Vainglory Lore: Ardan

Part 4
"Vanguard Up!"

Ardan slammed his fist into the armor’s control panel.
“Command?” responded the computer voice.
“Vanguard up!” he screamed.

It hadn’t been enough, Ardan thought, running with sidewalk-splitting clomps toward the cracked, tilting Carnie Wheel, clutching the tattered Masker-Rage poster in his free fist. It hadn’t been enough to escape the Stormguard by the dead of night. It hadn’t been enough to use assumed names and hide every day for more than a decade. It hadn’t been enough for the kids to watch their mother die.
Had his rules been so impossible? Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Don’t let anyone see you playing with that magic stuff. Don’t tell anyone where you’re from. Don’t show anyone the curtained-off part of the garage where he modified the power armor after hours, adding generators and liquid coolants and boosters. He’d always known that his rules wouldn’t be enough.
And now, his children were falling.
Don’t draw attention to yourselves. And they’d put up posters.

Breathing hard through his respirator, Ardan raced through piles of trash and wild churn cranes, knocked over a few fleeing raver kids and carnies and winced at the battle sounds he’d hoped never to hear again – pained screams, weapons clashing, explosions – but louder than that, the reverberation of a sonic boom that had cracked the wheel at its base. The boom echoed off every surrounding surface. They’d probably heard it at the other end of Taizen Gate.
Damn it, Vox.
Getting close to the wheel meant dodging the sparking, falling stars that burned and exploded together. One flew past Ardan’s face, struck a burn mark onto his cheek.
Celeste!
Ardan roared, bursting through the soldiers gripping Gythian steel, men and women who wanted what Julia had wanted: Celeste on the throne of the Storm Queen.
Over my dead…
White-clothed Stormguard swarmed up the Carnie Wheel to escape a sickening nothing into which anything closeby sank. It had been more than ten years, and still the Storm Queen would risk her best soldiers to end his family.
Ardan squinted up through the falling starlight at the shadows plummeting toward him.
“Vanguard confirmed,” the control panel responded.
“Please, be enough,” whispered Ardan, as the holographic barriers crackled to life a few feet from the ground.
The barriers bent but held fast as the twins slammed into them.
Gythians closed in tight as the barriers dissipated and the twins rolled safely onto the pavement.
“We have to fall back, your highness!” cried a Gythian battle mage, blue electric currents moving up his arms. “Retreat!”
“Stay away from my children,” grunted Ardan, swallowing down the sob in his throat, grabbing Celeste’s elbow as the soldiers fled.
Celeste pulled away from him, trembling. “We can’t hide anymore, Dadda,” she said, and ran.
Ardan cursed, but Vox was running after his sister. Close behind, the Stormguard regrouped. Ardan followed, and together they dashed toward the bay, surrounded by what was left of the allied Gythians. Behind them, the Carnie Wheel continued to fall, rusted metal screeching, collapsing on itself, slow as a dream.
A single raven circled above them, camouflaged against the now-dark sky, watching.

Vainglory Lore: Ardan
aaiel (36) in story • 2 days ago
Part 3
"The Masker Rage"

masker-rage-768x316.jpg

00:00.05
It takes five seconds to fall from the top of the Carnie Wheel.
At first Celeste flails, her hands pinwheeling through empty air, the deafening squeal of metal rods shearing apart drown out the hammering beat of her heart.
But then, falling through the bright burning magic of her own design, her eyes close. Her arms relax. In five seconds, every bone in her body will splinter and she will die. Her overprotective father has been right all along, and there’s nothing she can do. Time slows, loses meaning.
Five seconds.
Celeste’s mind wanders.

3_Masker_Rage-768x2227.jpg

00:00:04
For years they braved the noxious-aired abandoned carnival to climb up the Carnie Wheel where they could be alone and play with magic. “Do the thing,” Vox said, then watched as a little swirl appeared in the air over Celeste’s outstretched palm. The air there became not-air, and her hand under it became not-a-hand, and what they stared at became not-a-thing, an absence of a thing, the end of a thing, the last dying breath of a tiny star, collapsing in on itself.
“My turn,” he said, and closed his eyes, raised up his hands. For a few seconds, nothing. Then, Celeste heard it. Sparrows that had been calling out of sync sang together, this little melody, and Vox hummed along. He sang little lyrics with it to crack Celeste up. “This is the Celeste song, I made up a Celeste song, everybody sing the Celeste song…”
00:00:03
Stars slide between her fingers as she falls and falls and below, their eighteenth birthday rave churns with chaos, the desperate screams muted inside gas masks.
The Masker Rage began at nightfall, the smog layer blinking with the raver kids’ glimmering crystal necklaces and the glowing designs they’d painted on their skin. Carnies had cut open the security fences and charged admission; they snaked through the crowd selling drinks spiked with who-knows-what, their pickpocket kids cleaning up.
“Wait,” whispered Vox. Celeste’s hands radiated with heat. Vox nodded to a beat coming from inside of him, then inside her, then inside of everyone on the ground, their heartbeats pounding in tandem. His fingers snapped and the sound was a crack that scared the cranes. Their wide wings stirred up the smog, pulled it back like a stage curtain, revealing the twins’ faraway silhouettes to the crowd. “Okay. Do the thing,” sang Vox, so Celeste held out her palms and
let
go.
The stars above coiled, then their hot light fell, bursting into spirals. Vox sped up the beat, and from nowhere and everywhere there was music, and the ravers danced, wild with elation and anticipation and whatever was spiked into the Carnie drinks.
Stars shot through her and exploded from her hands into fountains and geometric patterns that danced along to the music, and inside of that blaze of light and sound the twins were free.
00:00:02
The ground flies up to meet her, littered with the scattered bodies of ravers who’d gotten in the way. They fell in clumps, trampled under swords and shields and blasts of blue magic. The tourists threw off their cloaks, revealing uniforms in Gythian gold and Stormguard white. The singing turned into panicked shrieks and Vox’s song became a march, music for unifying armies and terrifying enemies.
As the music mutated, the starlight moving through Celeste’s hands turned into searing drops that incinerated whatever they touched. Showers of pain. On the ground, puddles of starlight exploded. The fighters lunged out of the way of the spraying light. Sparks burst on one another, lighting up terrified people running toward the city.
“What’s happening?” Vox screamed, and the sound came out in song, another layer to the music.
Celeste tried to answer, but her tongue crackled with light, like popping candy sparklers, and below them, the ground under the Carnie Wheel became not-ground, the absence of ground, the death of the falling stars, just like the baby black holes she had always made to delight Vox, but big and churning, swallowing.
Vox clapped his hands once. “Celeste!” he cried,
“STOP!”
The world rumbled with Vox’s sonic boom, and an explosion of starlight blasted from below. Cracks splintered underground and the Carnie Wheel tilted hard, jerked out from under their feet.
00:00:01
Celeste searches among the faces of the Stormguard for the one who killed her mother, but finds instead the red shapes of her father’s armor, scorched black in places, surrounded by charred, crumpled people. His hand reaches out. There’s a look on his face she’s seen before only once.
00:00:00

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Part 5 coming soon!

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