When she gained the side of her advisers, she was finally close enough to see for herself. Out and down from her vantage, standing boldly, within bow range, row upon row of soldiers stood in perfect formations. Thousands of men, among them huge ladder towers, and great battering rams, stood at the ready. Catapults, and wagon loads of head-size boulders for ammunition, were spread evenly just out of bow shot, in a row parallel to the wall.
“Look,” General Spyra pointed down, and then helped the Queen lean out past the arrow crenellations, to see what it was he was trying to show her.
Below them, and a bit to the right, directly in front of that particular set of gates, stood half a dozen soldiers at attention. They had so many arrows sticking out of them, that they resembled porcupines, yet none of them had fallen. In front of them, was a pyramid stack of three barrel kegs.
“What of the other gates?” Willa asked.
She felt as if she were sinking in sand, and had the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.
“The same,” Spyra answered, with little or no emotion in his voice. “Around ten thousand men, who are unhindered by our arrows, and ready to set all of the outer gates on fire with those casks of oil.”
“Curse the gods of the heavens and earth,” Willa said to herself, fingering the horn that she had snatched from her bedside table as she left her room.
Just then, a small, mule drawn wagon, pulling a load of supplies up one of the long, slow sloping ramps that ran on the inside of the wall, broke free from its tethers. Men shouted, and screamed to make way, as the cart wobbled, and scraped against the wall on its unhindered way down the ramp. Men dove and leapt out of its way, as it gained careening speed, then smashed into the next mule cart, which was halfway up the slope. A man, and a mule were crushed to death, and a few men were injured from the tumbles they took, while trying to avoid a direct hit.
Queen Willa decided not to mock the gods anymore, and also decided that never in all of her life had she felt more helpless than she did just then.
“What is it that you and Hyden Hawk have come up with?” she asked Targon, with her last bit of hope hanging in the balance.
“There is a plan,” Targon answered, with a doubtful look on his face. “But it cannot even be started until he returns.”
“Returns?” She didn’t understand.
With an expectant wince at what her reaction would be, Targon explained.
“He has gone into the Tower.”
“Wha – What Tower?” Willa asked.
The sand she felt like she was sinking in was about to suck her under, because she knew the answer to her question before he spoke it.
At least ten would-be heroes had gone into Pratchert’s Tower in her lifetime. Not a single one of them had ever been heard from again. According to the records, over a hundred wizards, sorcerers, mages, and fools had tried to beat Dahg Mahn’s trials over the ages. None of them had succeeded.
She didn’t even think, before she took the Horn of Doon from inside her robe, and put it to her mouth. The loud blasting sound it made startled General Spyra, who almost tumbled over the edge of the wall. It was all Targon could do to wrestle him back to safety. The scene before her only served to confirm that, without a doubt, it was indeed a time of great need.
Vaegon sat patiently beside the big, bland block of Wardstone, waiting for something to happen. On top of the stone, Ironspike lay in the exact place, where it had melted itself a snug cradle, into the semi-smooth surface a few thousand years ago. A depression, shaped roughly like a war hammer, and a few smaller ones shaped like large arrowheads, were empty alongside the sword.
Nothing had happened when Vaegon placed it there, nothing at all. He had half expected a flare of light, or a telling glow, or maybe even a hum, but there was nothing to indicate that the great sword was replenishing its power. He had slept for awhile and was now a growing restless. Dugak’s long, powerful snores filled the cavern. The sound reverberated off of the stone walls, and came closing in on the elf.
If there was one thing that Vaegon, or any other elf for that matter, didn’t like, it was being enclosed underground. The smoky torch flame, wavering in its crude sconce by the entryway, was the only movement. Save for the grotesque shadows it threw across the roughly hewn walls.
“There’s no breeze, to sway the grass and the trees, even if there were grass and trees to be swayed…” Vaegon sarcastically butchered the words, while singing a verse of an old elven tune in a soft, musical voice. “There are no songs, for the birds and the bees are all gone, and all they left here is the decay…”
Worse than the dead air, and the suffocating feeling, was the fact that this wasn’t just a cavern: it was also a catacomb. There were no corpses in this particular room, but just outside, there was a tunnel lined with rooms, just like this one, and they weren’t so empty.
