I wrote this in the 80s as a teenager. Found a copy on my PC along with other stories I wrote. I was heavily influenced by Jack Vance.
The Deed, Concluded
The matter is finished at last — and with uncommon finesse, I dare boast.
The Warrior sprawls, quite dead, upon the flagstones of my abode — my ramshackle fortress amidst a litter of heroic skeletons, the bones of champions, heroines, and the occasional sticky-fingered rogue. Shattered across the chamber lie the vestiges of the fabled The Panoply of Veritas, each relic a fragment of some long-forgotten martyr. Centuries ago, they had been forged to expunge my ilk from the material sphere of existence. Now they gleam, still perversely radiant, though battered into irreparable ruin. Such is the ingenuity of Man — to create wonders whose only merit is to haunt him. No matter. Another potential flowering of sweetness and daylight has been clipped before it could so much as bud.
Idly, I run my tongue across my twisted, blunted fangs, recalling the days when my visage was unmarred and fair. I too, once, was resplendent — before the Fall. How curious, to speculate what might have been, had I not cast my lot with the Morning Star in his high folly. A useless meditation, of course; that path is madness.
The latest hero lies mangled in the corner, his body grotesquely wrenched and his famed Breastplate of Righteousness shattered like thin pottery. He was the last of the six, and his ruin completes the ruin of the accursed panoply: an amored suit crafted in desperate hope against my Lord and his fallen ministers.
How miserably misplaced that hope. They trusted in their cunning, in their relics, their contraptions. And so much the better, for our dominion grows while their faith founders. Leviathan, Sovereign of the Deep, erodes the shores grain by grain; Wyrm, the Shaker of the Earth, crumbles their works with convulsions of molten stone; and above all towers Dragon — the Authority of the Air — the Morning Star’s eldest and deadliest child. I am bound to him, as are they, though they claw against their bondage in pitiful rebellion.
The bowman who accompanied them lies shredded along the corridor. I can still conjure the look on his face when his silver-tipped arrows bounced harmlessly from my hide. Silver! As if so pale a metal could wound me.
Only the songstress yet draws breath — a bard, I think, though even that recollection wavers. I have spared her, for now, to extract one final amusement: the bitter curse of a heart broken by her own failure.
“Do you hear me, pretty singer?” I call.
“Yes, daemon,” she croaks, her voice rent and wet. I may have injured her lungs during our little encounter. Who can recall every blow struck in the dance of slaughter?
“Why do I still live?” she dares ask.
“For sport,” I reply. “If you will renounce goodness, beauty, truth, and all noble aspiration — I might permit you to depart this place. Or at least grant you a quicker death, according to my whim.”
“No,” she murmurs.
“No?” I purr. “You have lost. Your cause is ash. Goodness scores naught but six dead.”
She remains silent. Perhaps she dies even now. No matter — I continue.
“That ‘hero’ you pinned your hopes to,” I jeer, “never even marked me. The last one — the so-called Paladin — at least clipped me across the shoulder.”
“We were the worst you faced?” she rasps.
“Oh, hardly,” I chuckle.
“But far from the best.”
“Humor a dying woman, daemon. Tell me — who was the best?”
I allow myself a nostalgic sigh. “That would be Sebastiol, Last of the Militanites. A king among men, if men can claim kingship. His blade — The Pneumachron — fell like a thunderbolt loosed by the Creator Himself. His thews rippled like the tide; his silence was a poem; his stroke near undid me. I triumphed only by resort to sorcery, abandoning brute strength. A magnificent adversary.”
“And poor Jesithar, the latest pretender, failed to measure up?” she murmurs.
“By leagues, girl. By leagues.”
“And the blade Pneumachron — where lies it, amidst this wreckage? And the bones of Sebastiol — show me where the brightest hope of man fell.”
I snarl. “Enough prattling.” I flex my claws to sever her throat.
But she halts me with a single phrase:
“You have not yet won.”
“What prattle is this? You are the last!”
“You lied,” she says, her voice growing strangely serene. “You said your Lord’s dominion would never end. Yet you cannot see your own flaw.”
“I have no flaw!” I roar.
Through the gloom, she smiles — a ghastly, luminous thing.
“Very well,” I growl, restraining myself. “You need not curse goodness after all. Simply name this supposed flaw.”
“I consider your ‘quick death’ offer rather overrated,” she quips. “Nevertheless, I shall enlighten you: You will fall when you know love.”
I bellow laughter so hard it racks my ruined frame.
“Love! Your mind has broken worse than your body, girl.”
I am still chuckling as I tear her head free and bowl it across the antechamber like a kicked melon. A fine joke, to end her prattling.
Afterward, still amused, I gnaw idly upon the leg of the last hero. A bit chewy.
Later, my Lord Dragon descends in a whirl of ash and tempest, his grandeur terrible to behold.
“Daemon,” he demands, after surveying the carnage, “why do I see but the remains of the Panoply and five broken swords? Where is the sixth?”
I bow low, grinning. “One remains intact, my Lord. Higher in the tower. That champion came by air — with the eagles — and I bested him by craft rather than by claw. I preserved him. A memento.”
“I would see this for myself,” he hisses.
“As you command.”
I lead him up the winding stair to where the sixth hero stands frozen. The Lord draws breath sharply.
“The blade is unbroken — and the man and his beast are whole!”
I nod. “Petrified by my sorcery, my Lord. An artwork of defeat.”
“Fool!” Dragon bellows. “Spells can unravel! It is Sebastiol himself — and The Pneumachron yet whole!”
He surges forward, preparing to destroy the statues.
But in that fatal instant, my own treacherous voice rises unbidden, chanting the counterspell.
Stone melts to flesh. Time, stolen for a thousand years, resumes its flow.
The Spirit blade, poised an inch from my heart, completes its plunge.
I topple backward, blood jetting from the wound.
As I expire, the last sight my withering eyes behold is the great wolf lunging — not at me, but at Dragon — and Sebastiol, grim and terrible, turning Spirit’s flawless edge upon my master.
The smile upon his face is white and silent as doom.