This week’s prompt was: Write a story that's set in a place you've never been to.

The Siege of Orchid’s Blush

Stone smashing stone and all fell silent.  Tolard fell silently clawing at his face, smacking one shoulder blade against the narrow walkway and began slipping over the edge.  The hand was snatched away, his ankle gripped, and for a moment he hung suspended above a hundred feet of void terminating in the stone flags of the fortress below.  Whoever they were, fellow soldiers from somewhere, fellow sufferers in a near lightless world, they dragged him back onto the walkway, back to huddling behind the battlements as Violdred’s army pounded the Fortress of Orchid’s Blush.

Tolard slapped at his bloodied face, feeling shards of shale prick his palms, as his hearing returned from down the long tunnel where it had fled.  The man holding his other arm was screaming something in an impenetrable accent; the man who’d grabbed his ankle wept with his head pressed to the crenellated parapet.  All were exhausted after four days or weeks or months of siege.  Time was impossible to determine: Violdred had fastened the sun to the sky in perpetual eclipse.

Across the border, to the north amid the haunted forests through which terrors wondered and the sane perished, Violdred had stole into the Fey King’s bower.  While the king and his retainers busied themselves with drinking honeysuckle and dew, nibbling cherries and roasted shrews, Violdred slipped from shadow to shadow until he neared the Fey King’s daughter.  With a laugh that extinguished the light of her eyes, Violdred snatched her and leapt back into the world.  Though a wild hunt pursued him, the broken-minded mage was too fleet, too ensorcelled for the ancient magic of the earth.  At noon, under the high sun where no fey can tread mortal ground, Violdred cast a spell called “The End of Days,” sacrificing the Fey King’s daughter on the Altar of Cryningdrown.  Insensible with mirth, awash in immortal blood, Violdred watched as the sun stopped in the sky, as the sun held the moon before it as a shield against the blasphemies of man.

Then wolves howled in the blood-brown light and from throughout the forest and across the north, wolves heeded the call to Violdred.  Entering the now enchanted wood, however, changed them.  They rose on their hind legs, their forepaws clenched into talons, and they grew to towering heights.  Swift despite their hunching, agile despite their bulk, the hundreds of running wolves became thousands of raging werewolves.  Violdred, dragging the shredded corpse of the Fey King’s daughter as a child might a constant but forgotten doll, ascended Mount Ulustrar and, with the eclipse behind him, from ten-thousand werewolves on bended knee, he took their howled oath fealty.

Inundating the borderlands, Violdred's army overwhelmed the feeble towers of guard, burned farm and hut, cabin and fold, devoured the young and smashed the old, on their way unstoppable to the castle Lilies in May.   Baron DeLisle, good lord of a comely people, watched from his rusted gates as the swell of death rolled from the forest's edge, the few terrified people—his people, his charges—falling under the howling wave.  There was no time and the gates of Lilies in May had not been shut against attack in two-hundred years.  Seizing a spear from a shaking soldier beside him, Baron DeLisle called the retreat and stood between his gate towers to receive evil on his feet.  The message of Violdred's invasion reached King MacNarin—twenty miles away—from the blood-foamed lips of the spear-less soldier.

His own castle—a thousand-year impediment to the Wilders of the north—King MacNarin hoped to hold out as messengers sped south to the Feudal Overlord and his famed table.  Could they come with fire and sword, with spell and dragon?  The whole of the north would be devoured before the fastest of the Overlord's chevalier could take the field, no matter how many horses they left dead along their way.  So good King MacNarin ordered his household and every refugee from his border baronies to the Fortress of Orchid's Blush.

Of stone heavy and black, shaped by hands that held lovely the sharpness of a line and decried the gentle curve, the Fortress of Orchid's Blush gazed from the summit of Sanier Hill, a once strategic promontory when the land was young.  A museum now for scholars and madmen who sought truth in the indecipherable etchings that covered its walls, Orchid's Blush was thought impenetrable.  Thought so, but now after untold hours of constant siege, History had slipped to Rumor and stumbled to Legend and then huddled in the filth of Lie to die cradling hopeless Wish.

Violdred's werewolves had lopped along behind the refugees, feeding upon the slow and weak, and when the gates of Orchid's Blush slammed to, they encircled the old fortress and howled their delight.  They tore trees out by the roots, they gnawed them into shape, they lashed them with the entrails of their discarded feast, and built ghastly engines of siege.  Buckets of twined branches and bloody limbs, fixed to bended tree trunks could have thrown one-ton stones, if a human army had invested the fortress.  With no such supply train to offer ammunition to the macabre trebuchets, the werewolves clawed at the ground to unearth whatever rocks they could.  Surrounding Orchid's Blush, for a mile or more around Sanier Hill, the earth was studded with bluestone shale.  The werewolves piled hundreds of pounds into their catapults and launched load after load unceasingly at the walls.  The brittle stone soared through the burn-blackened sky to shatter against the walls of the keep and throw slivers of shale as long as daggers and sharp as razors at the backs of the horrified soldiers manning the walls.  Salvo after salvo crashed through the sky, some payloads colliding in midair to rain needles upon the defenders.