Vaegon shivered at the thought, and forced it away. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to know. All he wanted was to get back into the open, to see the sun, the moon, or the stars overhead, and to breathe in the fresh air. He had been sitting there so long, that he wasn’t sure if it was night or day anymore.
He decided that when Dugak woke, they would go. There was no way he, or the dwarf, could tell if the sword had been replenished. The important thing was that he now knew where the cooling stone was hidden so that he could bring Mikahl here if…No, he corrected his thought. Not if, but when, Mikahl recovered from his injuries.
Vaegon stood, looked at the sword, and seeing that it appeared no different than it had the last time he had looked, let out a frustrated sigh. He began to pace the dusty gravel floor of the chamber, trying to fight off his claustrophobic feelings, and his unease, in general. The crunch of his footfalls gave him a strange comfort, in the otherwise silent catacombs. He was sure he would have felt much better if he still had his elven vision. Seeing in the darkness is one of the things he had taken for granted all of his life. He could still make his way in the dark without the torch, but with his vision he could have…Could have what?
“No use in might’ve been, foolish elf!” he said to himself out loud. “It’s the lot I’ve been left with so I must accept it and move on.”
“Who are you talking to?” a wavy, liquid voice said from the doorway.
The sound of it, and its suddenness, startled Vaegon so badly that he almost fell to his knees. He looked for the source of it, and found a ghostly form standing there, a man in a long, flowing robe, sporting a crown upon his head. The figure had no substance, and very little color, but was still defined in smoky white, and vivid detail. The ghostly thing had been human once, with a sharp nose, high cheekbones, deeply set eyes, and long straight hair.
“What? Who are you?” Vaegon asked, as he eased his way back towards the cooling stone.
“I was once a King,” the ghost said sadly. “But now, I’m just a harmless ghost.”
There was a hint of sarcasm in the tone of his voice.
“There’s so many undead up and about, that I decided to go look for a conversation. It’s lonely down here, you know. I felt the sword there, and heard you singing.” The apparition pointed a bony finger at Ironspike on the cooling stone. “It’s not every day a power such as that comes around. It’s driving them away. As I suppose it should do. No undead soul wants to feel its edge biting into them. It’s such a final thought, don’t you think?”
“What?” was all Vaegon could manage to get out of his mouth. The dwarf’s powerful snore filled the silence that followed.
The ghost looked at Dugak curiously and then back to Vaegon.
“Well sir, there are no ghosts or undead in here, and I doubt you can relate to my situation well enough to sustain a decent parley, so I’ll be on my way.”
The ghost bowed regally.
“Good day,” it said, just before it disappeared entirely.
Instantly, Vaegon felt the air begin to warm around him. He had been too frightened to notice how cold the chamber had gotten. He spent long moments blinking his good eye, trying to figure out whether he’d really seeing the thing, or if he’d gone crazy down here in the underground. It didn’t matter, he decided. Crazy or not, the thing had felt Ironspike’s power, so it was time for them to go.
He put the sword back in its sheath and, as politely as he could manage, he woke Dugak.
They started back the way they had come. Vaegon had never been happier to see the light of day than he was when they came out of the mouth of the necropolis, into the afternoon sun. The moment they were drenched in the bright, welcoming warmth of it though, he knew something was wrong. He turned, and saw the source of the rancid stench that had assailed his nostrils. A troop of soldiers was there, looking just as surprised as he and Dugak were. Every one of them was dead, and rotting on the bone, but coming at them with murderous intent nonetheless.
Mikahl was back in his childhood bed, in his mother’s tiny apartment, in the servants’ wing of Lakeside Castle. His mother was in the old, creaky rocking chair in the corner, needling something or other out of a peach colored yarn. The fall of her golden hair shone with angelic radiance, and he was bathed in her feelings of love for him.
“Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…” the chair sounded, as she slowly rocked it to and fro. In a nearly inaudible voice, she hummed an old lullaby in time with the rocking of the chair.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the tranquility of the scene that he found himself in, Mikahl crept out of bed, and tiptoed to the window.
