Unchosen Read online

  Unchosen

  by Jeffrey Cook and Katherine Perkins

  Cover by Christopher Kovacs. Base images licensed

  Text Copyright © 2017 Jeffrey Cook and Katherine Perkins

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, and events are either imaginary or used in a fictitious manner.

  All Rights Reserved

  To Sheri, James, Shayna, Jessica, and all those whose fandom goes beyond just reading our words

  Some Other Books by

  Jeffrey Cook and Katherine Perkins

  Fair Folk Chronicles

  Foul is Fair

  Street Fair

  A Fair Fight

  All’s Fair

  Accidental Inquisitor Series

  Mina Cortez from Bouquets to Bullets

  Writerpunk Charity Anthologies

  Sound & Fury: Shakespeare Goes Punk

  Once More unto the Breach: Shakespeare Goes Punk 2

  Merely This and Nothing More: Poe Goes Punk

  What We’ve Unlearned: English Class Goes Punk

  Table of Contents

  Section I: Beginning’s End

  Chapter 1: The Day and the Hour

  Chapter 2: Listen to Your Heartbeat

  Chapter 3: A Morning After

  Chapter 4: Part on the Stage

  Chapter 5: Drive the Dark Clouds

  Chapter 6: Bad Memories

  Chapter 7: How Many

  Chapter 8: Again and Again

  Chapter 9: Always Darkest

  Chapter 10: Sunrise

  Section II: The Third Tower

  Chapter 11: Breathing Down Your Neck

  Chapter 12: This World of Time

  Chapter 13: Over the Ground

  Chapter 14: Audience

  Chapter 15: The Road

  Chapter 16: To Tell the Tale

  Chapter 17: King of the Monsters

  Chapter 18: Twilight

  Chapter 19: Dawn of the Dead

  Chapter 20: To Fit Right In

  Section III: Blood and Spheres

  Chapter 21: Won’t Be Long

  Chapter 22: The Bright Side

  Chapter 23: Underworld

  Chapter 24: Broken

  Chapter 25: Nowhere to Run

  Chapter 26: A Combat Site

  Chapter 27: Now for Wrath

  Chapter 28: Now for Ruin

  Chapter 29: And the Red Dawn

  Chapter 30: Eina Dottir Sunna

  Section I:

  Beginning's End

  1

  The Day and the Hour

  Marshall Joseph More

  Marshall had heard that approximately .003% of the world's population had a capacity to understand the twisting, maddening script of the Othertongue. Doing his best to ignore the impossible syllables that Nils and Dr. Nathaniel were chanting over Xharomor's sarcophagus, he mused that this was at least several times the percentage that ever wanted to hear it spoken aloud.

  With Xharomor and his followers at the gates and the prophesied day clearly at hand, the Horizonte Academy had to use everything that had been prepared. One of these was the sarcophagus where one of Xharomor's former mortal hosts had been interred. They needed the remnants of the magic that had once kept the Otherlord asleep and the sympathetic ties to him from the withered bones of his former host. As long as the loremaster and student kept up the ritual, Xharomor would be as mortal as anyone else on the field. Of course, he still had an army at his back.

  Marshall bristled at the thought of it. That otherworldly army had descended upon and destroyed the Hikari Tower, one of the four bastions that guarded the weakest points in the fabric between the Otherrealm and Earth. As the second-oldest of these, the Hikari Tower was also called the Second Tower, and the prophecy had panned out there. 'The Second Tower will fall before the Chosen One's Day comes.' The actual trans-reality Seal had been safeguarded even when the Tower was brought down, but the enemy was emboldened, and the casualties were real.

  The attack had been meant as an insult and proof of Xharomor's strength. Fujimoto Hanzo, Marshall's own swordmaster, was one of the people who had fallen defending the tower.

  Marshall shook his head, trying to regain focus. They'd known the Tower was likely to fall. The men and women there had held it bravely, taking the brunt of all Xharomor's forces in this world, to buy Marshall time where he was, 6,000 miles away. Thanks to them—and to his friends—he'd done it. He'd recovered the sword Fragarach, also known as The Answerer, the last step to proving that he was the one who could unlock its blessing and finish Xharomor.

