Once is Never Enough —a side story of Old Sorcery

Aisling is a character featured in Callan's upcoming novel, OLD SORCERY. Check out the book on BackerKit. All backers will receive the audiobook free.

Art by Diego Castro. Used with permission.

* * *

Aisling held what remained of Blightheart by his horn, throwing the goblin magelord's head at the boots of her liege lord, Árdghal, who had commanded his fighters to cleanse his lands of the vile bastard’s black magic.

“You have done well, Aisling.” He leaned forward in his throne, examining the grotesque grimace gazing upward from the straw and cobbles.

Aisling did not kneel. She did not bow her head. Tough as leather, she crossed her sinewy arms and smirked. She met her liege lord’s eyes as if she were his equal, as if she were his better.

“The deed is done, Árdghal.” Aisling spat into the amber coals of an open hearth. “Gratitude won’t buy me ale,” she boldly stated. “Gold, my lord. Gold I’ll gladly take.”

Árdghal suffered his subject’s insolence with temperance; such was his esteem for Aisling’s worth as the kingdom’s finest warrior. Without a word of reprimand, he asked her instead, “And where will your own way guide you?”

Aisling fingered the ogre-bone hilt of her greatsword, Affliction, caressing its rough, troll-hide wrappings. “I’ll return the way I came, of course, crawling back within the foul innards of the goblin-plagued caverns.”

Árdghal was more than surprised—he was appalled. And so, bending to the edge of his throne, he investigated Aisling’s motive. “Why return to the odious abode of the nefarious horde? What quest of madness returns you to the hell you are fresh from leaving behind?”

Aisling grinned in satisfaction, fondling her monstrous blade with amorous strokes. She clutched Affliction with her calloused hand and rolled her flint-grey eyes in hedonistic lust. Biting her lip to suppress the arousal stirring within her, she eased her grip upon her greatsword, spitting once again into the dying fire. “I am going back, Árdghal, because once is never enough.”

Árdghal did not question the meaning of her words—he had known bloodlust first hand. He had experienced such primal urges during the Ogre Wars, the vicious campaign that elevated him to the throne. Árdghal did not want to lose the kingdom’s finest, fiercest warrior, yet neither did he order Aisling to abstain from her pursuit of folly. After all, he knew exactly how that would go, and he did not wish to sully his dignity by goading her into disobedience. No, he would not think to hinder Aisling’s whim—Árdghal did not wish to die.

“You are a mad bastard of a woman, Aisling. But in this, your will is your own. Be on your way, young warrior, and gods be with you.”

Aisling nodded curtly, remaining, arms crossed, at the edge of the hearth. “Gold, my lord,” she repeated. “Gold I’ll gladly take, then I shall be on my way.”

Árdghal shook his head, repulsed, but did not venture a word. He threw a purse of coins across the coals to Aisling, who, with confident steps leading out of her lord’s stronghold, jingled on her way.

* * *

Deep in the Emerald Forest, a festering wound bored into the slopes of Peridot Peak, the maw of the mountain reeking as if the anus of the world, a diseased hole descending into darkness and decrepitude. Aisling left the forest behind her, entering the rotting wound of the mountain, returning for the pleasure of killing, exercising her desire to swing her greatsword, Affliction, and quench its fevered steel on the guts of countless cave-dwelling denizens. Within, the air was fetid, foul, and sulphurous. And yet, tinged with the scent of blood from her recent visit, Aisling had never smelled anything half so sweet. With gladness filling her fearless heart, she plunged into the burrows of oblivion.

Sconces carved from the rock lined the walls, their anaemic fires offering small islands of marmalade light between prolonged patches of darkness. Guided by their meagre glow, Aisling wormed her way into the heart of the mountain where signs of goblin masonry lined the weeping granite walls—crude embossed images of plunder, torture, and wanton violence. Rats the size of hounds chewed away at the wasted carcasses of goblins, those who were murdered by Aisling the day before.

All in all, the tunneled city of the nefarious horde lacked the simple niceties of open-aired, human settlements. The dank, sour atmosphere and macabre decor was garish and grotesque, the narrow passages cramped and confining. But soon, Aisling knew, the caverns would open and widen, the ceiling would soar and span far above her. And while the rank decor was no less prevalent in the vaulting domes of Goblin Town as it was within the arterial vennels that led to its core, Aisling favored the city for its space to swing her greatsword, and the goblin bodies that gathered en mass to feed Affliction with their miserable souls.

