Line of Fire

One guy constantly gets beat up.

## Characters

* The Elf: A half god-half drow hexblade assassin. His blade controls elements, splitting into fire and ice, but also sports necromantic powers.
* The Entity/Sol: Appearing an an andorgynous clown like being, they are the ones who wants the boy dead, using various mediums and avatars.
* The Princeling/Bastard/Norman: A reality hopping demi-celestial bearing a fire controling sword and armor.
* The Sorceress: Last leader of their failing brotherhood. She hopes to change the fate of her world using Norman against Sol.

## Part 1

The doors opened, slowly, begrudingly, they opened. The massive stone monoliths were moved by contraptions older than most would bother to count, and lead into an ancient hallway, a temple. At the end of it all was an altar a raised platform of stone upon which was a cluster of rocks. The knights entered, all of them in steel armor with blue garments underneath that. Some wore helmets, some did not, but one among them was different.

The young man sported a scraggly beard, and long blonde hair that he should've cut some time back, with blue eyes, and orange armor, spiked and made to resemble fire, while he wore a red body suit underneath. On his back was a sword, a straight blade that radiated a sinisterness to it.

Among those garbed in armor was a women, older, with long black hair and purple eyes, carrying not just a sheathed blade but a staff that resembled a coiled snake, holding a purple sphere in its jaws. She raised he staff and the jewel glowed, while the crystals adorning the wall began to shine with an eerie white green glow.

"This is it...?" the blonde one asked.

"Aye..." she replied as they walked in, "With this, we'll be able to find Sol's essence, his truth and put and end to him. We could even use it to cleanse this world of its impurities as you father attempted."

"My father..." He said reminiscing. She touched his shoulder

"Your father, Prince Chen, he would be proud of you." They reached the end of the hallway and she raised her staff. It glowed, the purple light captured into runes upon the stones, which turned blue. The stones glowed voltage arcing between them, somehow raising them up by this mystical force. The other knights watched them, instead of watching the door, as they should have. Perhaps they would've noticed him, walking up the steps silently, a figure clad in dark armor, yet moving so silently.

They should've seen him, but they were unobservant, and he was silent, for the most part. The silence broke when the first fell to the ground his head rolling, following shortly byt the second whose face had been slice open. The third and fourth were already dead now, the assassin pulling his blade out of the fourth victim's guts allowing blood to gush out. This was when the remaing four knights finally noticed, truly noticed and drew their blades.

The figure was....a child, an elf. He resembled a teenager with messy white hair, and dark ash grey skin, but his pointed ears were undoubtedly sylvan. His eyes, his black eye balls sported golden rings, while his wore armor that seemed more like a form fitting suit than proper armor. The ridged, layered thing hugged tightly to his atheletic but slim frame, putting claws on his fingers and a singular blades and the end of his toes. On the left side of his waist was sheaths for three blades, two identical ones and the sheath of the third blade he was now putting back. While the other two were elven katanas of a dark construction, the third was a cross between a scimitar and a kopesh.

"A beastman assassin?!" shouted the first one who charged swinging his sword one handed. The elf said nothing, but when the knight came in range he stepped forward drew his blade, slicing off the hand holding the sword and cutting through most of the warrior's neck, cauing blood to spurt out and the warrior to fall immediately.

"Bastard...!" said the blonde one. The elf raised his eyebrow.

"That's bright, the bastard of the 'bastard prince' is calling this bastard, a bastard..." the elf mused as he took a stance.

"What?!" The elf raised an eyebrow

"What?" he replied with a monotone but confrontational tone. The princeling reached for his sword as he sneered, only for the sorceress to grab his shoulder.

"Do not let him bait you. That is how they brought down your father..."

"I thought they brought him down because he was an idiot who overestimated himself, but it seems the loosers also write their own history..."

"Wretched mongrel...!" shouted one of the two knights.

"And yet my blood is still a higher quality than yours."