  The Academy staff had placed every protective enchantment on him that they could: blessings, shields, and wards augmenting his own Astral heritage to allow him to survive the Otherlord's worst blow. Most potent among those protections was that provided by the ritual being done over the sarcophagus—its link to the Otherlord gave it a power over him nothing else could match.

  Once Marshall had taken Xharomor's attack, the sword would return the strike threefold and end Xharomor. The defenders of the Horizonte Academy and its Seal would buy him the necessary time—and then deal with the army of cultists and Tainted lieutenants Xharomor had drawn around him. They would be much easier to handle once the patron of their magic was gone.

  His musing was interrupted by Headmaster Carvalho, slapping him on the shoulder. "Are you ready, young man?"

  Marshall swallowed. The Headmaster had always been an ally when others doubted. It had taken years, but as more and more of the prophecy had come to pass, the more of that conviction Marshall had learned to share. The star-shaped birthmark at each shoulder blade—where his Astral ancestors, the opposite number to the Otherrealm’s daemons, were said to have had wings—meant something after all. "Ready, sir," he agreed.

  The old earth magus limped, leaning heavily on his gnarled walking stick, to his position. As long as he stood, the walls of the Academy would be virtually impervious, and the support staff, their lorekeepers, enchanters, and healers would be safe.

  "Hey, hero," came a teasing voice.

  "Hey, yourself," he responded, turning to greet his girlfriend—fiancée, rather. He knew the ring he'd recently given her was tucked under her clothes, but he could see the chain it was on around her neck, the silver contrasting against her dark skin. Her hands didn't need interference at work.

  "Kiss for good luck?" Celeste added. Her curly hair bounced within its ties as she stepped up to him, then lifted onto her tip toes, one hand on his chest for balance as she pursed her lips.

  "I need all the luck I can get," Marshall agreed as he kissed her lightly.

  "You?" she snorted. "I'm the one who has to help patch all you big, strong warrior folk back together when this is done. Don't make my work any harder than you have to, okay? There's already enough of it.”

  "Don't worry; I'll look out for him," came another voice from behind them. Igarashi Noriko swaggered up to the pair, the fairly diminutive girl offering her glasses over to Celeste. "Meanwhile, could you look out for those for me?"

  Celeste sighed, tucking the glasses into her pocket while Noriko stepped aside. "You could have just transformed before you came out here, you know. Your glasses would be a lot safer in your room."

  "Nope." Noriko replied with a playful grin. "They wanted my help with some last-second ritual stuff, and I think clearer like this."

  "You just like the showy transformation bit," Celeste replied, more amusement than anything else in her response.

  "Well, duh," Noriko said. "Lightning is cool."

  "If it were that great of a transformation sequence, your glasses would transform with you," Celeste said, patting the pocket. They did this a lot. If she really wanted to go for the teasing jugular, the ter
m ‘sidekick’ would come up.

  "Yes, well..." Noriko paused, stepping back, before starting to spin the ornate staff she carried over her head, electricity starting to crackle from it, radiating down her arms. "Lightning," she retorted.

  Marshall rolled his eyes at the exchange, slipping an arm around Celeste's waist while Noriko transformed. "You have to admit, the lightning is pretty cool," he offered, quietly.

  Celeste bumped him with a hip in response. "All I have to admit is that if she doesn't bring you back in salvageable condition, she gets healed last."

  "I heard that," called Noriko, as she was showered in sparks, before the arcs of blue electricity started extending further from the staff, down her form.

  "Good," Celeste added. "And if that's not incentive enough, I made cookies too. Gee, I hope there's enough to last until the final people are healed."

  "Better be enough," Noriko called, as she virtually disappeared amidst a bright flash of blue light. When spots faded from Marshall's eyes, Igarashi Noriko had grown at least a foot and put on thirty pounds of lean muscle, along with trading in her Academy uniform for the light armor of her magical onna-bugeisha form. The twirling staff slowed, sparks fading, and Noriko stepped back up to the pair, now almost as tall as Marshall. "We need to get out—" she started.

