The Oracle of the Sisters

The Candles Submission for IronAge Media

The sisters stand atop the rocks, one shrouded in her hood, knife hanging in the red light to drip viscera into the crimson mist, as the other gazes into the skull fragment from beneath her mask, hair wild and untamed as it spills over her shoulders. Vesrek stands behind and slightly below, watching their ritual slow to an end, backlit by the full disk of the moon casting its silver-white light through the haze, silhouetting the trees whose branches dare to creep in from either side, the sisters low, droning chant echoing in the crevasse below.

He shifts, pieces of armor scraping one against the other, as he waits to hear their verdict. One hand rests, wrist against the handle of his sword, while the other drums fingers quietly against the knee-cap of his breeches. Something lingers in the back of his mind, a growing discomfort he can’t place, but he needs their counsel. The back of his throat is parched dry and rasping with his breaths, his ankles aching still from the uneven ground of the climb to this rocky promenade.

The masked sister turns left to face her sister across the candles, her own chanting ceasing as she begins to speak in a voice like somber music, in a tongue that makes Vesrek’s skin crawl, and his hackles raise. The hooded sister nods, turning to her masked twin and swapping blade for bone and raising her own voice into a lilting haunting crescendo of singing chants, a blasphemous hymnal that Vesrek had to will himself to not look away from.

The hood is low, and only her jaw and mouth are visible, but this is enough as she unhinges the whole of it to devour the fragment of skull in a single bite, the sound of it grinding between her teeth turning his stomach as his hand instinctively slides closer to the sword handle. She continues to make a chanting, haunting noise, now more animal moan than musical voice, punctuated and percussed by the grinding of the bone. She kneels down, lowering her head and continues her noise as her sister turns towards Vesrek.

The mask is smooth and bone-like, and as crimson as anything else in the strange mist and the gleam of the candles, her voice warm and cloying like honey, “You have come, and you have asked. Your fate is the fate of all, your throne dust the same as all.”

Vesrek’s gray eyes narrowed, hand genuinely gripping the handle of the blade in its scabbard now, “I did not battle my way to you, nor pay your price, to receive empty prophecy.” His own voice is steel and fire, his throat meat scraped across dry bread, “I know your master gives you sight, answer me what I seek, or be delivered to your master now to answer for your indolence.” He unlocked the loop on the scabbard, pulling it out by an inch to let the blood-tinted moonlight glint on the red-gold of the blade.

While the hooded sister continues to drone and grind, the masked sister lets out a pleased and cold laugh, bringing the blade she had in her hand up to lay the flat across the palm of her hand, “Would-be God King, thief of ancient powers, you know what path you have chosen. You seek not answers, but permission.” She moves closer, between him and her sister, the mask tipping to one side, “Do what you must, deadlander, the answers will remain the same.”

The sister behind her rose, the sound stopping as her lips split into a terrible gnarled grin, “Unless you seek audience with our master yourself.”

Vesrek takes a step back, bracing himself better as his fingers grip the hilt with an almost panicked strength, his eyes just now allowing him to see the dark silver-grey veins that pulse and quiver on the surface of the silver-white disk behind them. The masked sisters smiles warmly, her voice tinged in sugar and honey.

“Ah. The deadlander opens his eyes, sister.”

The hooded sister lets out a laugh, reaching around the masked one and taking the knife from her, “But does he know, sister?”

He knows his pallor betrays his fear, but Vesrek refuses to allow his voice to do the same as he speaks, drawing out the blade of blood-red gold, “I know that I am not to be trifled with, hags. What legerdemain is this, for I know too that your master is bound beyond both sense and reach, except by his disciples.”

The masked sister lets out a small laugh, “He knows, does he?” Cocks her head back against her sister, “The laws are writ, are they, sister? Bound in pacts of flesh and gold, hm?”

The hooded sister laughs, pulling the blade of the knife into her twins stomach and beginning to slowly drag it upward, the masked sister falling back against her, gurgling foaming blood out almost in silence, “Those pacts were broken, deadlander, when you stole your blade from its master.”

The masked sister lets out a laugh that spurts out a splash of blood down the front of her robes, dark and black in the unclean light, her voice the sound of a songbird drowning, “You worry about a mortal throne, at the dawning of a war for an immortal one, deadlander!”

The veins in the orb pulse harder, the disk seeming to grow and a strange grating sound beginning to grow in Vesrek’s veins, his heart seeming to strain for every beat as the masked sister’s ribs split open and spilling her viscera down onto his boots, her hooded sister howling out in laughter for interminable moments before he feels  his arms move of their own accord, the blade finding its place too high but low enough, crashing into the hood just below the crone’s cheekbone and cleaving it inward, sending her body to ruin down in the canyon below, dragging her sister’s corpse with her.

Vesrek steps forward, kicking the candles down after them, staring into the orb itself, pointing the orichalcum blade towards the pulsing disk as the sounds of the sisters striking stones echoes up the crevasse walls, “I do not fear any force, vulchek, be it man monster or god!” Pointing the tip of his sword down into the crevasse, “As proof, I deliver your bitches to you with my blessing.”

He turns on his heel then, his cloak scraping on the stones before he grabs it, sliding the blade against it to clean it before returning the sacred sword to its home, walking with purpose down the rocky path back towards his mount, jaw set in the rage necessary to abate the primal fear that comes with looking an immortal in the eye.