Outside, he saw the ocean rolling and swelling in the distance. A deep, dark sea wasn’t supposed to be outside that window, but he accepted it as if it was. He felt a comforting presence ease up beside him, and peek its furry head out, to see what it was that he was looking at. It was Grrr, the Great Wolf, and sensing him there, caused a coldness to churn inside Mikahl’s belly. As he scratched the wolf behind the ears, he realized that he was no longer a boy, and that the sound he was hearing wasn’t his mother’s rocking chair, but was the creaking, and groaning of a ship. He looked from the wolf, back out the window, and it was there, passing very close to them.
“Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…” the timbers slowly groaned, and the taut ropes protested.
The ship’s deck was littered with bodies. A small group of tired and haggard looking men worked to throw them overboard, one at a time by the limbs, like sacks of grain. Each of their faces was full of fear and defeat. At the front of the ship, leaning out like some half dead bowsprit, was King Glendar.
Glendar turned, and looked at Mikahl with eyes as cold and black as jet, and smiled a grin of needle sharp teeth. It wasn’t a smile of victory or menace. It was a smile full of contempt; contempt for the living, for the ship was floundering aimlessly at sea now. There was no crew in sight, only King Glendar, and a few Westland soldiers tossing corpses out into the vast, cobalt expanse, while drifting to their own certain deaths.
Mikahl turned from the window, and hurried to the door of the little room, but it wouldn’t open for him. He tried and tried to turn the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. Terror shot through him like wildfire.
“There has to be a way!” Loudin’s voice spoke from the chair where his mother had been sitting.
Mikahl’s fear ebbed away, and he smiled at his big, tattoo-covered friend.
“Aye Loudin, but what is it?”
“There is only one way!” King Balton’s hoarse voice croaked from the bed.
He was buried under a pile of blankets, and the skin of his face was greenish pale, and slick with sweat. The poison was still eating his life away, and he was gasping for breath.
“Think…Then act…Think…Then act…Think…Then act…” the raspy mantra echoed on and on.
Suddenly, Grrr rose with his hackles standing on end, and a deep rumbling growl in his throat. Mikahl turned to the window. Peeking in, with a gleeful smile on his sickly, white face was the wizard Pael. His cackling laugh echoed through the room, and it all collapsed into a sudden blackness that overtook Mikahl.
Alone again, back in his coma, the only sound Mikahl could hear in that dark empty place, was the sound of his own broken body trying desperately to draw breath. “Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth… Creeek… Krooth…”
After he stepped inside, Hyden Hawk closed the door to Pratchert’s Tower behind him. Talon flapped up from his shoulder with a start, and he jumped a little himself.
There was no room or hallway there. He found himself in a forest. Sort of a forest, anyway. Leading out ahead of him was a tunnel-like corridor formed of greenery. What little space overhead, that wasn’t closed in by branches and leaves, was filled with tangles of colorful, flowering vines, and clumps of hanging moss. The moss seemed to glow a radiant yellowish color, which lit the underside of the canopy like a lantern might. The thick trunks of the trees, that lined the archway in nearly perfect rows, were wrapped in spirals of ivy and creepers. Between, and behind the trunks, an unforgiving wall of thorn-bearing shrubs filled every conceivable space. Beyond that, there appeared to be nothing but blackness.
Talon flew up to the peak of the arch and tried and tried to get through where there should have been sky, but the effort was futile. There would be no bird’s eye view of the layout of this place, Hyden decided.
After further investigation, Hyden found that the walls of this passage were just as impenetrable as the roof was. Seeing that there was nothing else to do, but find where the forest tunnel led, Hyden set off down the leaf-strewn, grass covered floor with Talon winging along beside him.
Clumps of wildflowers sprouted up here and there, some with tiny white petals, some with big drooping orange and red blooms. Around the base of a rather large tree, a cluster of purple and gray mushrooms sprouted up, like a little city of toadstool buildings. A bright, yellow butterfly fluttered by on its way to an even brighter, cerulean colored flower, which bloomed from the thorny shrub beyond the trees. Hyden half expected a group of fairy folk to troop out, and dance a jig for him.