Chaos God 3, page 2
part #3 of Chaos God Series
“Levi?” Elora asked in a tone that made it clear she wanted my permission.
I thought about it for a moment, and I decided there was no need to delete the history of this world. I’d accepted the path of destiny that the Völva, Sylmarie, had said was laid at my feet, and I fully intended to become God King of this world if that was my true destiny. This didn’t mean the past should be erased.
“They are a part of our world’s history,” I said. “I don’t see any reason to forget the gods who once were.”
“Perhaps we should return on another day to collect things such as these,” Finnern suggested. “We should leave room for the materials we have come for, and not overburden Frida.”
“That’s a good point,” I agreed. “This won’t be the last time we’ll be here. Let’s stick with what we came for today and any other items that can be immediately helpful. Then we can come back for other things another time.”
“A wise choice.” Elora smiled sweetly at me as she placed the bust of Odin back on the wooden table where it had sat for the last several decades.
We moved back into the hall, and about halfway down, we found a massive library that was lined with a few thousand leather-bound tomes and a thick layer of dust. Heavy leather and wood furniture sat by the windows, beside a huge fireplace, and under the elegant wall sconces.
“Here are more items worth returning for,” Finnern said as he scanned the walls of books.
“Indeed,” Elora breathed with reverence at the collection of knowledge that had sat waiting to be found again.
“Perhaps now I will have the opportunity to learn how to read,” Shalanna sighed with a touch of longing in her voice.
“You don’t know how to read?” I asked.
“It was never a priority.” My black-haired lover shook her head sadly.
“Well, we’re just going to have to fix that, aren’t we?” I grinned and wrapped my arms around Shalanna to give her a tight hug. “Pick a book you like the look of, I’m sure we can spare the room. In fact, I want each of you to pick a book for yourselves.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Hezzig breathed with gratitude.
My companions scanned the shelves for several minutes in search of a book of their choosing. Finnern located a historical text bound in a deep red leather with gold-gilded pages. Hezzig found a book that, based on the anvil embossed on the leather cover, I could only assume was about smithing. Shalanna selected a much thinner one that was filled with acid-etched drawings of children and animals that I guessed was a kid’s storybook. Elora chose what looked to be an adventure novel by the looks of the ship on the cover.
I cocked an eyebrow at the unusual choice, and my silver-haired lover shrugged her shoulders at me.
“I thought Wyn would enjoy the story,” Elora murmured.
Love glowed like a warm winter fire in my heart, and I smiled at the sweet and caring nature of my two women before I led us back into the hallway.
“Does anyone else find it strange that there are no bodies up here?” Shalanna mused. “There were several on the first floor.”
“I suspect those are the remains of the servants,” Finnern said with sorrow in his rumbling voice. “The Aesir, their families, and close friends would have escaped these floors quickly during the first attacks. Many of their personal soldiers would have helped them to flee the palace, but the lower servants below would not have been so lucky. I expect that if we had come to search the castle before their bodies had decayed, we would have found evidence of lethal wounds.”
We moved on to the next room and found another set of fireplace tools to add to the pile. By this point, I estimated we had a pretty decent amount of metal for Hezzig to forge with and keep himself busy for a while, and I was starting to think we should call it a day.
The final room at the end of the long hallway seemed to be a more private sitting room. There were fewer couches and armchairs than any of the previous rooms, and more knickknacks that had a personal feel to them were strewn about the room.
A series of large oil paintings that were similar in style and technique as the one that hung in my castle were situated around the room, but it was the one over the huge fireplace that caught my attention.
I’d looked at the portrait of Odin and his sons enough times now that I immediately recognized the black-haired brother of Thor. The portrait displayed Loki in a confident stance in front of the bright sea. He wore an emerald-green tunic made of fine satin and black trousers that were perfectly tailored to his long legs, but what caught my attention was the fine leather pauldrons on his broad shoulders.
