I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - The Rot-King’s Tithe

Through the broken louver of the door, he could see the horses steaming. The lead gelding had one foreleg jammed between two split pine logs of the culvert, its head tossed back in silent, shuddering terror.

“You’re thirty leagues off your beat, Warden,” Morden Brock rasped, planting his boots into the clay beside the carriage step. His black wool robe hung heavy with moisture, the hem dragging through the mire like a drowned crow’s wing. “The magistrates in Skan-Tor don’t care about three dead weavers in Oakhaven. They care about their quarterly tax receipts. Go back across the river before you drown in an unmapped ditch.”

Dame Elspeth Phillips sat high in her saddle, the roan mare’s breath coming in slow, white plumes against the grey limestone wall. She didn’t drop her eyes to the mud. She reached down with her left hand, gathered the heavy braided leather of the reins, and laid her palm flat against the iron cap of her saddle-bow.

“Three weavers and eight day-laborers,” she corrected him, her voice dry as oatmeal. “One was fourteen. She was my second cousin’s girl. I promised her mother I’d bring your belt-buckle back to the parish warden. Get your hands out of your sleeves, Brock.”

The warlock let out a wet, rattling chuckle from the depths of his cowl. “A family feud. How very provincial of you.”

He didn’t draw a blade. He reached out with his left hand, his parsnip-pale fingers clamping around the nape of the terrified coachman who was still cowering on the driver’s box. The driver—a fat, bald man in a greasy wool livery coat—opened his mouth to scream, but Brock’s thumb dug into the soft tissue behind the man’s jaw-hinge with a wet, crunching tear.

A jet of oily black bile shot from the warlock’s fingertips, burying itself in the driver’s neck.

The fat man’s eyes rolled back until only the yellowed whites showed through the rain. His skin turned the slate-black color of stagnant canal sludge in less than three heartbeats, his fingernails lengthening and splitting into jagged, horn-like talons. A thick, bubbling hiss escaped his blackening lips—the sound of lard hitting hot iron.

“Take her down,” Brock whispered, giving the puppet a violent shove into the mud.

The corrupted driver hit the road on all fours, like a scalded dog, his spine snapping into an unnatural, humped arch that tore through the seams of his livery coat. He launched himself across the fifteen paces between the carriage and the roan mare, his jaws snapping on empty air, green foam trailing from his tongue.

“Watch the teeth!” Corin shouted through the broken carriage blind, his voice cracking on the cold air. “The rot is in his mouth!”

Elspeth didn’t pull the horse back.

She rose in her stirrups by two inches, her shoulders settling into a square, balanced line that ignored the horse’s shifting weight in the mud. Her right arm moved—not with the theatrical flourish of an academy duelist, but with the short, brutal snap of a woodcutter splitting an ash log.

Her broadsword cleared the scabbard with a sound like tearing canvas.

The steel didn’t show silver. A cold, electric-cerulean radiance erupted along the five-foot blade, humming low and heavy, the way a millstone hums before it takes the grain, and the rain sizzled into mist three feet out from the edge. The azure aether was so dense it looked like poured glass, casting a pale, unnatural glare across the grey limestone boulders.

“Azure Surge,” Brock muttered, his jaw dropping as he took half a step backward into the ditch. “A high-tier warden… out in the scrub…” The corrupted driver hit the blue light two feet before his claws could touch the mare’s chest.

There was no clatter of steel on bone. The azure blade passed through the man’s humped spine with a clean, sharp shlick, the heat of the aether cauterizing the severed flesh before a drop of black blood could spray. The two halves of the corpse tumbled into the gorse on either side of the horse, smoking like wet peat on an open fire.

Elspeth didn’t watch them fall.

Her roan mare surged forward, her iron shoes throwing clods of black peat ten feet into the air. The azure blade came around in a wide, horizontal backhand, aimed squarely at the warlock’s neck.

Brock knew he couldn’t take that weight on a spell-shield. He threw himself sideways into the ditch, rolling through the blackberry brambles as the blue blade cleaved the carriage’s splintered door-frame in half, turning the aged oak into a shower of white toothpicks.

He came up on his knees in the mud, his cowl torn away, his pasty scalp bleeding from a dozen thorn scratches. His yellow eyes were wide, the pupils blown until they swallowed the irises.

“You want my belt, woman?” Brock shrieked, his voice rising to an ear-splitting, bat-like whistle. “Then you can feed the master who gave it to me!”

He brought his right hand to his mouth, sank his yellow teeth into his own tongue, and bit down until the dark, purple blood filled his cheeks.

He didn’t spit it out.

He sprayed the warm gore upward into the grey drizzle, his hands clawing at the empty air as he screamed the ancient, forbidden syllables of the Nether-Tithe—words that did not belong to human throats, sounding like stones grinding inside an iron pot at the bottom of a dry well.

The sky over the limestone gorge turned the greasy, jaundiced yellow of an old bruise.

A tear opened in the space between two hemlock stumps—a jagged, three-yard fissure that bled thick, black fluid onto the wet gorse. What rolled out of the gap hit Corin’s stomach like a fist, bringing up a mouthful of sour bile and water; it smelled of an uncleaned slaughterhouse in the dog-days of August, mixed with the sweet, sickening odor of gangrenous flesh and boiled vinegar.

A foot came through the tear.

It was four feet long, grey-green like the skin of a drowned pig, with no toes—only a cluster of weeping, ulcerated tubers that hissed and smoked wherever they touched the wet clay.

The Putrid Sovereign pulled itself through the spatial wound with a sound like wet hides being dragged over gravel. It stood twelve feet tall, its head a bloated, hairless dome with two tiny, milky eyes set deep within folds of yellow fat. Where its nose should have been was a gaping, black cavity that wept grey pus in steady rivulets down over a wide, toothless maw that stretched from ear to ear.

