Heretic Spellblade Read online

  Heretic Spellblade

  K.D. Robertson

  Copyright © 2020 by K.D. Robertson

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Thanks for reading!

  Chapter 1

  The last day of the world arrived with little warning. A scouting report sat unread in an office. The lights were off and moonlight shined through the window. If somebody scanned the report, he’d learn about unusually powerful activity in the nearby demonic portal.

  The owner of the office, Nathan Martel, stumbled in and fumbled with the light switch. Two wrought iron lamps flickered to life as magic ran into the lighting elements within them. Nathan scanned the room for a few moments. His dark blue officer’s jacket hung off his shoulders, and his shirt buttons were undone. Given his unkempt black hair, it seemed unlikely he was here for work.

  His eyes fell on the report. He picked it up, flicked through it, then frowned. He hesitated, going over it once more. Almost a minute passed in silence while he considered what he had read.

  Then he snapped the report shut, dropped it on his desk, and turned off the lights.

  The report could be dealt with in the morning. He had an alluring subordinate waiting for him in his bedroom.

  Light crept into Nathan’s bedroom at dawn. He was already awake. He remained under the silk sheets of his bed as the sun’s rays crept over his face. His eyes were wide open, and he stared at the black hair of the woman sharing his bed. A bushy black tail lay wrapped around his body as he spooned her, and her tufted black cat ears twitched every few seconds as she dreamed.

  Nathan absently rubbed her belly while they spooned. His mind was elsewhere. He glanced at the ticking clock on the wall. The ornate golden hands had moved by at least an hour since he last looked. Licking his lips, Nathan realized he needed to get up. The bed was alluring, but work needed doing.

  He rolled out of bed and the woman stirred. She tossed the sheets aside as she blindly groped for him, her eyes still closed.

  “Nathan,” she moaned. “Come back to bed.”

  “Go back to sleep, Jafeila,” he said.

  She opened her eyes and pouted at him. Her arms reached for him, palms out and welcoming. He kept his expression still, but found it difficult. She knew his weaknesses. Every muscle in his body called him back to bed.

  “You know you want to,” she sang. “Come on, this is the first time I’ve had you to myself all week.”

  “Go back to sleep,” he repeated. “I’ll join you once I finish something I should have dealt with last night. It’s probably nothing.”

  She blinked at him and lowered her arms. Her brow furrowed as Nathan retreated into the adjoining bathroom.

  The rhythmic pulse of hot water on Nathan’s back allowed him to focus his thoughts. Something about that scouting report was off. He was no stranger to stopping demonic invasions, but he couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong with this report. Little things jumped out in his mind that didn’t add up.

  Handling this was Nathan’s duty. He was the Bastion of the Far Reaches, and the commander of this frontier fortress. As Bastion, he had special magic to suppress demonic portals and destroy their armies. And only Bastions could create Champions, who were magical warriors with the power to destroy entire armies of demons single-handedly.

  Nathan turned the shower off with the brass taps and dried himself off. A clean and neatly pressed uniform lay in a basket near the door. He smiled at the sight. For years he had refused to accept any servants, but somehow his subordinates kept sneaking in and doing pointless things like this. This morning it saved him the trouble of putting together his own uniform and appearing ragged.

  Given the choice, he would have chosen to appear ragged rather than waste any more time. Every passing minute weighed on him. The voice of experience warned Nathan that he had made a grave mistake last night.

  Jafeila stared at him when he stepped out into his bedroom in full uniform. She was curled up around his pillow, her tail pressed against her face and ears flat against her head.

  “This isn’t ‘probably nothing,’ is it?” she asked.

  Nathan frowned. “‘Probably’ means that it may also be something.”

  “Don’t be coy,” she said.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and glared at him. Her tail swished back and forth along the sheets and sometimes brushed her curvy thighs. Her large bust bounced with her movements, drawing his eye to the three glittering amethysts inset directly into her collarbone. Those gems marked her as one of Nathan’s most powerful Champions.

  Nathan sighed. “I need to follow-up on a scouting report I saw late last night. Something about it doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “A scouting report?” Jafeila repeated. Her eyes narrowed. “This is about the portal, isn’t it?”

  “Could it be about anything else?”

  “It could be a war…” she trailed off, her lips thinning.

  “Against who? Falmir is the last nation left on Doumahr.” Nathan laughed bitterly. “I’m hoping it’s nothing, but…”

  “If you’re this torn up over a scouting report, then it’s not nothing,” Jafeila said. She stood. “I’ve only been with you for a few years, but I know your reputation. Something is very wrong.”