“Shit,” I whispered under my breath.
Those were the exact pieces of shoulder armor we’d discovered in the hidden room, the ones I’d worn against the demon queen, and the ones that fit me like they’d been made for me. In fact, I had them on at this very moment, and I glanced between myself and the portrait of Loki a few times before my brain really accepted that I was wearing the custom-made armor of a dead god.
“Levi, are you well?” Shalanna asked.
“Yeah.” I shook myself and gestured for her and the others to come over. “Come have a look at this.”
“What a fine painting of Loki,” Finnern commented as he strolled over.
“Do you notice anything strange about it?” I asked, and I turned around so Loki and I were looking in the same direction.
“No…” Elora hummed, but then her amber-red eyes grew wide as she started to smile. “Are those the same pauldrons?”
The blacksmith leaned forward to inspect the painting for a moment, and then he looked back and forth between the painting and me three times before he pursed his lips.
“They certainly appear to be the very same ones,” Hezzig confirmed.
“That is fascinating,” Shalanna breathed. “Do you think our castle once belonged to Loki?”
“It’s looking more and more likely with every new discovery we find,” I chuckled. “I don’t see any reason why Thor would have had his brother’s things in his castle. We’ve also been pretty sure from the beginning that it wasn’t Odin’s home.”
“The entire castle has never quite felt like a place Thor would have lived in,” Finnern scoffed. “I learned much about the Aesir during my time in the Crystal Spire as my father’s emissary, and Thor much preferred more rustic surroundings. He had a strong preference for wooden construction over stone or marble.”
Shortly after we’d rescued Finnern and his people from the demon queen and moved them into Castle Levi, I’d asked him if he knew which of the Aesir had once occupied the castle, but he didn’t know. Finnern had spent all of his time at the Crystal Spire and had never ventured out to any of the other gods’ homes, so it had been as much of a mystery to him as it was to the rest of us.
Now, I was pretty damn sure I was living in Loki’s former home, and I wondered again why he would have carefully stored all of his belongings away in that hidden room. I supposed it was possible Loki’d had intentions of moving on to another location, or perhaps he’d been simply storing those items, and all his other possessions had been destroyed by the Demon Lord decades ago. I figured I’d never know for certain, but it still nagged at the back of my mind from time to time.
“Perhaps we should make our way home,” Shalanna suggested.
I looked at my black-haired lover to find that she was a touch paler than normal, and I assumed it was from all the extra exertion I’d been putting her and Elora through the past few weeks. I smirked to myself as I remembered the mind-blowing sex we’d had just last night, and I nodded.
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “We can come back and explore more another time. Hezzig, you have enough to keep you crafting for a while, right?”
“Yes, Lord Levi,” Hezzig confirmed as he looked into Frida’s pack. “With this amount of materials, I will be able to make many new weapons, and I can experiment more with the demon blood. I want to try mixing the different species of demons together to see if I can imbue a blade with both properties.”
“That would be a very exciting development,” Finnern said.
We turned to leave the private sitting room, but then a horrendous, suffocating stench of rotting flesh and pure death rolled into the room like a thick fog.
“Oh, gods,” Elora gasped as she slammed her hands over her mouth.
“What is that horrid smell?” Finnern exclaimed.
“I don’t know, but it’s definitely not fucking good news,” I growled, and I instinctively pulled my sword from its sheath.
Chapter 2
If you’d like to see a map of the where the action takes place in this book, you can find it on my Patreon (search Google for ‘Patreon Eric Vall’), or you can find it in my Facebook group (Search for ‘Eric Vall’ in Facebook Groups). It’s also linked on my website at www.ericvall.com
“Oh, ugh,” Shalanna groaned.
An eerie scraping and shuffling sound reached us from the hallway, and Finnern, Hezzig, and Elora raised their weapons beside me. Then two walking human corpses appeared in the open doorway, and the smell grew even stronger until it coated my tongue like a fungus.
