Bellageist: Chains of a Demigod Part 4

Arcade repentant, Garuna imperious, and Nyl unchained

Derek James Kritzberg

Mar 15, 2025

Chains of a Demigod

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Part 9 (coming soon)

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Part 1, 2, & 3 Synopsis (2 minute read):

In Part 1 Nyl awakens in a primal world ruled by unseen forces, her young mind driven by aggression and a dread of weakness. Thrust into escalating “scenarios,” she wields stone clubs, then bows, then bronze spears, guided by a metallic voice that praises her victories - first as “the Impetuous,” then “the Ardent” - and urges her to claim the ultimate title: “Basilissa.” Each triumph sees the sun flee the sky, only to rise again over a new era, her mind absorbing foreign knowledge with uncanny speed. By her third battle, atop a fortified wall, Nyl allies with Garuna the Quick and Arcade the Steady, fully aware warriors amid half-conscious “others.” Her superhuman feats - dodging arrows, hurling dual javelins, scaling towers - earn her adoration and cement a bond with her new companions, who rise alongside her as “Garuna the Swift” and “Arcade the Unwavering.”

In Part 2, Nyl’s fourth scenario pits her trio against a dragon. Victorious but battered, her armor scorched and her shoulder burned, Nyl revels alongside Arcade. Yet the sun lingers in defiance of the usual cycle. Garuna, mortally wounded, is tended by a boy claiming to be her son. A king arrives, pressing the Nyl and Arcade to swear fealty for the feat of slaying the dragon while refusing to take on the dying Garuna. Torn between Garuna’s fate and the promise of glory, Nyl swears fealty despite Arcade’s protests. Full of regret, Arcade follows suit, and both abandon their friend. In the king’s coach, Nyl glimpses her hands as metal, hinting at an artificial nature. At the castle, she finds Arcade in foreplay with naked maids, driving her to jealousy, tears, and existential doubt.

Part 3 sees Nyl grapple with her identity and circumstances amidst the king’s feast. The sun’s refusal to set underlines her turmoil and unanswered questions. Arcade is asked at the feast to recount the tale of slaying the dragon and praises his companions’ valor in combat. At the conclusion of his tribute, the king’s beautiful daughter symbolically grants Arcade her favor, initiating an uproar at the court and further fueling Nyl’s rage, chaos culminating in a wine-soaked outburst.

A grieving Nyl flees to a tower. Arcade chases and confronts her and reveals the voice’s decree: the sun will not set for only one may survive this challenge. He offers to sacrifice himself, but Nyl hesitates. His following confession of love shatters her resolve; they kiss, and the sun sets. Alone in darkness, the voice names Nyl a “Knight” and a “candidate,” and answers a barrage of her questions with a cryptic truth: she and Arcade united “ahead of the curve” on her path to become “Basilissa.” Heartbroken by the interruption, Nyl rejects the game, but the sun rises anew regardless, throwing her into another challenge.

Part four continues Nyl’s journey of raw violence and emotional awakening. From a primal killer who despised weakness, Nyl has evolved to find camaraderie and love. The king’s realm, trapped in a timeless cycle, hints at a constructed reality. Her visions of a metallic body and the mysterious voice’s riddles suggest she’s more (or less?) than a person of flesh.

Read on and witness Nyl navigate a twisting reality of ever-growing extremes.

Bellageist: Chains of a Demigod Part 4

Nyl hovered, bereft of light, touch, or smell.

She might be bodiless and nerveless. But she remembered it – Arcade’s kiss, fresh and wet on her lips.

The sensation lingered, but eventually that, too, was taken from her.

Nyl awakened somewhere new. An icy flat surface pressed into her face and body. She blinked her eyes open and found herself sprawled over a stone floor.

A prison.

She scrambled to her knees. A thin drape of rags hung loose from her body. Manacles and chains clinked at her wrists and ankles. Rust and urine polluted the air, though an airy breeze cleared the worst of the stink.

It seemed unusually bright for a dungeon. Squinting through whitish-blue light, Nyl took in her surrounds. Her bindings had give - long enough for her to approach the her cell’s single window - a narrow slit barred with iron. When she peeked through it, she discovered she stood high within a roofed tower.