  "They're coming through!" came a shout from the front gates, not far away. Celeste drew away from Marshall and scurried to confer with the herbalists about preparations to start receiving wounded. Though she was still a student, they were dangerously short on healers, leaving the traiteuse one of the most proficient they had left. Marshall watched her go for just a moment, then went the other direction, with Noriko close behind.

  Marshall paused as they reached the sarcophagus—and the small crew around it who could handle the magics placed on it by Xharomor's own rivals among the Otherlords to keep him imprisoned all those centuries ago.

  Noriko pulled up short behind him. "What?"

  "Thing just gives me the creeps."

  "Soon as we dump Xhar's latest body back into it, we can rebury it, where no one will ever find it this time," Noriko offered. "Besides, Nils will do his job. He's got this," she called, with a wink at her boyfriend.

  "I know he does." It had taken Marshall a while to get used to Nils: the twisted and scaled foot and left hand, the reptilian eye, the metallic mask, decorated in runes to dampen his noxious breath. That hadn't put Marshall off enough to not come to his rescue when he'd found some of the other older boys pushing the Tainted transfer student around, as if it should be Nils's problem that his however-great-grandfather had let himself get possessed by a daemon. Well, granted, it was Nils's problem—the bad decisions or misfortunes of the Tainted were passed on in so many ways. But it wasn't Nils's fault. So Marshall had stepped in, those few years ago that felt like more.

  That help had been repaid a thousand times over, as far as Marshall was concerned. Now, he didn't even notice Nil's outward corruption. Besides, it somewhat paled before the withered, bony visage of Dr. Edwin Nathaniel, more difficult in part because Marshall was used to seeing the Dimensional Lore Instructor hale and hearty. He'd gained a wasting disease in the process of protecting the five of them during the descent into Teos's Tomb in Egypt in search of the ancient sarcophagus. They'd been able to slow its progress since, but neither modern medicine nor Celeste's saints had been able to do more than buy a little time and ease his pain. Marshall knew the ritual had to be a strain on Dr. Nathaniel, but he continued to persevere in the face of what was to come.

  Nils nodded to Noriko, but didn't break his chant. He did manage a small smile for his girlfriend. The mask was down to avoid muffling his voice, and Nils wasn't as self-conscious about that as he once was, not even with the three reptilian teeth showing in the left side of his mouth.

  Noriko nodded back and grabbed Marshall. "Come on!"

  The gates opened, and Marshall strode out to see a swirling portal opening in the air in front of the Academy, just beyond the warding circle drawn around the walls. A number of the armed and armored defenders of the place—and no few of the magically gifted just behind them—looked far more at ease facing off with the portal once they saw Marshall. An honor guard moved up to help Marshall and Noriko reach Xharomor when the time came. The Astral-born needed to not be bothered with a dozen skirmishes along the way to putting an end to it.

  "We've got you covered," Sergeant Azevedo said.

  "I know. Thank you, Sergeant," Marshall assured the big man.

  "And whatever we don't pull off you, the kid will. You just do your job."

  An angry growl pulled Marshall's eyes to one side, eyeing the kid. Hrobjart Bjornsson, Nils's little brother, wearing his traditional bear-fur cape, was snarling and glaring at the portal like he'd charge into it now if they'd just give the signal. Marshall couldn't help but smile as he remembered when Celeste had first seen the cape. “If that's real fur, then somebody’d better have eaten all that meat,” she had said.

  Hobie had nodded and said, completely genuinely, "I started with the heart and worked my way."

  Marshall wasn't sure whether he felt sorrier for the enemy or Hobie, and what the family's Tainted blood had done to the poor kid's mind. He knew that, like all of the bear-sarks, regardless of what drove them to it, Hobie wasn't afraid of what was coming, and Marshall somewhat envied that, if nothing else. He also knew the odds were that the kid he'd seen grow up from angry little tagalong to full member of their company would live a short, violent life—and Hobie would be the only one who didn't see any tragedy in that.