  Nathan appreciated the ego-stroking.

  “Give me a minute to clean up and I’ll join you,” she said.

  He held up a hand. “No. I’ll go now.”

  She blinked and her tail froze. It resumed its movement a moment later.

  “I need you to gather Narime and Vala,” he said.

  A pause.

  “You think you’ll need all three of us?” she asked, running her hand over the three gems in her collarbone.

  “If it’s as bad as I suspect, I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

  Jafeila looked away for a moment, then back. “Right. I’ll clean up then get the other trigem Champions. Should I let anyone else know?”

  “Not yet. Once we know more, I’ll let the three of you take charge,” he said.

  Before he could take a step toward the door, Jafeila intercepted him. Her arms and bushy tail coiled around him. She pulled his head down and crushed her lips against his.
He reciprocated instinctively, his tongue slipping inside her mouth and eliciting a moan from her.

  When she pulled away, she had a grin on her face. “I’ll see you in a little bit,” she said impishly.

  Nathan left his bedroom. The halls were dimly lit. Only one out of every three lamps were on, a measure to save magical energy when nobody was around. The moment he stepped into the hall, every lamp lit up as motion-detecting magic sensed his movement.

  “Bastion, good morning,” a woman greeted Nathan. She stood next to the door in full plate armor, a longsword at her side and a tower shield strapped to her back.

  “How long have you been standing guard, Ciana?” Nathan responded. He glanced around the hall. Had she been standing perfectly still? He couldn’t imagine how else she had avoided activating the lights.

  Ciana was a curious woman. Only slightly younger than Nathan, she had served as a Champion under several Bastions until he finally recruited her. She had platinum-blonde hair and a fine silken horse’s tail. A pair of diamonds shined from within the gorget of her armor. A single iridescent horn protruded from her forehead, parting her platinum bangs and marking her as one of the rarest of the beastkin: a unicorn beastkin.

  Neither Ciana nor Jafeila were human, like Nathan was. They were beastkin, a race with animal-like features such as ears and tails. Their appearance varied significantly based on the region their race originally came from. Many beastkin races had been lost to history over the centuries. Ciana’s race of unicorns were so close to extinction that Nathan had never seen another in his thirty-plus years.

  “Sen and I changed shifts four hours ago. Sunstorm was to guard you during the day, but it appears you have work to do early in the morning,” Ciana said. “The scouting team—”

  “I saw their report last night. I’m heading to the monitoring station now,” Nathan interrupted.

  Ciana followed behind Nathan as he walked through the empty stone hallways. The fortress was sprawling, but Falmir had long stopped supplying enough soldiers and staff to keep the place full. Nathan’s power as Bastion kept the fortress running regardless of how many people were present.

  A half-dozen men and women sat at glowing desks in the monitoring station. Holographic charts and figures hovered above the occupied desks. Another twenty or so desks were unoccupied and unlit. The far wall was lit up with more charts and figures, and formed a central monitor for Nathan and everybody in the room to use as an overview. A pair of statues stood in the far corners, depicting the Watcher Omria, the only goddess of the world.

  Nathan froze as he entered the room, his eyes running over the central display. Ciana’s hand closed around his arm. She looked up at him in concern.

  “Bastion, you’re here early,” an analyst said, noticing Nathan’s arrival. “Have you seen—”

  “Have you confirmed the scouting report?” Nathan interrupted.

  He strode forward into the center of the room. Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Looking around at their faces, he realized they didn’t understand what they had given him last night or what they were looking at.

  “Well, all night we’ve been—” the lead analyst began to say, but stopped when Nathan looked at her. She gulped. “No, sir. None of our readings match what the scouts reported about the portal. Monitoring devices installed next to the portal, scanners in the walls, and even the leyline activity readings built into the fortress are all at normal levels. The sorcerers can’t detect anything out of the ordinary either.”

  Nathan nodded slowly. “You’ve re-calibrated everything?”

  The lead analyst paused and looked to her subordinates. They nodded. “Yes, sir. At least what we can. We don’t doubt the scouts, but…”

  “Do the calibration again. Tell Captain Murdas to send out a different team of scouts. I’ll check the binding stone and see what I can read from the fortress and leylines directly,” Nathan ordered.

  Nothing happened for several long seconds. Nathan sighed.

  “We need to confirm if the scout report is correct. If it is, then I know what is happening and can take the appropriate countermeasures,” Nathan explained, looking each of his analysts in the eye one by one. “If it’s wrong, then we can all get some sleep and laugh this off as a false alarm. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” the analysts said in unison.