Beyond the window stretched a walled city of jagged rooftops. A leaden sky hung overhead, and below, a vast courtyard teemed with thousands of soldiers in silent, orderly ranks. A forest of steel pikes glinted dully in the ashen light, every man wearing mass-produced munition armor. Amongst the pikes stood rows of soldiers holding weapons new to Nyl: cast-iron tubes ringed with brass and nestled in wooden stocks. As with every scenario, when Nyl focused, foreign knowledge could be grasped from the edge of her consciousness, and she knew these matchlock weapons to be “arquebuses.”

The pike-and-shot soldiers encircled a raised platform at the courtyard’s heart. In the center of the dais, a queen sat; dead and bloody, a corpse propped up by a silver throne. The distance made it difficult to see the queen’s face, but Nyl recognized the knightly armor of her former companion: Garuna.

Garuna’s once-proud coat of plates hung in tatters. Crimson still seeped from her fatal side wound. New regalia enhanced her warrior’s dress. Robes of white and gold flowed out from under her plated panoply, and a crown of jagged metal thorns wreathed her orange-haired skull. Her corpse-white hands gripped the throne’s arms, and her lifeless eyes stared unseeing from a lolled head, a silent witness to the mass of her army.

The sight churned Nyl’s gut; revulsion, guilt, and no small amount of awe.

A figure stood beside the throne. Garuna’s son, perhaps? If so, he no longer resembled the frail boy who once wept at his mother’s death. He stood tall, a man now, his white robes pristine and his noble face carved with cold resolve. He wore a breastplate of brilliant gold which shone despite the muted sun. Nyl felt a chill as his eyes swept the courtyard.

The boy-turned-man raised and unrolled a scroll. His voice rang like a tolling bell: “I am Garun, rightful heir of our lady Garuna. Bring forth the condemned.”

Guards in white robes and silver breastplates emerged from the base of Nyl’s prison tower. Between them they dragged a line of ragged captives. These they marched through a corridor left open by the soldiers.

The prisoners, all red-haired men and women, stumbled onto the platform. Their chains rattled in the silence, and despite the distance, Nyl saw faces pale with dread and heard their weeping.

Several gunmen in steel breastplates filed up short steps at either end of the platform. They moved to stand behind the prisoners, one soldier for each prisoner.

Garun, scroll in hand, strutted to stand before one of the females. His imperious voice rang out: “Envy. Your jealousy festered and you struck at allies for selfish gain. How do you plead?”

The prisoner mumbled and babbled her response, and Nyl could not hear it. The calm and haughty cast to Garun’s face and shoulders, however, told Nyl the offender pled guilty.

The soldier behind the woman kicked her legs, dropping her to her knees. He raised his arquebus to her back.

Garun nodded and stepped aside.

The soldier fired his gun point-blank, the sharp report echoing off walls and rooftops. The prisoner crumpled into a spreading pool of blood.

Garun moved to a male prisoner. “Weakness. You faltered in the face of duty.”

Nyl panicked, thinking the man to be Arcade at first. Though he looked broad and red haired, a second look confirmed him to be someone else.

The kneeling man wept at the woman’s execution. His choking sobs and murmuring filled the air. Like the first, he repented.

Another nod. Another shot. The second prisoner’s blood mingled with the first.

Garun approached the third prisoner, another woman. “Disloyalty. You forsook your friend, sought fleeting glory.”

She repented and died like the others.

Nyl’s chest tightened with guilt and rage. These prisoners, they were echoes of her and Arcade, a fool could see that.

“Lust.” Another man with Arcade’s build executed.

“Wrath.” A fifth prisoner, another red-haired woman superficially similar to Nyl.

“Negligence.” More sobs, another death.

“Pride.”

The seventh prisoner’s torn body fell, sending ripples through now-copious amounts of spreading blood. Spilled vitae reached the dead queen’s naked toes, splatters of it staining Garuna’s sallow calves with streaks of red.

Nyl’s fists clenched, her nails biting into her palms. She saw herself in these prisoners - her rage at Arcade’s flirtations, her wine-soaked fury at the feast.

Who is Garuna to judge me?

“Tyrant!”

A thousand pairs of eyes turned to find Nyl in her elevated perch.

Nyl belatedly recognized the shout had been hers. She cringed inside, but fury overtook her body and soul.

“Murderer!” she added.