  Once more, Marshall forced himself to focus, trying not to think of his friends and all they'd been through together. The best way to serve and protect them, the Headmaster, his teachers, and everyone else was to finish this quickly. He had to do his job.

  Dark, humanoid shapes began to take form in the mouth of the portal. Though neither of the last confrontations with Xharomor had gone well, they'd survived, and they'd grown. Marshall had The Answerer in hand; he had Celeste's blessings; he had Noriko guarding his flank, thunderstaff and all. And the Bjornsson boys? Well, the Otherlord had best worry. The Sons of the Bear brought a darkness of their own.

  As the front ranks of Xharomor's army, mostly the lowest ranks of his cult, emerged, Marshall raised his sword and charged. As he surged forward, all the doubt and hesitation left him. When he'd arrived as a young boy with strange birthmarks, he'd questioned everything, most of all himself. In the quiet moments, he still had his doubts, but a lot of experience over the past few years had taught him a great deal about leadership, as he and his friends achieved the seemingly impossible together.

  Marshall cut down the first opponent to reach him, the sword working perfectly well the first time around against mortal foes. It was only the supernatural that he'd need its enchantments against. Beside him, Noriko whirled and leapt, pitting her skills, enhanced physiology, and thunderstaff against as much of the field as she could occupy.

  More of the Academy’s guardians rushed into the ranks of the cultists, trying to cleave a path for Marshall. For the moment, they were doing well, but he knew this was just an opening challenge against the least of Xharomor's forces. More were emerging from the portal by the second, Tainted infantry and a handful of sorcerers among them. The casters along the walls engaged now, focusing on defensive and warding magics to protect the fighting men from the spells of the enemy and challenging their opponents to exhaust themselves trying to dispel their wards, reinforced by the enchantments on the Tower grounds.

  Marshall still saw no sign of Xharomor, but knew he'd have to show himself eventually.

  "Daemons!" Marshall heard the shout from behind him. Looking up from the fight to the portal again, he saw them. A trio of fifteen-foot tall, scaled, squamous things emerged from the portal, each one hideous in a completely different fashion than its brothers.

  "How did he get those here in the flesh?" Marshall demanded, though no answer was given. "Try to slow
them down," he called to the spellcasters. "Don't let them get into the ranks."

  Behind him, Hobie howled, mixing in with the frantic shouting of the casters as they tried to reinforce the wards. The signal was given, and the youngest of the bear-sarks charged at the giant targets. Bear-sarks were always a risk to their own forces, especially the further into their bloodlust they got. On the other hand, they had a tendency to fixate on the greatest challenge present. Unsurprisingly, Hobie rushed straight at the giant daemons, granted superhuman speed by the berserkergang.

  Marshall breathed one of the prayers Celeste had taught him, hoping that one of her patrons for the mad might look after the kid, even if he was pretty sure Hobie would have preferred to "die well." Hobie wasn't home right now, though, and Marshall just hoped someone up there was listening. Had they been at the Gisting, the infamous 'Third Tower,' they'd have a number of the bear-sarks to throw at the daemons. Out here in Brazil, they had one kid with truly supernatural anger management issues.

  With the daemons warded outside the perimeter of the circle, at least for the moment, Marshall continued his surge, trying to focus on getting to the enemy's spellcasters. Noriko had the same discipline, going through the almost dance-like ritual that called a bolt of lightning down in the midst of the enemy's back ranks. She could only pull that trick off so many times, especially with all the build-up, but it seemed to work to disrupt whatever a group of the black-cloaked sorcerers were trying to put together.

  With that cleared, Marshall finally spotted his target. Xharomor emerged onto the field through the portal, flanked by his lieutenants. The smoke-shrouded hag to his left stopped almost immediately, gathering some of the remaining sorcerers to her to empower one of her rituals. Marshall remembered the last time they'd fought Rhalissa. He thought he'd killed her, but her magics had apparently saved her somehow. He had no intent of letting that stand.