Their eyes were sunken deep into the withered gray skin of their faces, and their long scraggly white hair looked like it was barely hanging on. Huge gashes of torn flesh covered their skeletally thin torsos, and their fingernails were disgustingly long, cracked, and filthy.
But the two creatures looked like they had once been men like myself as they shuffled forward on bare feet.
One of them had a broken shinbone sticking right out of the parchment-thin skin of his lower leg, but this hardly seemed to encumber him down. An old-fashioned looking tunic clung loosely over his gaunt frame, and he dragged a rusty sword alongside him as the point scratched along the marble-tiled floor.
The other was missing his entire left hand and wore the last remaining scraps of what must have once been a fine robe of silk. The material was so worn and dirty now that I couldn’t tell what color it had been before, but he also carried a rusty sword with a huge chip in the middle of the blade.
“What the fuck are these things?” I growled through clenched teeth as I tried not to breathe through my nose.
“They are Draugr,” Finnern explained with horror in his voice.
“I’m going to be sick,” Shalanna gasped, and she bolted into the corner behind us and started to throw up her breakfast all over the floor.
Concern for my black-haired warrior bloomed in my chest, but I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off of the hideous, rotting men.
“Draugr are the undead of this world,” Elora explained. “They are the unfortunate results of a life ended by pain and suffering, and a soul that cannot rest.”
“Great,” I grumbled. “This should be fun.”
“They are very strong,” Hezzig said in a warning tone. “You must not underestimate them.”
“Monster,” the Draugr with the protruding shinbone groaned like every brain-dead zombie I’d ever seen in movies or on television.
“Oh, they can speak,” I muttered with surprise, and then I raised my voice to the undead corpses. “What do you want?”
“We want for you to suffer,” the one-handed Draugr mumbled slowly.
“Yeah, not happening.” I smirked. “Let’s kill these ugly fucks, and maybe they’ll stay dead for good this time.”
The Draugr locked their glazed and sunken eyes on my face, and the petrified flesh of their cheeks pulled tight as they snarled at us. Then the two zombie men lurched forward with enough speed that I was shocked they didn’t just fall apart like a house of cards.
I launched into action without hesitation, and I swung my dwarven-made sword up as I lunged forward at the one-handed Draugr. My blade slammed into the partially exposed ribcage of the undead man and shattered a few of the brittle bones, but the exploding skin effect of my demon blood-quenched blade was totally absent. I gritted my teeth with irritation, but I’d figured that was a possibility. The Draugr had so little skin to begin with, and what was left was already very tight and ruined.
That was fine, though, my blade could still slice them into pieces without the skin-rending qualities.
“Uuuuhhhh,” the one-handed Draugr groaned at me, and his foul breath wafted around me like a toxic cloud.
“Oh, fuck you,” I grunted low in my throat.
Elora, Finnern, and Hezzig were just a half-step behind me, and I caught flashes of their spear, war hammer, and axe from the corners of my eyes as they attacked the two Draugr.
Now, the zombie corpses seemed to fully wake up. They were shockingly fast and blocked our swings and attacks with an alarming amount of speed and strength. Elora and I naturally fell into attacking the one-handed monster while Finnern and Hezzig focused on the one with the broken shinbone.
I swung my sword up and blocked the one-handed Draugr’s chipped blade before it could crush into my skull. Then I swept my left foot around behind me and pivoted to hurl the mummified creature away from his partner.
I chanced a quick look at Shalanna, and I saw that she was still bent over in the corner as she heaved whatever was left in her stomach onto the filthy marble floor. Longing and an urge to take care of her pumped thickly through my veins, but I knew she would be alright until we could dispatch these monsters.
“You are a foul creature,” Elora said with righteous indignation as she glared at the one-handed Draugr.
“We require vengeance for the wrongs done to us,” the zombie man growled, and he raised his sword again.