Garun’s gaze rose, the last head in the courtyard to find her. Green irises, twins to his mother’s, pierced the distance somehow, fixing her in place. “Nyl. You arrive. You have kept us waiting along while.”

Nyl had not considered she had been missed. Chilled by dread, her hands tightened on the bars of her prison window. Garuna’s head, lolled and dead like it was, somehow stared lifelessly at her. Had it moved?

“Nyl, the Ardent no more,” Garun declared. He waved a command and the guards in silver breastplates hustled back to the tower.

Garun shook his head with feigned sadness. “Nyl, the Fool. Nyl, the Unrepentant. Your crime is the gravest of them all. Garuna’s blood is on your hands.”

“A dragon killed your mother, idiot! Not me!”

Nyl’s cell door slammed open, the guards arriving quicker than should have been possible. Nyl braced, ready to fight, found herself quickly outnumbered and overpowered. Two men seized Nyl’s arms while two more put keys to her manacles’ locks.

Nyl snarled and continued to struggle. Their grip unrelenting, two men dragged her to the stairs. Nyl’s foot found purchase on a breastplate. She kicked hard. She half saw, half heard a nearby guard crash down the stairs. She grinned in satisfaction.

Two more guards grabbed her legs, one each, hoisting her waist-high to haul her down twisting steps. Nyl fought and writhed a moment more, then surrendered. She would save her strength, for now.

They found the stricken guard at the base of the steps. Dead with a broken neck. Nyl spat at the body, earning herself an iron-clad knee to the ribs. She grunted with pain while two surplus guards hauled the corpse aside.

Outside, her jailers dragged her through the man-made corridor of looming pikes and guns. The stone-faced guards maintained their humiliating grip on her limbs, carrying her like a log. Only at the end did they right her, before hurling her onto the platform.

Nyl’s bare knees cracked and skidded upon the stones. She caught herself, grit her teeth, and swallowed a yell of pain. She looked up and saw Garuna’s face: her head had changed position again, the queen’s dead stare boring into her once more.

Her son Garun loomed close, his scroll unfurled further, trailing to the ground now, packed with flowing script so fine it seemed indiscernible.

“Nyl, the ultimate sinner. Repent,” Garun commanded.

“What a relief. I worried you would read your vapid scroll at me.”

The butt of a gun smashed the back of Nyl’s skull. She had not heard the striking soldier climb up behind her.

Nyl’s vision swam, but she would not be cowed. She glared at Garun.

Garun’s face dripped with sweat. Rather than make him look nervous, the shine on his face gave him an inhuman character; a man sculpted from alabaster.

Nyl turned from him and scowled at Garuna’s corpse.

“You execute them either way,” she said, then licked a bleeding lip. “A dead queen, and a boy playing judge. A mockery of justice and your mother’s memory. Garuna is dead, and no one can replace her – especially not you.”

She said the last at Garun.

Soldiers everywhere shifted, their fists tightening on guns and pikes.

Garun looked to Garuna: “We waste words on her, mother. Nyl is naught but a beast. A slave to her passions.”

Nyl smirked, angry as much as amused. “Have you gone daft? She is dead!”

The queen moved not a finger, trembled not a lip.

But the boy-turned-man nodded as if she had spoken: “If she is here, so is Arcade. Bind her.”

Nyl jumped to a stand at the mention of her companion. Guards ambushed her before she could ball a fist. They wrestled her arms to her back. Nyl heard the clank of chains and felt her wrists clapped in iron again.

Nyl twisted in their grip and shouted a threat: “Harm a hair on his head, I dare you!”

The guards produced a cloth gag and brought it to her face. Nyl dodged it and promised Garun: “You will not survive the day!”

The guards braced her more firmly. With effort, they secured the gag over her mouth.

Garun ignored Nyl and looked up at the tower: “He is here. Bring him forth.”

Nyl struggled against the guards, felt as if with just a little more strength or the right twist she could break free. She had no plan. But she felt an inner rage, a fury so beastly and powerful she instinctively believed it could kill every man present. The rational part of her brain balked at this, but she ignored its warning voice - the longer this farce continued, the angrier she felt, and the less she cared.

But the power she sensed remained just out of reach. She heard more guards arrive and postponed her fight, giving a last shove calculated to push one of her jailers a step back and give her a view.