"I'll cut your gizzard...!" the knight shouted rushing forward holding his hand with both swords, swinging down. The elf just deflected the blow away with his blade, mixing the motion with a forward step and arcing slash that disconnected the knights right arm. He screamed in pain, before being stabbed in the back, the blade slipping through his arm to strike his liver before being removed in a slash cutting open his guts.

"You will pay for that..." said the princeling "You will answer for those lives..."

"Doubtful..." the elf replied "Even if you leave here, what do you think you'll do in the heart of my father's power..."

"Your father?!" the sorceress said before turning back, needing to maintain her concentration "So much for his claims of purity..."

"I don't know what claims you heard of, but regardless you...don't really understand what my father is..."

"He has linked himself to a place of power...what is there to understand...?"

"Is that what you think he is? Well in that case coming here was pointless, your Queen really worries too much..."

"She is not our queen..." said the last knight., barely struggling to hold back the shivering. The elf simply looked at him and he jumped back, cautious, afraid. The elf turned back to the other two.

"So..." said the sorceress "Your 'father' left you here, to serve, or..."

"Or can I just go home when I choose...?" he replied. "Does it matter, you think of tomorrow but here you are walking into a line of fire, drawn across the map of creation itself, by a hand whose scribblings are the only things you see. You are small..."

"And you are 'big'...?" she asked.

"We are all small here. I just seem to be the only one to know how tiny we are." He sheathed his blade. "Go then, go and find your placed among the destroyde, the used and damned, this should be amusing to watch." He sheathed his sword and turned around, leaving.

"This isn't over yet...!" the princeling roared, ready to draw his blade. The elf looked back, and scoffed, then had a look of rememberance "Oh right, you're going to need this..." he said throwing a stone, a stone marked with a rune. "I wouldn't try travelling without that." The princeling caught it, and looked it, his eyes, his wits unable to ascertain what was so important about this stone.

"What is this...?" he asked.

"Ask your friend the spell slinger..." She looked back, and then to the prince and she looked at the stone with eyes wide open. With desperation she grabbed it, and tossed it into the cluster of other marked rocks immediately entangling in the web of energy as it untangled the nexus of powers. The stones moved about energy arcing, and sparkling between them, leaving behind trails of energy ribbons of arcane wind that seemed to warp space, as the stone arranged themselves into a circle, an arch, which landed on the platform, the last stone resting on the ground the phenomenon of energies congealed to form a portal.

"We have it..." said the sorceress, eyes wide open, madly so. "We have out gate way to him..."

"Can even make it..." said the last night.

"Do not falter now...!" she snapped at him. "We have the royal bloodline, blessed by fire, we have the sword, and with it, we will conquer that invader once and for all, and free our people of this false reign!" Then red ligthning crackled across the portal and a red light exploded out consuming them.

The three of them fell, through crimson currents of energy and lighting. Within the currents they could see them, and they clearly saw them. Eyes opened in the phenomenon, flowing past them, flaming eyeballs.

"This was a trap...!" shouted the last night.

"This..." said a disembodied voice "...was your trap, but it seems you are poor hunters."

"Sol!" the sorcerous "Where are you...!"

"A foolish question..." the entity replied "I am all around you."

"Then the spell worked?"

"Yes, and no. Your spell did indeed locate me, but as I said, I am far more complicated than that. The last things to storm my sanctum were giants, and you are infinitely lesser things than them."

"Is that why you fear us?!"

"Fear? I have crushed your armies, laid low your would-be king. You are dregs, the last scraps on the plate, and you speak of fear? You are small."

"You are pompous, so what, you're some eldritch thing?!" The rage and bloodlust was near solid, as the entity's voice that of a raging volcanoe.

"**Do not blaspheme**! You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor. You speak of restoring order, bah! I am order, and your reign would be fragile. Give up you petty ambitions."

"My 'ambitions' are the restoration of the natural order!"

"And who are you to dictate what is natural? You seek a path for your people that your people have rejected. You think you can claim my power and use it as you see fit?"

"Don't I get a say in this...?!" said the princeling.