I slid my feet across the tiled floor and met the Draugr’s attack with a firm block and parry of my own. Our blades rang out and echoed through the marble hallways of the palace as Elora thrust the long blade of her spear up into the creature’s lower jaw. The last two inches of her blade jammed out from the top of the Draugr’s skull, and his eyes rolled back for a split second.
I started to smirk, but then the noxious-smelling creature’s eyes rolled back into place, and he glared at us with dull rage. The Draugr grunted and pressed his handless forearm onto the handle of Elora’s spear with so much strength that he nearly forced the weapon out of her grasp. He pinned the staff to his chest, tilted his skeleton face back, and pulled the spear out of his skull with a dusty scraping sound.
“Gods,” Elora muttered with shock.
“Fuck, no!” I growled, and I didn’t give the Draugr the chance to make another move. I swung my sword out like a baseball bat and sliced through his spinal column in one swing. “Goddamn asshat!”
The Draugr opened his mouth full of rotting teeth and tried to groan, but his head rolled off his shoulders and dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
I started to sigh with relief and turned back to help our companions, but the headless corpse lifted its sword and took a wildly blind swing in front of itself.
“What the fuck?” I gasped, and I stumbled backward as shock rushed through me.
Elora skittered back a few steps out of the headless Draugr’s reach, and she looked at me with questioning eyes.
“You must dismember the entire creature to give it a full death!” Finnern shouted from somewhere behind me.
“Great,” I grumbled.
I swung my sword with focus and determination at the Draugr’s joints, and together, Elora and I chopped through its elbows, shoulders, and finally its knees until the beast collapsed into a pile of wriggling limbs on the tile floor.
I looked down at the decapitated head, and his sunken eyes glared up at me as its stinking mouth moved in silent growls. Then I kicked the head clear across the room.
Elora and I turned back to check on Shalanna and our dwarf companions. My black-haired lover was leaning heavily against the wall in the corner, and she was still far too pale for my liking.
“Go take care of Shalanna,” I instructed my elven Valkyrie. “I’ll help them with this other fuck.”
Elora didn’t say a word, she simply nodded and dashed over to check on Shalanna.
I lunged forward and raised my sword in preparation to try and cleave the broken-legged Draugr’s head clean off, but I skidded to a halt halfway across the room.
The Draugr’s corpse-like body began to grow and expand, and for a second, I wondered if I’d accidentally initiated a shift. I glanced around and found that it wasn’t me who was shrinking, but it was the Draugr who was growing rapidly in size.
“Gods, no!” Finnern grunted with a touch of horror in his voice.
“What the fuck?” I shouted.
The Draugr grew in size until the exposed bone of his hunched shoulders touched the gold-inlaid ceiling. The foul-smelling beast towered over us now, and Hezzig and Finnern stepped back with their eyes frozen wide with fear.
That was when I was struck with inspiration, and I remembered the structurally unstable floor and walls at the opposite end of the hallway.
“Hey, you ugly fucker!” I shouted and waved my arms at the twenty-five-foot-tall zombie man. “Come and get me!”
I backed up toward the door, and I gave a small nod to my shocked dwarf companions as the Draugr began to quickly shuffle after me. I turned and bolted out of the door as I focused on the new form I wanted to shift into, and the crashing sounds of the Draugr breaking his way through the doorway echoed behind me.
Adrenaline started to pour into my brain as I focused on the way my limbs and face would stretch and change, and I kept pounding my feet down the hall. I was suddenly really glad I’d been working on shifting on the fly, but I’d been working on a few other tricks lately, too.
Dark brown fur sprouted all over my body as my mouth extended into the muzzle of my bipedal wolf form, and long claws stretched out of my fingers as I gripped my sword harder in my hands. Then, as my shoulders became wider, thick armor plates grew over my upper arms and across my upper back, and my legs finished shifting into those of a bear.
Then I bolted forward in a new combination of my hybrid wolf and armored bear forms.