Arcade stumbled onto the platform; shackled, dirty, and bloodied. Unlike Nyl, he still wore his armor, dented and rusting now.

Nyl shouted for his attention, but the gag strangled her voice, and Arcade did not see or hear her.

Garun raised his patronizing scroll again, perusing it with a finger, finding his target swiftly: “Arcade the Wavering. Your idleness sowed fertile ground for evil. You bear responsibility for all sins comitted here. Envy. Weakness. Disloyalty. Abandonment.”

Arcade’s head dropped further with each accusation.

“Lust.”

Arcade’s eyes scrunched tight at the last, his face pained.

A shard of ice lodged in Nyl’s chest.

Garun leaned closer, his voice low, insidious: “Recover your honor. Admit the truth. Your attraction to Nyl is nothing but a distraction. A moment of weakness.”

Arcade hesitated and stared at the ground.

Nyl held her breath and searched his face, desperate for him to defend her. She saw nothing under his outer layer of pain.

Arcade finally spoke, his voice weak and cracking: “Nyl is dear to me.”

Garun’s brow rose in indignation, his first human expression of the day. “What?”

Arcade cringed under Garun’s ire, but insisted: “My feelings for Nyl are more than lust.”

“You dare?” Garun’s hands tightened, crinkling the wrapped part of the scroll. He gestured to the queen. “You disrespect Garuna and a warrior’s ethos! Renounce Nyl and be redeemed!”

Arcade raised his head and stiffened his spine. Garun’s words seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect.

“Insolence! Repent!” Garun transformed.

Nyl marveled how Garun’s skin glowed hot and golden. Garuna’s son grew taller. Spidery veins stretched across his thickening, metallic musculature.

Arcade, weak and bloodied, raised his head and tracked the eyes of the towering, still growing youth: “I adore Nyl. Only one sentiment matches its strength: my shame at betraying Garuna.”

Arcade’s words sent tears streaming down Nyl’s cheeks.

“Lies!” the son said, his transformation accelerating. He grew to half-again Arcade’s size. “You choose poorly! Guards! Set fire to this man’s flesh, then put it out with boiling water!”

At Garun’s order, Nyl’s anger and sadness rose to incandescent heights.

Garun continued: “Cut off his ears! Twist off his thumbs! Stretch him upon the rack! Break him on the wheel–”

Nyl’s gag caught fire in her mouth. She spat it out and exhaled - her breath came out as a guttural roar, immediately silencing Garun mid-tirade. She sensed the power in reach. Spurred by Garun’s threats, she broke through some invisible barrier and clutched it tight. The guards holding her screamed and yanked their arms away, staring in shock at their scalded palms and blackened, charred fingers.

Nyl’s skin prickled, then split. Her flesh sank beneath an eruption of silver scales. Her body surged in size, shredding her now-flaming threadbare garments. Her body distended to Garun’s size in a heartbeat, doubled it in another. Still she grew, dwarfing him, outgrowing the dais he stood upon. She sprouted horns the length of a man, teeth like swords, and spread a pair of reptilian wings wide enough to blot out the the sun.

Men fell back in horror, tripping over each other to escape the monster in their midst. Where Nyl once stood, a dragon now sat, one of red eyes and a silver hide. She roared, streamers of flame spouting from her smoking jaw and nostrils.

“Tyrant!” Nyl growled the word at Garun like a curse.

Garun, craven and cowering behind other men, shouted: “Subdue the convict!”

Soldiers, their faces crazed with fear, halted their retreat, raising guns and pikes to confront Nyl. Thousands of armed and armored men now charged and shot at the dragon in their midst.

A deafening volley sent shivers of pain through Nyl, but her scaled hide turned most of the punishment. She closed lizard-like lids, her eyeballs sinking beneath thick protective folds, gunshots zipping by and ringing off her skull. She lashed out blindly, slashing dozens of bodies to ruins with each swipe of her claws. The courtyard immediately stank of blood and gore, enough to overpower the smoke and brimstone scents streaming from her nose. Her tail tore the roof from a house then slammed into prison-tower. The great structure fell, its toppled stones crushing a hundred screaming men. She beat her wings, flattening ranks with gale-force winds. She opened her eyes, aimed, and spat a blazing arc of fire, incinerating soldiers by the hundred before they clambered back to their feet.

