by P D Dennison
Turynn’s face peeked through the crack below Ravak’s as the Barbarian stood on his tip toes to witness the spectacle within.
“What’s happening?” asked Manya.
“Back out of the way,” said Ravak shoving the two aside. He kicked at the door to shift the debris on the other side. He and Turynn both put their shoulders into the door and shoved with all their might.
They managed to get it open enough to slip through and scrambled clumsily over the mounds of junk, all the while watching Graxxen in the midst of his spell casting at the center of the lair.
“We’re too late!” shouted Manya. “He’s opening a Transportal and the magick is nearly complete!”
Graxxen stood glaring at them. His bare skull face and hollow, purple, glowing eyes fixed on the three companions as they made their way into the room. He said nothing, but merely pointed at Ravak and then was lost in the brilliance of the magick; as the portal began to consume him and the pile. Black tendrils of magick from the nethyr wrapped their way around him and all his gear until he disappeared into the shadowy grasp of his magick and with a flash of purple Blood Magick brought to life with electricity, he was gone.
The ghouls slowly encircled the trio. Graxxen’s undead servants the ghouls of Dragon’s Maw Keep. The odds were overwhelming and they had no quick means of escape. Manya scrambled back up over the blockage and through the only slightly opened door while Ravak and Turynn fought off the onslaught of ghouls frantically. The magick circle seemed to come to life once again. Turynn noticed it first. There was a faint white glow and the sound of a hum. This time a brilliant white oval portal opened and through it stepped a large man.
Garbed in fine furs lined with armoured plates of platinum and wielding a broadsword inscribed with ancient text all aglow with white light, the being stepped toward the ghouls and the trio. The ghouls all cowered and shrunk away from him.
“There is no justice in this.” He spoke to them all, voice booming into the companions’ minds as if they had thought rather than heard its sound. Manya peered back through the hole in the door at the being, mouth dropped in awe. Ravak and Turynn both stood in wonder before him. He pointed his sword out toward the ghouls and spoke one word.
“Stuppa!” He said loudly and calmly, sword extended. With a modest electrical flash of white energy, the ghouls all disintegrated into ash and crumbled to the floor of the cave. He stepped out of the circle and approached them, lowering his sword to the ground to rest both hands on the pommel.
Manya scrambled back into the room to find out who their saviour was.
He spoke again. “Come here, young woman. Have no fear of me. I mean you no harm and am here only to help you.”
Manya fumbled over the piled up junk and took her position behind her brother and Ravak.
“Who are you?” Ravak asked, anxious to learn if this being was friend or foe. He felt quite sure nothing good could come of this encounter based on his recent experiences.
“I am shocked you do not recognize me, Ravak, Ekesson,” the strange being proclaimed.
“How do you know my name? We’ve never met before now, stranger. Do you mean to destroy us with your sorcery as so many others have tried today? For I can tell you that I am slayer of dragons, ghouls, and goblins and will not be felled so easily.”
The stranger laughed heartily and shook his head.
“No, certainly not. You have demonstrated great courage and honour, Winter Wolf. I am here to reward and protect you for your honour and bravery. You are the greatest son of the horde in this Age. Honor and glory coupled with towering responsibility awaits you and your companions. For today was merely a taste of the power of the evil you will have to overcome to save your people from the fate of the ghouls you just saw.”
“You have not yet answered my question, sir. Who are you?” Ravak asked again impatiently. Manya put a hand on his shoulder to restrain him.
The being laughed heartily again.
“Ravak, your courage knows no bounds and that is why you and your companions have been chosen to face the challenges that await you on the road ahead. I am Krigaar, God of Justice, Peace Maker of Asgaard.”
Ravak’s eyes widened and he fell to one knee before the god.
“My lord, forgive my ignorance.”