"It's adorable that you think you ever did, that you think she cares..." He sneered, and drew his blade. The atmosphere changed immediately. The sword, it's blade was black, a black iron, it was black like a deep pit, a place where the light did not reach.

"There is ignorance..." said Sol "and then there is whatever this display of idiocy is here. You draw that piece of heresy **in my presence**?! **Have a care**! But then, how could you...ignorant as you are, of what she gave you."

"And what is that...?"

"**Silence**..." From the perpetual 'below' there was an erupt, a wave front magma like energy that flooded towards them. The sorceress reached for the boy, trying to erect a shield to block it, but it could not be blocked. Instead of being burned, once beneath the wave they were in another world, different sky, a different land, and also in the middle of the air.

The trio fell and hit the ground, rolling down the dune, until they reached the bottom.

"Where, where are we....?" asked the knight, the first to get up. He and the others laid eyes on the elf from before, now bearing a scar on his cheek and eating a cooked lizard on a stick. He was wrapped up in several ponchos and head wrapping to fight the sun, much like the other elves in the caravan behind him, who are masks.

"Long time no see..." he replied

"You!" shoued the princeling as he pointed his sword. Immediately the elf's smug tone disappeared. "I would not wave about that wretched thing so blatantly, even in forsaken lands as this..."

"What...?"

"Put it away, you idiot...!"

("My lord, who are these people...") asked an approaching elf. ("We saw the red light, are they servants of your father?")

("No, I don't think so...") The assassin replied ("But he did send them here...")

## Part 2

"Where are we...?" asked the Sorceress, as the group walked through the camp. All around them were tents set up by ashen skinned elves, with their curious beasts of burden sporting crystal horns.

"You are in another world..." said the elf "Or perhaps, 'reality', or 'dimension' would be drive home to the point..."

"And yet you arrived here before us...?" asked Norman.

"Time is not universal..." said the assassin elf "Nay, it is, but it is convoluted. One day here, is a week there, seconds there, so on and so forth. Worse when you're dealing with an entity who circumvents it altogether."

"And what about the other way around...?" asked the sorceress "Can we return to our home, at our time..." The elf looked back and shrugged.

"What happened to this world...?" asked the knight.

"Hubris." said the elf "My father and uncles made this world and the elves that ruled it. Said elves betrayed him."

"You mean rose up in rebellion against his tyranny..." went Norman

"Just because the ruling powers demand of you things you don't like, does not inherently make that 'tyrannical'. Besides this was ideological. my father and uncles did not rule directly. Each was the source of the magic of powerful civilizations. My father power the 'Well of the Sun', Uncle Kaos, blew the 'Chaotic Winds' across the land, and from last uncle, the Dead Fountain flowed underground. Sun Elves, Wild, Elves, and Death Elves. They used these energies to forge their great civilization, but these energies had more important purposes..."

"What purpose could those be...?" asked Norman.

"Child, power exists for a purpose, otherwise it is being abused if that purpose is not being attended to. The wells of power and the relation was a microcosm of the trinity's relation to the wider realities."

"Sol is a tyrant, a warlord from other realms who attacked our world!" said the sorceress. The elf stopped and the three followed his example. He looked back at them.

"You faced an 'aspect' as did I. Things like them are not so...simple. If you came here as I think you did, you got a glimpse of his true face, and what did you see..."

"A monster..."

"Is it, or could you simply not understand what you were looking at. I've seen monsters, I've seen the eldritch. My father's absence made this world as it is. The sort of 'monsters' you're complaining about make worlds like this with their 'presence'. These people bow and prey everyday for the three to return and last I checked the only ones bitter about the state of 'your' world, was you lot, the elitist, speciest."

"Don't test me, elf..." said the sorceress

"Don't tell me, 'human'. Your lot didn't fair much better last time, and you had numbers on your side. I'm helping because I was asked."

"Asked...by whom...?"

"Who else? And no, I don't know why he bothers with all this."

"Asked to do what...?" asked Norman

"To take you to the Welll of the Sun." the elf replied.