She sought and found Garun, fixing the terrified man with her draconic irises. He turned and fled, but she swiped him up into her talons then leaped into the air. He felt heavier than he should, like an ingot of gold. Garun shrieked, utterly unmanned.

She circled the courtyard. She spotted Arcade below, still shackled, his face upturned and watching in confused wonder. Gunmen crawled atop the platform, surrounding Arcade and readying another volley. Pikemen likewise braced weapons to receive her.

“Surrender Arcade and I will spare your puny lord!” Nyl demanded.

The soldiers answered with gunfire. A dozen lead balls tore bloody rips through her wings. She roared in outrage and pain. She dove, blasting another hundred men down in a trail of fire. She circled about, stretched out an arm to snatch Arcade, but a hail of shot blasted her hide and a forest of pikes converted the platform into an impenetrable hedgehog.

The pikes forced Nyl back. She roared again and regained altitude. She held Garun in both arms then ended his screams by depressing her claws deep into his chest. His body burst like a ripe berry, fountaining hot blood. She further crushed his remains, easily massaging his remains into a boneless pulp.

Nyl’s wings beat the air, each swipe cracking like lightning. She swooped over the platform. She dropped Garun’s wretched corpse, perfect aim, his body splattering upon the dais right at Garuna’s feet.

The soldiers ceased fighting. All heads turned first to the corpse, then to their queen.

Nyl coasted to a hover, wings beating to keep her massive frame aloft. “Give me Arcade, or I will burn you all and flatten your pathetic city!”

The soldiers ignored her, awaiting a sign from their dead queen.

Nyl regarded Garuna, and again accosted the soldiers: “She is dead! Think for yourselves, fools! I may yet be merciful!”

Nyl blinked. In that flickering moment, a golden staff appeared in Garuna’s dead hand.

The corpse-queen stood.

No – she did not stand. Something pulled her up - invisible strings like some marionette. Garuna lurched a step forward under the guidance of an unpracticed puppeteer. The hem of her white robes met her son’s corpse, ruins that could hardly be considered a body. Her dress soaked up his blood, the vitae climbing with impossible speed. Her own side wound likewise blossomed anew, coating her in red, transforming her from a pallid queen of white to one of crimson. Her tattered armor rusted to match.

Nyl hovered and watched, amazed, transfixed.

Garuna’s staff rose high, pushed aloft by an arm both gangling and torpid. Her head lolled upon a loose neck, then her pallid muscles flexed. She slammed her staff down on the stone through the ruins of her mutilated son.

Garun’s flesh shattered, as if made of glass. The pieces scattered, slowed, then returned, coalescing into three whirling vortices; shards scaling each other in assembly of new shapes.

Nyl felt fear, then. She did not know what this magic portended . She sensed opportunity slipping away.

The soldiers, entranced by their queen’s conjuring, lowered their guard.

Nyl would capitalize on their distraction. She dived in to rescue the man she adored.

She decelerated at the last moment, the wind from her beating wings blowing men over. Soldiers stumbled and tripped as they twisted to face her. Nyl reached through them, brushing aside clattering pikes, separated from Arcade by only a few more meters.

Twinned, oversized halberds arose from nowhere, crossing to impede Nyl’s reaching talons. Metal from base to pointed tip, the axe heads clacked against her claws.

“I am Luna,” announced one soft, feminine voice.

“And I am Runa,” echoed her twin.

Nyl balked, withdrawing her scaly arm. She planted her hind legs on the ground, bracing for another attempt.

Two tall, statuesque, golden-armored women barred her way. Both wore hooded helmets encasing unseeing eyes, sentries as blind as they were sure-footed and beautiful. Feathered wings sprouted from their ear guards in a style imitating Garuna’s helmet back when she had battled a dragon at Nyl’s side.

The women spoke in harmony: “We remember our grandmother Garuna, and our father Garun. Arcade is ours to command, not yours to tempt into wickedness.”

The appearance of the daughters struck Nyl dumb. Something new drew her eye - Garuna, inanimate and seated again. Her throne had grown in size and grandeur, now featuring runes etched in marble and woven with gold filigree. Garuna’s body loomed larger and more ostentatiously dressed, though she languished in posture, every bit as dead as before.