She had no need to return to this hellhole. But hellholes, Aisling had found, were the very best places to murder and maim. So here she was, happy as a squirrel with a nut. And if nuts were goblin heads, well... then Aisling was the happiest squirrel in the forest.

* * *

She clove the tallow-skinned demihumans at will, splitting their knobby skulls like rinds of ripe melon, breaking their bones with strikes from her spiked, mailed fists, kicks with her heavy boots. She did not spare the women, the children, the old and wizened that shrieked in the corners or wept for their blasted god. But it was the warriors’ deaths Aisling had savored the most, their bold approach with spears, clubs, and axes. Some were adept for their kind, skilled in the ways of combat and war, but next to her—the finest, fiercest warrior in the kingdom—they were like children with wooden swords.

As she slaughtered, sauntered, sashayed her way deeper into the cancerous center of the rotten metropolis, Aisling came face to face with formidable foes; goblin chieftains and torture savants, half-ogre bastards with muscles as large as a dray horse. It was no easy feat to escape unscathed from the mighty swing of demon-forged war hammers wielded by the troll-kin giants, monsters who wished to make human jam with their overlarge instruments of carnage.

Indeed, Aisling did, at one moment, receive a glancing blow on her gleaming pauldron. But one close call was enough to sober her blood-drunken stupor, to give her the gentle wake-up call that she needed. She shook off the pain of her dislocated shoulder, popping it back into place upon the impact of her charge into a nine-foot savage freak.

Affliction drank of goblin innards to the hilt, and troll heads rolled to the stone. It was enough to make her drunk all over again. It was enough to send her howling with exaltation.

But swords are swords, and as any swordswoman would tell you, magic is a different kettle of fish, a leviathan among common cod. So when a wizened goblin with a frog face and wispy white beard stepped out from acrid smoke to show his robe-clad, stooping figure leaning on a gem-studded staff, horns protruding from a dark cowl, Aisling knew she had met her match. She gripped the hilt of Affliction, wringing the sweat and blood from its troll-hide strips with a white-knuckled fist. Breathing deep, she found the blazing core of her warrior spirit, letting it burn away the weariness that wracked her arms and thighs. She let it simmer, stew for a moment… Then it boiled right over the edge.

Spells of blue fire. Incantations to wake the dead. Illusions of horror. Pain, direct to the source, as if talons raking on raw, exposed nerves. Wizardry—black and terrible magic.

It rained down in a torrent of color and light, agony and dread. Its assault was unyielding, a blasphemous, black wind carried on a raging storm cloud of malice conjured in the cauldrons of Stygian corners of oblivion. It was a hell of dance to evade the molten missiles, the venomous globs and waves of acid, the hellhounds summoned from their Hadean crevice.

But Aisling knew the steps well, performing her deadly ballet. She dodged, she ducked, she ran for dear life, but she always came back, rising, time and time again.

When she closed the distance between herself and the magelord, she raised Affliction high above her head. With fury, she sent the great blade down to cleave the soft-butter flesh of the goblin magician, its bitter steel scraping the length of his spine before settling deep into his bowels.

The enchanter’s gasp mingled with Aisling’s own, a discordant note of pain and pleasure, death and delight. Aisling withdrew her mighty sword from the putrid stuffing of her enemy, and, as she returned Affliction to its sheath, the goblin magelord's life spilled out in a deluge of steaming guts.

Goblin Town was emptied of life, full of blood and ruin. Aisling was whole, bursting with rapture. Within her spirit, ecstasy took hold, and her joyous screams filled the void of a city bereft of souls. It was a warrior’s exaltation, euphoria after the slaughter.

Gods, it was good!

And then the gore-stained city began to spin, and all the world faded to darkness.

* * *

It was the smoke that woke her. The sting in her eyes from the black, billowing towers that rose amid a cheerless landscape. Where confining walls of granite had entombed her, now, without any knowledge as to how, Aisling lay exposed beneath the endless sky. Where long shadows of stalagmites had swayed in the citrine glow of fire-flickering sconces, at present, a pale sun shone through a veil of milky clouds in a wash of glaring light. Where goblin bodies festooned the floors and walls of a dark mountain hall, now, by horrific contrast, human bodies littered the trampled lawn, the front steps and open gate to a castle Aisling knew intimately.

