A severed head rolled on the dirt of a backwater town, blood gushing from the headless body. A warrior clad in full plate suit of armor with a bestial helmet stood over it and kicked it without a shred of respect. He pushed his visor up, the wolf-like face sneering at the corpse.
“Another fake,” he growled, drawing a deep breath through his lupine snout and drinking in the fragrance of blood. Eleven armored figures clanked as they nodded, shrieking townsfolk screaming and running away in all directions around them. A handful of decapitated bodies showed the path they had taken to reach the temple’s yard.
“That makes thirteen fake Paladins.” A broad-shouldered humanoid boar said after revealing his face. “We’ll test our skill against him one day. Then, we will have a fight worthy of the Knights of the Round Table.”
“I bet the king recalls us before we can feed our blades,” another, more slender armored figure with unnaturally long arms said without exposing their inhuman features.
“It costs us nothing to keep trying until we get orders not to interfere,” the boar said, then turned towards the others. “They say number fourteen is a charm.”
“You said that about the third one too,” the wolf grumbled, but lowered his visor and followed the rest to their destriers.
They never reached them, appearing at the Summer Court’s outer forest. The summer sun found its way through the leaves on the day after they had gone on their quest to slay the Paladin. Once more, the Knights of the Round Table had not laid a hand on a human in centuries.
***
The Sculptor stood, evaluating his latest work, his three sets of arms folded, his beak twisted in disdain.
Fire.
Fire was everything the last handful of weeks. The streams feeding him from all over the world had swelled not quite into rivers, not yet, but there were times, glorious times that hadn’t happened, when fear and nightmare grew so much it nearly gave him the power of a god.
A burning suit of armor with maws that operated like a mechanical construct dreamed of by the Quartermaster but never constructed stood before him. Black holes for eyes always disturbed sentient creatures, and the living fire visible once the creation opened its mouth was quite satisfying.
Then it vanished.
The Sculptor was once more a horse, a fair maiden in the nude riding on his back. He clearly remembered the feeling of déjà vu back when it first hit. But as a creature existing on the border between the conscious and subconscious, between real and imaginary, such small jitters of prescience were usually normal enough to ignore. Going back weeks was something else entirely.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he told the fae, “I have an urgent matter to attend to.”
She buzzed and pouted, blinking her composite eyes coquettishly as she folded her arms and pushed her breasts up, but there were better things to do than to entertain a Wild Flower.
Her skin peeled away as she dismounted; perfect, feminine legs split, each into four root-like structures covered in brambles. By the time he turned around to face her, she too was the stuff of nightmares. He remembered the time when he created her, inspired half by the she-fiend of Lust, half by the most terrifying thing men could conjure up in their dreams when pleasure descended into terror.
She buzzed again, mandibles clicking, but it was irrelevant. He had business to attend to. Time had started rippling once more, and there were so many chances, especially if the Paladin had many rebirths and if he lived long lives.
His vast mind became a stormy sea, spawning ideas for nightmares which would never return the time and energy he spent on them, but which could be masterpieces if handled properly. If. A huge gamble, a risk which could be lessened by knowing the results beforehand.
“Hunt,” he shouted, summoning his best tracker, one who had been on the verge of becoming fae back when the world allowed such transformations. “To me!”
Black leathery wings soared towards the Sculptor as Hunt hurried to attend its master.
“I need you to find the Paladin once more,” he told the creature that was a mix between a wolf, a cat, and a bat, “and deliver my message.”
“I have never met any of the Paladins, My Liege.” The creature’s voice dripped with bloodlust, much like its maw did saliva—in a stream.
“The message will be the same as the ones before.”
“I have never received a message for the Paladin.”
The Sculptor ignored him. “You will ask for the number of holders of his living memory. Promise him that I will deliver ten messages for him in each of his memories. If he refuses, threaten him. If he still refuses, devour him, and we will do this again until he agrees.”
Hunt tilted its head, not fully understanding its orders, and the Sculptor massaged his equine temples with hooves melting into six-fingered hands. “Just find him. I’ll do the talking.”
Then for himself, he muttered, “Why do I have to do everything myself?”
***
A dream away, the city of Kingstown lay in ruins. Wails of pain and despair filled the air. A headless dragon squirmed and thrashed, tearing down homes and trampling the fleeing survivors as searing blood still sprayed from the stumped neck. Its glassy-eyed, house-sized head rested half a mile from the rest of its body.
The second dragon’s corpse hung off the castle’s tower, a waterfall of blood pouring from a man-sized hole in its chest, corroding the white fortifications. The third one, and the only living ancient dragon in the area, held its severed wing; its immunity to magic making the loss permanent. It would never fly again.
The black dragon glared with the acid of spite and hate at the smoking ruins of the castle. The King and Queen were gone, the heirs unaccounted for, but at least its hated enemy and the enemy of all dragonkind was also dead.
Inside, under its watchful gaze, three archfiends stood over an old man’s ruined body. Even in death, he gripped the remains of his shattered sword. Bits of metal stuck out of his dark skin, visible through the rends and tears in his plate armor.
“Damn fae! Had their three kings joined us, we wouldn’t have lost so many.” The burly, yellow-skinned fiend punched a pillar, shattering stone and collapsing another section of the ceiling in a rain of dust and debris. He looked down and couldn’t tear his eyes off the succubus queen split in twain from the top of her head to her groin.
“It’s not their fault.” A purple-skinned gentleman with a goatee and a thin, stylish mustache said while trying to reattach his severed arm. “Chaos is in their nature, and chaos needs both good and evil. It’s like they said; their world wouldn’t be fun without the Paladin.”
His face twisted after healing failed to take hold, and he threw the arm away. “Bless his soul, he burned off two inches of flesh and bone. This is gonna take a year to regrow.”
“The fight was good. Worth it. Would fight again,” a suit of dented and battered crimson armor said as blue, sulphur-smelling blood oozed from some of the cracks. “Without the Paladin, the humans are defenseless. And with only the three of us alive, we can split them between us and bask in sin while the other four find worthy princes and grow strong enough to contest us again.”
“Now, now, dear Pride,” the gentleman started, his voice honey, “why would we need to divide the lands when neither you nor Wrath require them? Admit it, all you want is to beat another opponent like the Paladin. To prove yourself. And Wrath here is quite strong. He even got five levels from killing the blessed one.”
The suit of armor turned to face the bulging mass of yellow muscle, then shook his head.
“What?” Wrath roared. “You think you can take me?”
The armor shook his head again. “I just think you can’t rip an ancient dragon’s head off with your bare hands.”
Wrath faltered and deflated, then looked down at the battered human corpse half his size.
“Yeah, that was insane. I never imagined I would see something as wild as that. I mean, look at that skinny little body. His hand’s smaller than one of Rubia’s scales. How did he even do that? Bless his soul,” he said the words like a curse and topped them with a thick blob of phlegm square in the dead Paladin’s face.
He frowned as a strong sense of déjà vu struck him. The sight looked so familiar; he must have fantasized about it before.
Greed glanced between the other two, unhappy with how Pride had defused the explosive situation. But he had to admit, he was happy to see the Paladin dead. And he was glad humans only ever had one of those blessed creatures at a time, because the demon spawn wouldn’t have survived the second.