“Down!” she shouted. “Down to one knee! I’ve crippled you!”
“You have not; it was a glancing blow, merely a scratch.” He could not afford to be crippled at this stage; he still had to find Michael and Corwin and make sure they didn’t take each other’s heads off.
“Liar! I say you’re crippled!” Ariel shouted, smashing away at him with a flurry of blows as she kept up the litany with each furious stroke. “Crippled … crippled … crippled … crippled … crippled!”
Aedan backed away and tripped. Ariel immediately pressed the advantage as he tried to regain his feet, but managed only to get up to one knee before she was upon him.
“Die … die … die … die … die!”
She’s out of her mind, thought Aedan, cowering behind his wooden shield as he warded off the rain of blows. And then, miraculously, she struck a blow that hooked his shield and sent it flying out of his grasp as he watched in stunned disbelief.
Thunk!
“Ha! Dead!” Ariel cried out triumphantly.
The blow had come down squarely on his metal skullcap, and Aedan’s vision swam. The sound reverberated inside his head like a ringing gong. The ground came up to meet him as he fell and everything went black.
Toward sunset, it seemed certain Azrai’s forces would prevail, but as the sun sank beneath the horizon and darkness descended on the field of battle, the elves suddenly crossed over to join the forces led by Haelyn, and the tide began to turn.
No one knew precisely what occurred to make the elves change sides. According to some versions of the story, as darkness fell, the elves saw Azrai revealed for what he truly was and realized they had been duped. Other versions had it that the elven generals discovered that at the close of battle, when the humans were defeated and the elves were at their weakest, Azrai would betray them and have the gnolls and goblins eliminate the last potential threat to his dominion. But whatever the true reason may have been, Haelyn’s embattled forces were in no position to refuse their help. Elf and human, who for years had tried their utmost to destroy each other, turned and faced the greater enemy, fighting shoulder to shoulder against the troops of Azrai.
As the moon began to rise, the champions of the gods, led by Haelyn and Roele, managed to break through a weak point in the ranks of Azrai’s troops. Haelyn led the charge straight up the slopes of Deismaar to where the lord of darkness himself stood upon the higher ground, flanked by his generals and priests. Beside him stood Raesene, the traitor, and at Azrai’s signal, the Black Prince led his troops down in a countercharge to meet the attackers. The brothers met midway up the slopes, each determined to destroy the other, while Azrai and his priests retreated to still higher ground. And it was then, at the climax of the struggle, that the gods themselves appeared in human form and joined the battle, uniting all their powers in an all-out effort to annihilate the lord of darkness and his priests.
Never before had god battled against god. The ground shook on the battlefield below, and the slopes of Deismaar trembled. The sky was cracked with lightning, and thunder drowned out every other sound. The earth heaved, and men and beasts fell screaming to the ground. All eyes turned toward the summit of the mountain, where the skies were lit up with a blinding glow unlike anything ever seen before.
It was the Twilight of the Gods, and it lasted only a few brief moments, but those who had survived the conflict never forgot the sight as long as they lived. The light grew brighter, and then brighter still, until the upper portions of the mountain where the gods were locked in combat was totally obscured from view. Then an incredible, thunderous explosion shook the sky, leveling the mountain and everything else for miles around.
The blast of the cataclysm washed down the mountain with the force of a hundred hurricanes, and no one was left standing. The ground cracked and split and swallowed up whole regiments as smoke and flames shot up from the fissures. Of all the hundreds of thousands of combatants who had clashed from dawn till dusk upon the blood-soaked battlefield, only a few survived, and later, when they looked back on what had happened, they counted it a miracle.
The final part of “The Legacy of Kings” was called “The Birth of the New Gods and the Abominations,” and it told the story of what happened when the old gods died, having given up their lives to destroy the evil that was Azrai. The cataclysmic explosion that had leveled Mount Deismaar in an instant and reduced it to a smoking crater had released the cosmic essence of the gods. Those who had stood closest to the holocaust caught the full brunt of this searing wash of divine essence as it radiated from the epicenter of the blast like an incinerating wind. The champions of the gods, who had followed Haelyn in his bold assault up the mountain slopes, were closest, bathed in the full force of this raging wind of divine essence. Their bodies were discorporated in an instant, and in that same instant, their souls rose up to become new gods.
Haelyn became what Anduiras had once been, the noble god of battle. Aerik the druid took the place of Reynir, the patron of the forests. Seramie inherited the goddess Brenna’s role as the deity of fortune, and Avanalae took the mantle of Basaia, goddess of the sun. Nesirie supplanted Masela as the lady of the seas, and Vos, the moon lord, was succeeded by the new god, Ruornil, who became the god of magic. But the dark essence of Azrai had been released as well, and it imbued two of his grim champions among the Vos, the warriors Kriyesha and Belinik, who became the Ice Lady and the Prince of Terror.
These were the new gods, created from the old, and in time, the people of Cerilia would learn to worship them, erecting new temples to their glory and passing on this story of the new creation to the succeeding generations. But those days were yet to come when the survivors of the cataclysm rose, astonished to discover not only that they were still alive, but that they had changed in ways that would forever make them different from ordinary mortals.
The god essence the cataclysm had released had been much dissipated when it reached them, but the remaining energy had still imbued them with abilities no humans had possessed before. In the coming years, these wondrous powers would be passed on to their descendants, who would be called “the blooded,” those who had inherited blood abilities bestowed on the survivors of that battle where the gods themselves gave up their lives.
Among these comparatively few survivors were Roele and Traederic, who were not as close as Haelyn when the earthshaking blast occurred. They had turned to pursue Raesene, who fled when the old gods joined the battle, and though he made good his escape, he too was changed.
As smoke and flames rose up from the fractured battlefield, the earth began to groan and tremble. Slowly, the land bridge started to sink. Even then, the survivors turned upon each other. As Azrai’s minions struggled to fight their way clear before the land bridge sank, Roele marshaled his remaining troops to stop them from escaping. Many were killed on both sides, but soon they realized that they had to look to their own lives if they did not wish to sink beneath the waves that threatened to inundate them. In their battle frenzy, they did not notice the strange new feelings surging through them, and it was only later that they discovered they had inherited the powers of those whom they had slain in the cataclysm’s aftermath. They found that god essence could not be destroyed, but could be ripped or drained from those who had possessed it, and this dreadful practice soon received a name—“bloodtheft.”
Bloodtheft soon became a way of life for those of Azrai’s minions who had escaped, for outnumbered as they were, they realized their vulnerability and sought every opportunity to kill those who were blooded, the better to insure their own survival and increase their powers. And as their powers grew from the blooded men they’d slain, they gained the ability to transform themselves with the god essence they had seized. In their greedy quest for greater power, they became abominations, travesties of their once human form, and the elves, who were the first to learn of these perverse new creatures, gave them a new name—awnsheghlien, “blood of darkness.”