For what did they hope?  Men and boys of the borderlands?  Pressed by need, armed with whatever came into their hands or was taken from the dead as they ran?  They wept or screamed, shouted curses or defiance, every moment expecting the shears of fate.  And Tolard?  A farmhand, a thrasher of wheat; a soldier of three days, a mouth the harried quarter master could not feed; a body hurled over the battlements so it would not fester inside the Fortress of Orchid's Blush.

***

The captains—bound by blood to save their people, entrusted by history, by lineage, to expend their coffers, their stores, their sons, and their lives to preserve the markings on a map—waged their own war within the doubtful safety of the keep's doorway.  Off each twisting stairway inside, the people of the north who had fled so far, crammed themselves into the forgotten corners of the ancient and inhuman fortress.  To save them, to live up to their noblesse oblige, the captains battled over what was to be done.  The youngest DeLisle, Tristan, who had escaped Lilies in May with nothing but a cloak and a sword, trying to lead his mother to safety, represented the mounted knights.  One-hundred strong, armed, armored, and horsed, the few who the werewolves had not snuffed out on the long chase would follow the fifteen-year old into certain death if only to bring an end to the uncertainty, to leave the land of perpetual twilight and shameful fear.

“Now,” he demanded.  “Throw open the gates and let us charge if not to victory than to such a defeat as will be worth remembering when these ancient walls have crumbled under Time's fist.”

Baron Awestriker, whose men he had force-marched north from the relative safety of the midlands and who now manned the walls, counseled waiting.  To hold out, he had told them, to survive and deny the horde the walls, was the way to victory.  From the Overlord would come succor.  A mage atop a dragon to hurl fire at the beasts; knights on flying horses to rain arrows; witches sailing on clouds with kettles of boiling ice.  Their saviors would come, he promised.

Lady Cecilia parted the council with the power of her presence, silencing dispute with questions none could answer.  How did such an army appear?  What was its purpose?  Without these answers, no strategy could form.  She ordered a squadron of her keen-sighted archers—who guarded the keep—to the gate towers.  Of the four who went, two were smashed to death by catapult stones; of the two who returned, one was mad with fright.  The other, Owen Meriwether, told of a pavilion of sapphire and silk trailing a thin hair of incense from its baffled mast, which lie at the edge of the werewolves’ assault; respectfully around it, the largest werewolves stood quietly. 

“There,” Lady Cecilia declared, “the power that desires our destruction lies at its ease.  It is there that we must strike, to sever the head from the serpent.”

With the faintest hope now whispering past Tristan's cheek like a chaste kiss, his young blood—heated to avenge his father—called the knights to the stirrup, heeded no further council, brook no delay, and ordered the gates thrown open.  Such was the onslaught of one-hundred knights thundering en masse down the slope of Sanier Hill that the werewolves were driven back, hurled from their grim engines, and rent asunder.  The two waves of evil rolled from the armored wedge as it hurled itself toward the pavilion of sapphire and silk; but like a wave, like the sea, the tide turned and behind the knights came the jaws of vengeance.

At the charge’s head, screaming madly within his borrowed plate, slashing wildly at anything that drew too close or that he trampled, Tristan did not hear the first horses’ cries as the pursuing werewolves overtook them.  Armored as they were, the heavy horse of the cavalry thundered like a passing storm but moved as slowly.  The enchanted werewolves, light but strong as ever sinew could be, dropping to all-fours to claw their way faster, to bring their teeth within range, hamstringed the chargers and brought down the knights.

From the battlements, Lady Cecilia watched through the long eyes of Owen Meriwether as rank upon rank of knight was thrown to the ground by his felled horse, or torn from the saddle by snatching talons.  The in-sweeping tide of monstrosity closed upon the front rank, as well, slowing its progress, swamping the leading knights in a mire of death.  Surrounded, swinging wildly and cursing all evil, the last of the knights was unhorsed—Tristan, striking with his armored fist, his sword lost in a dead foe’s fall—and under the boiling mass of fur and muscle, as wolves cover a taken stag, the knights of Orchid’s Blush were devoured.

***

“Close the gates!” Lady Cecilia ordered.  “The walls will not hold long, Baron Awestriker: bring your men inside the keep.  Sound the retreat.”

“As you wish, Lady,” the barrel chest of the old Baron rumbled, courteous even in disappointment.

“Wait, wait!” Owen Meriwether said, leaning far out over the battlements.  To the soldiers at the gates’ winch he shouted, “Belay that order.  Trumpeters, sound Infantry Charge.”

“What?  Are you mad?” Baron Awestriker cried.  “We haven’t enough to man the walls let alone launch a sortie.”

Taking the closest trumpeter by the front of his chain shirt, Owen shouted, “Now!”  The trumpeter, having lived in fear for days, responded as fear demanded: he sounded Infantry Charge.  His fellows joined the tinny blaring, crying faint and weak under the unblinking eye of the motionless eclipse.  “Listen, M’lady, M'lord ” Owen said to the Baron and Lady Cecilia, “they almost made it, the knights nearly reached the pavilion of sapphire and silk.  It was their horses, their weight, that slowed them overmuch.  Now is the chance we need: spread the infantry as wide as you can.”