Groggy, as if remaining half asleep, Aisling pushed herself to her knees, examining the catastrophe before her. Hopeful that she may yet remain in the throes of a dreadful nightmare, she tallied the bodies of human children, of peasants among the smoking ruins of their homes. She looked upward to the towers of her liege lord’s stronghold, the rivers of blood that stained the ramparts, the wet, crimson flow that wept from every gap and crenelation.

On the grass where she knelt, Affliction lay before her, its blade freshly baptized in blood. What has happened here? She wondered. Surely, I must be dreaming?

“No dream, young warrior.” Aisling knew that voice, having heard it before. “The idyllic scene before you is real. It is the sum of our glorious collaboration.”

Aisling placed the familiar voice that emanated from nowhere. She knew from whom she had heard that unpleasant, guttural accent. But it didn’t make sense, for the voice she heard came from someone who was dead, from someone she had slain firsthand.

Blightheart, the goblin sorcerer, manifested before her, appearing from the ether and stood by Aisling’s side. His ochre-toothed smile was one of mischief, of mayhem, of multitudinous murder. He gestured with his taloned hand. And lo, a nefarious horde, one by one, popped up like mushrooms after an evening rain.

Aisling reached for Affliction, but Blightheart waved his hand and cast an immobilizing hex, preventing her from taking up her mighty sword.

“What madness have I woken to?” Aisling moaned from where she knelt. “This cannot be real.” She objected to reality. “You cannot exist.” She glared up at Blightheart. “I killed you! I delivered your wretched head to Lord Árdghal.”

Blightheart chuckled at Aisling’s misery and confusion. Like a true, diabolical bastard, he allowed his laughter to erupt in a long, echoing chorus across the bloodied castle yard. When at long last his maniacal amusement faded into composure, Blightheart explained Aisling’s nightmare-turned-reality.

“You have been under the influence of my spell,” he told her with delight. “You killed a great many goblins reaching me in Goblin Town, but from the moment that we met, your fate was mine to mold.”

Aisling listened with an awful dread that rose within her like too much wine. On all fours, as if a dog, she keeled over to vomit among the blood-soaked mud. “I killed you,” she repeated when finally catching her breath. “I killed you,” she said once more before ejecting more of her guts across the crimson steel of Affliction, now tainted with the blood of her brethren.

“Deception, young human—such was the nature of my enchantment. You only believed to deliver my head to your liege lord, but, to my benefit, it was quite the reverse.” Blightheart produced the head of Árdghal, letting it fall to the ground before Aisling. “You killed a great many goblins reaching me in Goblin Town, but since the moment that we met, you’ve killed countless more humans. You are the finest, fiercest warrior in the kingdom, Aisling. Without you, I never would have been able to take your liege lord’s castle.”

All at once, the horror of what Aisling had done returned to her. Images of her murderous orchestra flooded her mind—the massacre of her own people, by her own hand. As if one among the nefarious horde, herself, Aisling had taken up arms in a goblin raid, cutting down members of her hometown with Affliction, a greatsword now sullied by the blood of the innocent. Though her actions were not her own will, directed like a puppet by the stupor of dark enchantment, it could not be refuted: Aisling had slain her own people. Under the banner of Blightheart, the most wretched of magelords, she had marched, sword in hand, to the beat of the goblin war drum.

For Aisling, it was too much to bear—the guilt, the shame... the violation. Desperate to set things right, she took up Affliction, resolved to sink its blade deep into the wizard’s foul heart. But despite her efforts, her intention for revenge, her spirit had withered, and, lulled by enchantment, she succumbed to the renewal of the goblin’s witchcraft, which took hold of her soul.

Under the influence of sorcery, Aisling marched along with the goblin army. At the head of the nefarious horde, she traveled beside Blightheart, who, with his magic-bound human thrall doing his bidding, was primed for conquest. Gazing ahead to the human settlement and its castle looming in the distance, the magelord grinned in deep satisfaction at fruits ripe for the picking. With a broken tower at his back, and a fresh one on the horizon, Blightheart beamed contentedly, remarking that “once is never enough.”