The roan mare screamed—a high, shrill, animal sound of pure madness—reared up on her hind legs, threw her head back until the curb-chain snapped, and bolted down the road toward the south, leaving Elspeth standing alone in the center of the muddy highway.

The yellow horse in the carriage traces was not so lucky. A single droplet of the monster’s oily sweat splashed onto its flank; the hide blackened instantly, the hair sloughing off in sheets as the beast collapsed into the ditch, its legs thrashing once before its flesh melted into a puddle of foul, bubbling grease.

Elspeth did not step back.

She planted her heavy iron-shod boots into the clay, lowered her center of gravity until her thighs were parallel to the ground, and drew her breath down into the pit of her belly.

The azure aether along her broadsword didn’t flicker; it flared until the light turned a sharp, crystalline teal that hummed with enough force to kick the loose pebbles off the roadbed. “Filth,” she said between her teeth.

The demon let out a low, wet gurgle that vibrated in Corin’s teeth like the rumble of a distant millstone. A long, segmented red tongue—thick as a man’s thigh and covered in barbed, black hooks—shot from its mouth, lashing across the ten paces toward her ribs.

Elspeth swung.

The azure blade met the tongue in mid-air with a bang like an iron cannon fired into a stone quarry. Black ichor sprayed across the road, hissing like lye as the severed tip of the tongue flopped in the mud. The Sovereign roared, a sound that split the bark on the nearby birch trees, and lunged forward with both massive, grey-skinned arms.

She didn’t try to parry the dead weight of three tons of rotting meat. She stepped inside the arc of the left sweep, vaulted off the carcass of the dead coachman, and brought her blade down in a two-handed vertical strike directly into the center of the monster’s skull.

The steel bit deep.

A plume of white steam erupted from the wound as the azure aether burned through the layers of blubber, cleaving the head down to the level of the milky eyes.

The demon shrieked, its entire body shuddering with a violent, spastic tremor. But it did not fall.

With a final, desperate convulsion, the creature’s chest split open, spraying a sheet of yellow, necrotic fluid across Elspeth’s breastplate. The azure light flickered, turned dull grey, and died as the acid ate through the mail links and boiled into the leather underneath. At the same instant, the stump of the barbed tongue whipped forward like an iron rod, driving its poisoned hooks straight through her upper left chest, two inches beneath the collarbone.

The impact lifted the warden entirely off her feet, slamming her backward into the splintered wreckage of the carriage. She hit the ground with a dull, wet thud, her sword tumbling into the mud three feet from her limp fingers.

The Sovereign stood over her, swaying like a rotten tree in a high wind, its split skull weeping white foam, its red tongue drawing back to swallow the heart out of her chest.

Behind the beast, Brock was laughing—a high, hysterical screech that made his thin shoulders shake. “Eat her!” the warlock screamed, waving his bloody hands. “Eat the marrow out of her ribs, my Lord! Leave the bones for the crows!”

Corin was lying half-in and half-out of the crushed carriage frame. His legs were still cold, dead lead, but his hands were free.

Right beside his left elbow lay the oilcloth parcel, its twine broken, the dark rush-paper pages of Arch-Magus Bancraft’s manuscript fluttering in the cold wind.

Force is the heat of the blood, the third page had said. Intent binds the world.

Corin didn’t have an azure blade. He didn’t have three years of academy drill or a signet ring from the High See. He had only the rage of an eighteen-year-old boy who had spent twelve hours a day watching his mother scrub soldiers’ grease out of woolens while noble sons rode high-stepping stallions through the market square.

He grabbed the manuscript by its broken leather spine, hauled his upper body forward over the carriage sill, and threw the bundle the only way a dyer knows how to throw anything heavy: with the whole back, the way you’d feed a wet bolt of cloth across the yard to keep it out of the mud.

The book flew true.

It didn’t hit the demon’s hide; it struck squarely inside the open, weeping cleft where Elspeth’s blade had split the creature’s forehead.

The consecrated rush-paper did not burn.

The ancient blood-ward left by Bancraft two centuries ago recognized the necrotic frequency of the Putrid Sovereign. The five sacred runes along the margins ignited with a blinding, sun-white detonation that sounded like an iron boiler bursting under full steam.

The demon let out a high, thin wail that sounded almost human, clawing frantically at its own split head as the white fire burned through its brainpan. It spun around in the ditch, blind with agony, its massive arms thrashing through the air until its left claw caught Morden Brock by the neck.

The warlock’s laughter died in a wet, choking gurgle.

“My Lord—” Brock gasped, his legs kicking uselessly three feet above the mud. “I am… your servant—”

The Putrid Sovereign did not care about covenants. It closed its five-inch yellow talons, ripped the warlock’s ribcage open with a sound like tearing parchment, shoved the steaming heart into its toothless maw, and threw the ruined carcass into the blackberry thorns.

Then, with a final, shuddering groan, the monster collapsed into its own spatial tear, the black fissure snapping shut with a hollow thump that left only the smell of scorched earth and wet clay on the wind.

The road went utterly quiet.

The rain fell steadily, drumming against the overturned carriage wheels and washing the black gore off the limestone boulders into the ditch.

Corin lay in the mud, gasping for breath, the freezing sludge soaking through the front of his shirt. Ten feet away, Elspeth lay on her back among the splintered spokes, her face the color of wet lime, a steady trickle of dark, frothing blood running from the corner of her mouth down into her collar.

He dug his fingers into the clay, dragged his dead legs over the carriage step, and began to crawl.