“Rise, Winter Wolf. You are a man of the Second Age of Midgaard and none of your Age has ever laid eyes on a god before. I do not blame your cautious and suspicious nature. You’ve been through quite an ordeal. You and your companions must come with me. There is much to discuss and much planning to do. That creature you saw is named Graxxen. He is your quarry and he aims to kill everyone and everything. You must stop him.”
He motioned for them to follow him through the portal and disappeared back into the white light. The air round the portal had come alive with white magical electricity. Manya’s hair moved as if it were alive, her ringlets reaching out like tentacles. The three looked at each other nervously.
Ravak went first. He stepped through and disappeared into the light. Manya looked at Turynn shrugged and followed Ravak.
Turynn shook his head in disbelief. How could his sister and Ravak so blindly trust this man to be the god he said he was? He hesitated a moment longer, muttering under his breath. The voice came back through the portal one last time.
“Come, Turynn!”
Turynn jittered wide-eyed at the booming command and rushed forward through the portal to join his companions. It disappeared behind him in a flash, leaving only the darkness of the cavern where the ashes of the ghouls began to spread across the floor of the dark cave.
Chapter 12
Dod Givare and Liv Givare
“Mistress, please forgive my failure!” Graxxen anxiously pleaded. “I had no idea the magi of the Tower had found me! How was I to know they had sent out a search party? I had thought them far too pompous and caught up in their own studies to worry about the scheming and plotting of a poor withered old mage from the First Age.”
Graxxen knelt before Skulga, begging for his life. He knelt before no man, but this woman, the Mistress of Death, Goddess of Death and Vengeance; he knelt before her, and only her.
Skulga held dominion over Avgruxx. It lay on one of the deeper layers of the Abyss. The nethyr region after place of Midgaard and the hell to Asgaard’s heaven, Avgruxx was a place of great suffering and darkness.
Skulga had the power to disarm Graxxen’s magickal arsenal at will. She had the power to rot the very bones into dust that held his miserable tortured soul to the physical wyrld. She was the goddess of death and wherever she went, disease and pestilence went with her. Garbed in a flowing, white gown and carrying a long sword imbued with a skull-shaped magickal orb in the hilt she caused disease with merely a wave of the blade. The sword’s name was Dod Givare, meaning death bringer in the Old Nordish Speak and wherever Skulga took, it death was sure to follow.
Her flesh half dark and half light, stark pale white on her right side, on the left side, her skin was as black as pitch and again as featureless as the back of the darkest cave in the land. Her face was featureless and gaunt throughout. She kept her hair long, letting it fall down over her shoulders white like spider silk, fine and shiny. Her soul matched her featureless form; dark, blank, and without shape. She cared for nothing save the power she wished to usurp from Avgud and his little minion gods that sat high atop their thrones in Asgaard, her brothers and sisters from the dawn of time. The long Ages of her existence were spent hatching the plan she was only now bringing to life.
At the time of their inception into godhood her appointment was to be at Avgud’s side to rule as his queen over all the gods of Midgaard. Plans change and the creator reassigned her to Avgruxx as keeper of the dead, deciding her too ambitious and Avgud perfectly capable of ruling the heavens of his own accord. The creator instead gave to Avgud a trophy wife, Heyaa, whose beauty and fealty to the creator were both beyond reproach.
Graxxen became a key instrument to her plan.
She sought the enslavement of the peoples of the Land of Shaarn. A goddess required deific power and it came from only one source; worship. She had some followers, but the goddess of death and vengeance does not garner a large following when compared to the much more benevolent and loving gods of Asgaard in the high heavens. She had grown cold and her heart hardened to the lives of men. Her lingering, fruitless existence without love or worship made her dark and bitter, all the while feeding the hate and rage within her until she devised a plan to take the worship of the good people of Shaarn by force. This whelp, this worm, this dying husk of a mere mortal man Graxxen, now the key to her success failed her.