  While the analysts got back to work and several left the room to contact others in the fortress, Nathan turned inward.

  Lurking beneath the surface of Nathan’s mind was a gargantuan presence. It seemed to grow in size as he turned his attention to it, threatening to consume his mind. With long practice, he dove into it—mentally, that is.

  What had appeared to be a singular, all-consuming entity revealed itself to be a sprawling mass of mental nodes and magical links. Nathan followed a mental tether to the closest node. This was the binding stone of this fortress.

  Nobody knew who created the binding stones. They littered the world of Doumahr like discarded relics of an ancient race, but even the oldest records of the First Peoples stated that they were here before them.

  What Nathan knew was that Bastions trained themselves to control binding stones, and through them, they controlled the world around themselves. Through the fortress’s binding stone he sensed the world around the binding stone in impossible detail: the temperature of the earth; the heartbeats of every person inside the fortress; the flow of magical energy through the leylines connected to the binding stone.

  Time passed at a fraction of a rate it did normally. Nathan watched Ciana blink in slow motion. Her brow was furrowed, her worried expression cute despite the circumstances. She still held onto his arm. He couldn’t feel her grip.

  That was the price of focusing his senses through the binding stone. He lost access to his body’s senses for the duration. Fortunately, he normally only used the binding stone for brief periods and the time dilation effect prevented him from coming to harm or missing anything important.

  Nathan pulled away from the fortress’s binding stone, and the web of leylines and other binding stones under his control.

  Only seconds had passed in the world around him. He looked around.

  “Nathan?” Ciana asked quietly.

  He ruffled her hair, his hands tickling her pointed horse ears. She gave him a flat look.

  While Nathan liked playing with the hair of his Champions, and especially tickling the animal ears of the beastkin, many of them expressed a preference for him not to ruffle their hair. Naturally, he did it anyway.

  “I can’t sense anything through the binding stone,” he said. “But I expected that. There’s… something off about it.”

  “Off?” she asked.

  “Do you ever get that feeling of ‘too normal?’” he asked.

  “Sometimes. Is that what this is?”

  “Probably.”

  Nathan took a seat. The desk lit up with fancy holographic diagrams, but he ignored it. Only the return of another scouting team could confirm or allay his fears. Ciana stood next to him.

  Almost an hour later, Jafeila entered with two other Champions. All three women had a trio of gems inset into their collarbone. These were Nathan’s trigem Champions. His greatest warriors.

  “What the hell? All readings are normal? I thought you said there was a problem, Fei?” one of the new women said. She was Vala, a human Champion. Her body was noticeably thicker than the other women, with thighs capable of crushing a man’s skull and plenty of muscle packed in under her uniform.

  “Eh? But I…” Jafeila trailed off when she saw Nathan’s expression.

  The remaining trigem Champion stared at Nathan, her expression darkening. She glanced up at the central monitor, then looked at the busy analysts nearby.

  “You think it’s a Messenger, don’t you?” she said.

  Nathan scowled as the room froze. Everybody looked at the Champion who had just spoken, as if in disbelief at the words that had come out of her mouth.<
br />
  “I am waiting to confirm the scouting report,” Nathan said after several moments.

  The last trigem Champion was Narime, and she was as wise as she was outspoken. Seven silver tails hung behind her slim, buxom frame, and her robe was severely cut to accentuate her figure and reveal her luscious thighs. She pointed a finger at Nathan.

  “But if it’s correct, then there’s little else it can be,” Narime said.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “Wait, how can we get a Messenger when our demonic activity readings are this low?” Vala asked. She scratched her head, making a mess of her dense brown hair.

  “Messengers can interfere with our detection magic,” Narime explained. “We’ve seen it in the past. It’s how they conquered Trafaumh practically overnight.”

  “A Messenger?” an analyst blurted out. The others exchanged terrified looks, although at least one seemed lost.

  “Um, what’s a Messenger?” the confused analyst asked. He shrunk in on himself when everybody glared at him.

  “Don’t look at him like that,” Nathan admonished his subordinates. “All of you were like him once.”

  Jafeila nodded. “I remember being like that a little too vividly, back when I first fought a Messenger during the fall of the Anfang Empire. They’re the generals of the demonic armies. The weakest of them are equal to a trigem Champion. The stronger ones have taken out multiple Bastions.”

  “Multiple weak Bastions,” Vala corrected. “I don’t remember any Messenger ever defeating a Bastion with three trigem Champions. And Nathan has countless duogem and monogem Champions. We’ve got this.”