Darksiders: The Abomination Vault Read Online Free PDF Page B

with their great weight or stabbing with their jagged limbs.
    Whether by skill or fortune, I was not among the first to fall. I heard the rustling of the branches, saw movement just before the creature leapt. I kicked out with both legs, and though it felt as though my feet might break, I succeeded in knocking it back. It struck the tree from which it had just emerged and began to fall, but I had already dived below, glaive upraised. It tumbled past me in two distinct halves, crumbling to smaller pieces well before it struck the earth. I was even able to nudge one such piece aside so that it landed on one of its fellow constructs, distracting it sufficiently for me to finish it off.
    We were destroying them, but not swiftly enough. A small mass of them came at me from behind, and I turned my glaive, not on them, but on a nearby bole. The great tree tumbled, crushing many of the enemy, and granting me a moment to recover. And still there were more.
    The Faneguard would be overrun.
    Or so I feared, for a moment, before salvation appeared above, silhouetted against the burning sun.
    I told you before that each of us had our assigned duties for almost any contingency. What I had not known—what
most
of us had not known—was that, should an enemy of overwhelming numbers appear, one of us had been assigned to return instantly to the White City in search of aid.
    I understand why we were not told. Some would have found it demoralizing to contemplate. Some would have thought it a slight to our pride. When had the Faneguard
ever
required outside assistance?
    Yet now I see the wisdom.
    From above, a second phalanx plummeted into the fray. And at their head was not just any captain, any general, but great Abaddon himself!
    Have you ever looked upon Abaddon? Have you ever seen him in battle? He is a force beyond reckoning, beyond comprehension. His wings are iron as much as muscle and sinew and feather. His impossible sword, longer than he is tall, he wields as though it were a toy. Taller and broader of shoulder than any of us, his golden armor and ivory-white tabard gleaming more brightly than the sun behind him, he waded into the foe. It appeared that his blade, which he swung so rapidly it seemed to form a solid arch, needed only get
near
one of the constructs to blast the creature to dust. He refused even to acknowledge the presence of the trees, but swung his sword as he needed. If it encountered a trunk on its way to the target, well, it simply swept through without slowing. And somehow, no matter what the direction from which he struck, those trees always fell to hinder the constructs, never even a single angel.
    Between Abaddon’s ferocity and our newly inflated numbers, we rapidly turned the tide. Only a handful more angels fell to the constructs, while we destroyed them by the hundreds.The woods were filled with the crash of shattering stone, punctuated by sporadic bursts as the cannoneers found an open target.
    But even as the seemingly endless horde finally began to taper off, something else appeared in their place. The enemy had reinforcements as well.
    These, too, were constructs, but entirely unlike the initial wave. The stone that made up their narrow bodies was all but hidden beneath angled plates and long limbs of brass; they looked rather the way Heaven’s champions might be depicted in the stained-glass windows of the White City’s grandest chapels. Sharp, angular, jointed in abnormal places. They did not walk at all, but rather sat upon a narrow brass spindle that spun rapidly from the waist downward without ever jostling their upper halves. They boasted four long arms; like their stone forerunners, they had no heads, and their hands seemed capable of forming whatever implements they might require.
    Do I even need to tell you that most of them had chosen to form massive, razor-edged blades?
    They were horrifically fast, these new constructs, and the whine of their spinning shafts was the only warning of their