Next to her a new and smaller throne had mysteriously appeared. Garun, the queen’s dead son, sat upon it. His body miraculously repaired, his skin had whitened and retained only a portion of its former golden shine. His suit of golden armor had reknit, flawless but for a symbolic red circle painted over his heart. Nyl had crushed him mere moments ago, yet Garun now appeared as if peacefully preserved dead for years. The symbol upon his chest leaked a trickle of dark red liquid.

“Surrender, beast,” Luna said, calm.

“Or be subdued,” Runa threatened, equally composed.

Their words buoyed Nyl’s contempt, breaking her from her stupor. She would have incinerated them on the spot if not for the risk of harming Arcade.

“Come to me, my love! Break free!” Nyl urged.

She could not tell if Arcade had heard her: the soldiers resumed their attack. Seven-meter-long pikes pricked her, Nyl’s large body an easy mark. Men ten ranks deep stabbed at her with all their might. Lead shot from a thousand guns peppered her hide, an incessant sting, a hundred arquebuses loading while another hundred discharged. The close-range impacts drew blood, and Nyl felt balls and broken spear tips grind against each other beneath her scales.

Nyl howled her anger. Her whipcord muscles bulged as she reared her claws to strike.

The towering granddaughters thrust out their halberds, a thicket of pikes rising to reinforce them.

Nyl’s claws shredded through shafts, cracking them in half. Men died, their splintering weapons crushing ribcages and slicing flesh open. But their audacity paid proof in their numbers, and Nyl’s reptilian reach slowed and stopped a meter from Arcade. The twins struck her then, chopping with strength greater than mortal men, their axes parting her scales and biting into bone.

Nyl recoiled in pain. No amount of rage or willpower could overcome these men and women, and she could not risk burning Arcade. She spread her wings and leaped into the air once more. She faltered, her wings full of holes and slick with blood, torn webbing that barely purchased air.

“Bring her down!” Luna demanded.

“Tame the beast!” Runa echoed.

Gunners redoubled their efforts, shooting, reloading, shooting, obeying despite the mortal fear frozen on their faces. Pike heads chased her feet, daring Nyl to fall upon them.

Nyl pounded her wings as hard as she could, dropping half a meter for every meter painfully purchased. She had to flee. Now.

“Do not let her escape!”

Nyl climbed a dozen meters, then another. It did not require much distance for the guns to lose their accuracy despite her size. The pain slowed then stopped as she reached the city walls. She heard the twin’s voices, tinny and furious, barely audible under the pop of impotent guns and spreading, crackling fires.

Nyl’s muscles tired. The holes in her wings seared with pain. She felt herself losing her grip on this dragon form. She had no idea how she could transform in the first place, or why. She knew only that she needed help.

She searched the sky, hoped to see the sun sinking. She silently begged this nightmare to end.

Please, no more, she thought.

But the sun hung high, baleful and bright.

She cast her gaze far over grassy plains, seeking, saw a smudge on the horizon – a city on a hill.

Lacking options, she turned towards it. Every movement felt more leaden, every flap of her wings purchased less air.

Help me, please, she thought.

Garuna’s city had looked pale and soulless. In comparison, this city appeared dark. But as Nyl closed on it she saw a riot of reds and oranges - men and women waving banners in welcome, she realized.

Nyl’s thoughts slowed. Concentration required physical effort. She had lost a great deal of blood. Ribbons of it slopped from her beating wings and painted the countryside.

The city’s gates creaked open as she neared. She adjusted her waning flight path, aiming for the opening.

I will not make it. The thought came and went analytically.

The ground crashed into Nyl. Shocking, unexpected.

Her mass carved a furrow into the earth. She tumbled within a meandering trench of her own making, a reckless, flopping ball of wings, talons, and tail.

She plowed to a halt at the center of a crater. Her scaly wings and limbs collapsed in a heap.

Her furnace heart slowed, dimmed by loss. Arcade’s words echoed in her skull:

“Nyl is dear to me.”

“My feelings for Nyl are more than lust.”

“I adore Nyl.”

Face half buried in dirt, she only saw through one eye, vision marred by wetness. She blinked away a tear and saw her own bloody arm sprawled over the dirt. Weak. Human, again.

She remembered what it felt like to kiss him, and wondered if she would ever feel that again.

She closed her eyes.

The last thing she heard – galloping horses and shouting men.