She would now have to take all the eggs the plebe salvaged and hatch them elsewhere. As the goddess of death, she would not be able to nurture the eggs herself without killing the young within and now here knelt the worm Graxxen with only a handful of the eggs and piles of junk strewn about her throne room, begging for his unlife.
“Please, mistress, I exist only to do your bidding. Allow me another chance to prove to you my great worth.” Graxxen clung at her robe and kissed her feet, an act a normal mortal would have perished from instantly, but for Graxxen, it was nothing.
“My lady, there is something I have not yet told you. Something that ensures our victory over the will of the people of Shaarn and would surely break them. But I require more time and a place to foster the eggs where I will not be disturbed. After only two seasons, a young dragon is of adult size. Once the beasts have reached this full grown state, I have researched a ritual lost to the Ages that will allow me to convert them into a creature even more terrible than a fire breathing red dragon of old.”
She cut him short. “You have failed me so far, lich! You’ve done a very good job of fouling up my plans completely without even trying! What could you possibly offer up to me, a goddess, which I have not already considered? You will prepare your armies for war! You will forge the great lances of old to be carried by the Dragon Riders! You will have saddles fashioned to mount and house our armada of dragons when they are ready! And you will retake Dragon’s Maw Keep by force. The keep must not be lost! It is the key to holding the South and North at odds! Not to mention the great many eggs you left behind there! Now go! Make sure you follow my orders to the last or your days on Shaarn will be eternally filled with the suffering only I can inflict! To the northern wastes with you! To the Spiral of the Ice Serpent! That shall be your stronghold now! Enjoy the cold, whelp! It will match the warmth of your soul nicely!” She pointed off into the distance, signalling the time had come for Graxxen to make a hasty exit.
Skulga watched as he cast the Transportal spell and at the last moment, she thought she glimpsed a glimmer in his eye that planted a seed of distrust within her shrivelled heart. She trusted him little enough. After all, Graxxen’s very being radiated evil. Neither could trust the other at the best of times. But this time, she noticed something different. The fear had gone out of the creature’s eye, replaced with something she could not quite put her finger on. She found it difficult to read on the barren rotted face of a lich with only a spot of mortal essence for an eye, but still she spied it there and it gnawed at her from within warning her to watch him closely in the future. She saw confidence and a confidant slave was no longer a slave at all.
Skulga looked to her scrying pool of festering bubbling blood and rot. She had to find out who these mortals were that had so easily crumbled her plans.
Within the pool she’d poured all manner of foul and rotted blood from an array of creatures too wide to name that had fallen before her. The surface of the foul liquid bubbled and glopped. The rot and the dark Blood Magick within sent trailers of vaporous arcane mist into the air above. Had a mortal stood present, the smell alone would have set him retching and writhing, poisoned on the floor. She smiled wickedly as she approached. This pool had let her look many times into the wyrld of men and the hearts of the gods of Asgaard.
The pool had been enchanted with the same magick the great Noorns used to portend the fates of men. She had added her own sinister twists to the incantations when she created the device, making it truly her own. Instead of purified and blessed water, she used Blood Magick and the blood of her sacrifices to fuel the liquid’s terrible power.
She waived her hand over the surface and the gory liquid danced at her command, splashing up about her fingers. She plunged her hand deep into the pool almost up to the elbow and stirred the rot with her pallid arm. The pool was not deep enough to perform such an action and where her hand should have hit bottom, it did not. Instead, the magick allowed her to reach deeply into the nethyr. The enchanted blood had become a conduit to other realms from which she drew her dark powers. She felt the hands and tongues of the evil things on the other side of the bloody mirror lick, snap, and grope at her arm. Things so dark and foul they weren’t fit to exist. Not even in Avgruxx. Things from the deepest pits of the Nine Hells where none dare tread save those that preside in such places. Unholy beasts held prisoner by the very Abyss itself. They sought a conduit to other wyrlds to wreak their havoc and horror on places and things they’d been locked away from. She revelled in the sensation deeply and closed her eyes smiling, focusing on the Blood Magick of the nethyrwyrld.
