Khyven the Unkillable by Todd Fahnestock

Author:Todd Fahnestock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Khyven the Unkillable, Todd Fahnestock, Eldros Legacy, Epic Fantasy, Noksonon, Chris Kennedy Publishing
Publisher: Eldros Legacy
Published: 2023-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Khyven

A scream pierced the morning.

Khyven sat bolt upright on his pallet so fast he fell sideways. He hit the ground and felt like someone had struck him in the head with a hammer.

“Ugh,” he muttered. The hammer hit again, and then again, and then again.

A second scream pealed through the air and Khyven blinked his gummy eyes. Senji’s Boots, what’s happening?

Everyone around him had also awoken. They were scrambling toward the sound of the noise.

Instinctively, Khyven reached for his sword, then realized he didn’t have one. They’d taken it from him when he’d returned from the noktum.

Voices filled the air. People near Khyven murmured, and louder voices came from the direction of the scream.

Basant the cook waddled up the hill past Khyven, a cleaver gripped in his thick hand.

“What’s happening?” Khyven muttered, standing up.

“Don’t know,” Basant said. “Nokkie come through, maybe?”

Despite his pounding headache and the nearly overwhelming urge to vomit, Khyven held down his bile and kept pace with the cook.

“That ever happened before?” Khyven asked, and his pounding head told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to stop speaking.

“Not since I been here,” Basant said.

In the thin, yellow morning light that poured over the rim of the noktum, the entire camp was clustered around something.

Another few steps and Khyven almost vomited. His stomach sloshed about like a ship in a storm, and that damned hammer kept tapping, lightly asking him if he could just lay down and die quietly.

He wrenched his faculties together for the moment and assessed what was happening. There was no anticipation in the faces of the crowd, only revulsion. There was no movement among the people, only a stunned quiet. Whatever the crowd was looking at, it wasn’t a fight.

This was something else.

“Make way!” someone shouted, and Khyven turned. One of Rhenn’s knights motioned with his hands that everyone should back away. Behind the two knights, Rhenn strode forward, already dressed in traveling leathers with a red cape fluttering behind her. She didn’t look any worse for wear for having drunk Khyven under the table last night. Lorelle followed close behind like a flowing wind, her blowgun already in hand. The crowd cleared away and revealed what they were gawking at.

It was Gohver. Or what was left of him.

He lay on his belly, one leg cocked up under him, one stretched out, one arm bent under him, one reaching forward, gripping that monstrous sword he’d taken from the noktum.

He’d obviously been trying to crawl somewhere. The fist around his prized sword was grossly deformed, like a sheep’s bladder that had been stuffed full of rice. The grisly, bubbled flesh continued up his arm, culminating in a giant tumor of flesh on his shoulder. The growth pressed into his head where it had fallen against the grass.

His face was covered with the same sickly bubbles. The left side of his body had fared better, but it still showed similar signs.

Rhenn stood before the body with a furrowed brow. She hesitated only a moment.

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