Using his hand liked a claw, Dorian had caught one of the wounded warriors by the nape and clenching powerfully, he crushed the man’s neck. Without pause, he spun and twisted to avoid an attack from his second adversary and as he moved, he deftly caught his opponent’s wrist. Sidestepping and pulling his foe into an awkward stance, he broke the man’s arm before he could recover.
I saw him catch his enemy’s weapon as it fell and use it to block a strike from his third opponent. The two maces met squarely, and the poorly tempered steel exploded at the sudden impact of the metal heads. One razor sharp shard of metal lodged itself in Dorian’s chest, as bits of steel flew in all directions, but if the Grandmaster of the Knights of Stone noticed, he gave no sign. His heart thundered in his chest as he drove the shattered wooden haft forward into the other man’s abdomen.
As he fought, Dorian saw Thomas’ plight unfolding. Unable to reach his fellow knight to stop the awful battering he was enduring, he used the only weapon available to him… his legs bent as he crouched and levered upward on the haft of the broken mace, using it as handle to send the man impaled upon it flying across the room, to slam into the back of Thomas’ opponent.
Before he could recover, his second opponent, the one he had disarmed and left with a broken limb, caught him squarely with a powerful punch that sent him reeling backward. Another blow followed before he could recover his wits, and Dorian stumbled, trying to protect his head and body. The one armed berserker pummeled him, but despite his enhanced strength he was unable to land a solid strike, for Dorian kept rolling with the blows as he struggled to regain his balance.
As I watched, Dorian seemed to wilt for a moment, and then as his opponent’s next swing came, he straightened and caught the man at the wrist and shoulder before whipping him around to slam into one of the few remaining oaken tables. The heavy wood survived the impact, but my friend wasn’t done… before his foe recovered he lifted the man with both hands and drove him down onto the table again, this time with the force and weight of his own body behind it. The table shattered, and while I couldn’t see what happened to Dorian’s enemy, he did not rise from where he lay.
All of this took place in the span of less than a minute. Without my magic I was unable to intervene, and Walter was slow to react. The fight ended as Dorian finished off what remained of Cyhan and Thomas’ opponents… by first hurling the remains of the table he had broken and then wading in with a broken board to make sure that their enemies progressed from ‘injured’ to ‘dead’.
Understandably, it wasn’t easy to get his attention. “Don’t kill them all!” I shouted, “I need one to talk to!” My words went unheeded, as he used the end of his impromptu club to crush another of the still moving berserker’s skulls.
My childhood friend looked nothing like I remembered him. Gone was his beard, eyebrows, and sometimes sheepish grin, they were replaced by bare skin marked with blood and scorch marks. I had yet to hear him utter an intelligible word. The only sounds emanating from him were deep growling noises, so low as to almost be beneath the threshold of hearing. They were audible though, and the feral sounds sent a chill down my spine.
I moved closer, careful to keep outside of the radius of his makeshift weapon. “Dorian! Are you alright!?” I said loudly, and he finally took notice of me.
The board in his hand twitched as his eyes locked onto me, leaving me to wonder how close I had come to receiving another of his death blows, but it did not move further than an inch. He had frozen, staring at me with a look that bespoke confusion. A noise started in his throat, but only a wordless grunt emerged.
I smiled at him and stepped into his reach, opening my arms in a friendly gesture, “It’s me, Mordecai. You can relax my friend. Do you recognize me, Dorian?”
His lips parted for a second as he attempted to smile, and I caught a glimpse of granite teeth. It was a sight that worried me, for it meant that he had drawn far too heavily upon his bond. Over the past few years I had had to release two of my knights from their bond because of similar changes. One of them had only had the bond for a few months before he began changing, while the other had lasted a couple of years. I still didn’t understand why some turned so quickly, while others showed few signs yet, but the process was dangerous.
My ancestral home in Albamarl contained a living reminder of the fate of men who used the earth-bond too much. The golem Magnus guarded the house and he was but a rocky shell of the man who had once been Moira Centyr’s bodyguard. I had always feared that such a fate might someday happen to one of my knights, and Dorian was the last one I wanted to lose. I can’t release him without my magic… nor can I help restore him to full humanity, I thought silently to myself.
Dorian seemed to have calmed a bit, so I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder in a familiar gesture. “You look terrible,” I noted honestly.
Something seemed to crumble within him then, and his face softened. “Mort? You’re alive?” His big arms caught me up in a bear hug, and I felt his body shaking. Without my magesight I couldn’t tell, but I knew without evidence, that tears ran down his cheeks.
“I’m fine,” I reassured him, while thumping his back with my hands. It didn’t feel quite right. The skin was rough, and whatever lay beneath the surface was too hard to be normal flesh and bone. “I’m more worried about you.”
Stepping back I held him at arm’s length while I inspected him. The piece of metal embedded in his chest looked ugly where it protruded from his left pectoral, but if he noticed any pain from it he gave no sign. Indeed, there was virtually no blood oozing from the wound either, which worried me in an entirely different way.
“After you disappeared… I wasn’t sure what had happened,” began Dorian in a gravelly voice. “I thought you were slain, and more of them kept appearing.” He gestured to the dead berserkers that lay scattered about the kitchen in grotesque positions. “Where have you been?”
I smiled at him, even as my eyes saw one of the corpse’s eyes glance in our direction. It was the body of the man whose neck Dorian had broken. Apparently even though the body was paralyzed it still retained enough life for Doron to animate it. Raising my voice I answered my friend’s question, “I was dealing with Karenth. Now that I’m finished with him, I need to find Doron. It’s a shame you killed all of them.”
“Doron?” asked Dorian.
I nodded, “Yes, the god you’ve been fighting. He appears to have split himself into a multitude of his worshippers, imbuing them with strength and speed. Are there any left? It would simplify things greatly if I could talk to him.”
Dorian looked around him before giving me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of saving any of them. Until just now, it seemed as though we’d never run out of them.”
Cyhan groaned as he eased himself up from the floor. “I don’t think there can be very many left. We fought them by the dozens throughout the halls.”
“What happened to you?” I asked, for I had lost track of him after the mace had hit him from behind.
“I was just recovering from the mace that hit me, when I caught a table full in the chest,” he answered, giving Dorian a hard glare.
“I didn’t see you,” replied Dorian.
Cyhan coughed and twisted to the side in an attempt to unkink his back, when he grimaced suddenly and stopped. “I must have broken something,” he explained. Glancing at Dorian, he continued their conversation as though a broken bone wasn’t a matter of great concern for him. “I’m not surprised you didn’t see me. After the god back there blasted the armor off of you, you seemed to go bat-shit crazy. You were wilder than they were,” he said pointing at one of the bodies.