and loves to move into a new city searching for inspiration. In every city,  he constantly keeps drawing.  Now, 3 decades later (and a little bit more), he is  still drawing and learning something new everyday.  He loves the traditional touch into a digital tools world so uses pencil, ink and digital colors to give life to his artwork.  Sometimes he shares his knowledge with wannabe illustrators.  His work has been selected for several awards and he’s currently working for Italian and international publishers.