She focused on the dragons, their eggs, on sorcery in general, and the magi of the Tower. Faces shot through her mind of young women and men. She bypassed all the males and closely examined each female for the right specimen. She went on like this, locked deep in the trance of the Blood Magick, for an hour or more until finally an image drew within her mind vividly the longer she refined her search. Eventually she saw her; the face of the one who would foster the dragons back to life. This young woman was already an accomplished sorceress and businesswoman within the Tower community and the apprentice of one Rostioff Fastelaine, who was the right arm of Danthalas Whiteash the Arch Mage of the Tower of High Sorcery himself.
Present at the war against Graxxen during the First Age, Danthalas witnessed the fall of of the lich’s forces. They fled their master and Dragon’s Maw Keep to usher in the dawn of the Second Age of the Land of Shaarn. He knew the power of the darkness and he must be kept busy while she worked. But this young lady and her two male companions had already done a great deal to foil her plans and rattle Graxxen’s cage. She focused deeply and concentrated, reciting the incantations of gods from Ages now long passed in languages long forgotten, never spoken by men, the languages of ancient demons and devils from the lowest planes of the Abyss. She chanted, lost deep within the magick, her form rigid in front of the pool. No longer aware of her physical being as she worked the magick to fruition, she stood there entranced by the darkness.
A name came to her, Manya Silverleaf. Her hazelnut curls bouncing in the spring breeze, luscious cheeks smiling round and rosy. She’d been orphaned. Sister to a thief, sorceress, an innkeeper, and a shop keeper all at once, but at present she did not keep shop nor tend an inn. Nor did she appear to be performing any magick. No, she was in the company of gods. How could this be? She focused deeper on the girl. No, no, it couldn’t be true. She resided in the presence of Krigaar himself somewhere deep in the mountains in another land of Midgaard. Seated in a field of marigolds, out in front of a cottage, daydreaming and looking out up to the mountains in the distance.
A beautiful little place set deep within a valley surrounded on all sides by high snow covered peaks and again outside the peaks by water on all sides, she and her companions received the aid of the god of justice himself. What purpose had Krigaar with the young lady? Skulga watched them closely and focused all her power on the scenes so as to bring their movements to life and volume to their conversation.
“Good morning, Manya,” came the voice of a god from within the cottage as Krigaar stepped out. Two mornings had passed since their arrival to the place he had referenced only as Haven.
“Good morning, your grace,” came her reply. She stood brushing the grass and pollen from her dress and then bowed deeply be
fore Krigaar. She’d been reading an ancient, dusty leather bound volume on the subject of dragon rearing and husbandry that she’d requested of the god two days prior.
“I trust you are feeling all but fully recovered from your ordeals?” He motioned with his hand for her to stand upright again.
“Yes, I feel I am ready to return to the eggs and gather them back at the Tower in Stromsgate. It is a matter of utmost urgency that we return to Dragon’s Maw Keep before the lich Graxxen is able to. I’ve been reading the ancient texts you’ve left for me and they speak of how the magick either dark or light may foster the eggs into hatching. I’ve surmised I might be of pure and honourable enough character and possess sufficient enough arcane inclination to foster the remaining eggs into the dragons of old. Because of my honor and virtue, it will only take me a fraction of the time it will Graxxen and then we might meet him on the field of battle on even terms.”
Krigaar stared at her long and hard for a moment. A tall, hard looking man with great bushy eyebrows over stern-looking blue eyes his gaunt face showed his age, yet his skin was taught and smooth like that of a young man, creased only ever so slightly here and there as the eons had laughed lines around his eyes and mouth. Krigaar stood taller than mortal men a full eight feet in height with a muscular warrior’s build and dress to match with a long sword strapped at his waist he called Svard Rattvisa, which meant the Sword of Justice. He began to nod slowly.