“They’ll be overwhelmed,” the Baron said.

“Yes, but it will take all of our foe's forces to do so,” Owen said.  “It will spread them thin and give us our one chance!  Only one of us has to squeeze through—to sever the head from the serpent, M'lady.  Where strength and armor have failed, let speed prevail.”

Throwing off his hardened leather cuirass as he ran, Owen ordered the passing infantry to do the same, to ignore the werewolves and try to penetrate their lines, giving battle only to open a breach through which the man behind might pass.

“We are already dead,” he shouted as he and the doomed hundred ran.  “Whether we die on the wall or on the field, this is our last day.  Better to spend our final breaths and expend our blood in the one chance of saving those within, so that they die not alone in the horror of capture but with us in the End of Days.”

With a cry of desperation, of impotent rage, the farmers and hunters, the old soldiers and boys encumbered by equipment too large for them, spread across the field that stretched from Sanier Hill to the forest beyond.  Like porters wading out to a laden ship, they pressed into and were soon enveloped by an ocean of rending hate.

With leaps and dives, brushing past towering brutes and ever dodging the hooked talons of innumerable werewolves, Owen hurled himself through their ranks.  An old, battle-scarred sergeant-at-arms from some beaten down border tower ran to his right for a time, slashing at the beasts as he went.  Where he fell, Owen could not guess; one moment he could feel the man’s presence, knowing him beyond name, linked as an “us” together, and the next he threw himself under the swiping claws of a werewolf and came to his feet on the other side, alone.  His arms and legs bled from slashes, from tearing his flesh away from closing fangs; the air burned into his lungs as salt water.  He ran on.

Skirting a hideous catapult that fairly screamed with the blasphemy of its construction, Owen now saw the pavilion of sapphire and silk—and the dozen enormous werewolves who surrounded it as honor guard.  Raising his bow and nocking an arrow, Owen all but stopped breathing in the effort to squeeze his muscles to push just a little bit faster, a little bit farther.  He opened a space of three seconds between the werewolves who pursued him and the honor guard ahead.  He leaped forward, landed with feet spread for the shot, and pulled back his bowstring.  Past the heaped shoulders of two massive beasts, he could see into the pavilion; within, a man dressed in robes of crinoline in red, face furrowed with the laughter of madness, stared at an amulet; Owen loosed his arrow and fell, dragged by a dozen jaws to the ground.  So many werewolves tore at him that no one wound pained him: he ceased all at once, in the darkness of their huddled furry, and saw not where his arrow sped.

***

From the top of the battlements, where Lady Cecilia refused to be dragged away, she watched as the last of Baron Awestriker’s infantry dissolved amid the ferocity of the werewolves.  Her eyes, no longer as far-reaching as in her youth, had followed the flaxen hair of Owen Meriwether as he soared, like the arrows he was so sure at shooting, toward the pavilion of sapphire and silk.  The infantry annihilated, the cavalry and their horses no longer writhing in ruin, the werewolves howled their victory to the inert sky, howled their lust in gluttony and slaughter.  And then the moon moved.

The sun slipped from behind the pale disk and looked down upon the blood-soaked field.  The golden eye above watched and silence fell with its light.  Cecilia, entranced by the sudden change, leaned upon a stone battlement she could not feel in her surprise.  Everywhere before her, the silent werewolves knelt; without a growl, without snarl, they shrank; no longer striding upon their hind legs, dropping back to their four feet, they descended to their once natural size.  With the edge of the moon free of the sun’s grasp, the last of the werewolves ceased to exist.  Before her, scattered across the broken field, wolves roamed, tottering sickly on weak legs, panting for breath and whining in their distress.  Those at the edge of the field, as if frightened by the light of day, stole into the woods and away.

Baron Awestriker called a platoon of archers from the keep, before ordering it shut, and he accompanied Lady Cecilia through the carnage streaming from Orchid’s Blush down Sanier Hill across the field to the pavilion of sapphire and silk.  They grieved at the fallen who lay torn, trying at first to place a face or emblem, but were forced to leave that sad duty for a time to come: answers must first be found.  Lady Cecilia knelt, despite the mire, at Owen Meriwether’s remains and touched a lock of his hair.  His hand still clutched his broken bow.  Rising, not heeding warnings or her tears, Lady Cecilia entered the pavilion of sapphire and silk.

There she found the mage tacked to the pole upholding the pavilion’s center, an arrow through his skull.  His body had constricted, furious perhaps at his defeated plans, and clasped between his fingers remained the amulet he had gazed upon for the whole of the siege.  Taking its chain, Lady Cecilia wrenched it free and coiled it slowly into her palm.  Looking down at the open gold ornament, she stared into a tiny painted likeness of herself.

Thanks for reading the above short story; if you enjoyed it, I also have a fantasy novel you might like available in Amazon’s Kindle store called The Adventurers.  It follows four young friends on the eve of adulthood who decide to leave their sleepy village to find a life of adventure; but before their training and preparations are complete, adventure finds them.  Imagine, The Sword of Shannara meets Stand by Me.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!