by Justin Swapp
“Take one,” she said when she handed him a torch.
Marcus’s torchlight illuminated the passageway, exposing its rough walls lined with rows of perfectly aligned skulls. Just past the entryway, next to each wall, stood a basin that held a reservoir of liquid that reflected the torchlight.
“Submerge your torch in the basin,” Elba ordered.
“But how will we see?”
Elba placed her torch into the small reservoir. Marcus did the same in spite of himself.
Fire leapt from each reservoir as if the basins had been filled with gasoline. The flames ran down parallel paths above the skulls along the walls of passage. The flames were an amazing sight. They traveled for some time, eventually opening up to illuminate a vast, expanding cavern. Finally the flames looped around and met in the middle on the other side of a large, circular cave, surrounding the largest pit that Marcus had ever seen. The flames illuminated behind the skulls’ eyes, licking and writhing. The walls seemed alive.
“Come.” Elba crossed the threshold. “You need to see this.” Marcus and the servants followed.
“What did you mean that I had proven myself worthy?” Marcus asked, walking past the countless skulls whose fiery eye sockets gave him an ominous feeling.
“Magic is real,” Elba reached her free hand out and brushed it against the skulls as she walked by. “You know that now.”
Marcus thought he heard something soft, like a whisper, and he whirled around raising his hands defensively.
He saw no one but Elba’s stoic servants and the flickering firelight in the skulls.
“Magic is all around us, Marcus,” she said, gazing at something he couldn’t see. “Like air only the oblivious ignore it.”
Marcus felt something brush past him like a wind gust, but again, he saw nothing.
“Leave me alone,” Marcus said into thin air as he circled around.
“We may be in the catacombs, Marcus,” Elba said, “but this place is alive with the dead.”
Marcus focused on Elba and slowly shook his head. “What I did earlier, was that magic?”
Elba sighed. It wasn’t comical, but she said, “Your father should have been the one to have this conversation with you, not me. But, he went and got himself blown up, didn’t he?”
Marcus didn’t like it when Elba got like this. He had a hard time understanding her and her mood swings.
“So the obligation to bring you along was passed on to your grandfather,” she stared distantly, “but he wouldn’t have it. He wanted to keep it from you, so now I have to break you in. Very nasty process, as you have seen. He had better let me have my pick of his collection for this.”
As they approached the end of the passageway, Marcus’s mouth gaped as the path expanded into a large, circular cave. Standing at the edge, he looked down into the pit and saw more bones. Below him, alternating rings of different types of bones circled the pit, like rings on an ancient tree. A skull, then an arm bone, then a skull, and a leg bone, and so on.
“Tell me this isn’t where you got that Chinese food you fed me earlier,” Marcus said.
Around the pit on their same level, carved-out doors circled the cave.
“What is this place?” Marcus walked to the nearest door and touched the frame, which was made of packed earth.
“These are the catacombs of the Dun-Bhar,” she said. Marcus noted a hint of pride in her voice.
“What is the Dun-Bhar?”
“‘Who are the Dun-Bhar’ is what you should ask,” Elba said. “And the answer is: you.”
“Me?” Marcus stepped backward. “But I don’t belong here.”
“Magic comes in many forms, Marcus. Its uses are as vast as the sands of the seashore, and each wielder has their own agenda. Some come by the power naturally, and others acquire it by ambition and force. But we, the Dun-Bhar, have but one innate agenda. Do you know what that is?”
Marcus leaned against the dirt wall, slid to the ground, and thought for a moment. He still struggled to grasp that magic was real and that somehow he was involved with it. But now, to think that he should know what the Dun-Bhar were, all about was just silly.
“I don’t know,” Marcus picked up a rock and threw it into the pit. “How would I?”
“Because you have experienced it,” she removed his sphere and held it out in her hand. The cold, blue wisps danced like fireflies imprisoned in glass. “Haven’t you?”
As she held out the sphere, Marcus sprang up, feeling drawn to it instantly. He closed his eyes, consciously took a step back, and leaned against the wall again.
“After all this, all you have endured since this sphere has come into your life, you still want it?” she asked, her eyes widened. She looked anxious. “Don’t you see?”
Marcus considered her comment. The sphere had caused him great grief, but it had saved him too. He couldn’t explain the pull he felt toward it, but he knew it wasn’t normal, it was…
Before he could complete his thought, he saw something across the pit; a flicker of light coming from one of the carved-out doors. Something moved.
“What’s that?” Marcus pointed. Elba said nothing.
A moment later, Marcus saw another flicker, and then another. One by one, each door circling the pit lit up, except one. Had he awoken something when he threw the rock?
“Want it,” said a slow voice from behind them. Marcus spun around to see a pair of skeletons flickering towards them. “Have it,” the other skeleton said. As they neared, they flickered less, and maintained their old human form longer. “Maaagic,” they said in unison.
Marcus was surprised. He turned back to Elba in time to see the flickering lights across the pit move. They floated for a moment; it was then that Marcus realized what they were.
From out of each carved door glided something that Marcus thought looked like an illuminated shadow. As each shadow hovered closer, Marcus heard what sounded like a low hum. Soon, dozens of shadows hovered toward him, droning.
“What’s going on?” Marcus looked to Elba for an explanation.
Elba again said nothing, but she smiled. She took out the sphere and reached back to throw it.
“No!” Marcus lunged toward the sphere. He reached to save the globe, which grazed his fingers as it left hers. The contact sent him into a frenzy. He spun around, watching it connect with the pit, shattering into a million pieces. Free now, the blue wisps floated into the air like steam off molten lava.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, breathing heavily and clenching his fists. Marcus ran to Elba and pushed her. “That was mine!”
“Watch,” she said while she regained her footing, “and learn what you have to look forward to.”
Marcus wondered at the shadows as they changed direction and followed his globe into the pit.
They were just like the skeletons.
“Why are they after the sphere?” he asked.
“You know why. They want its magic.”
“But they’re—”
“They want your magic,” she said.
Marcus stared at the shadows while they converged on the magical tendrils at the bottom of the pit as they faded into the atmosphere. They hovered over them, crawled to them, swiped and clawed at them. They were ravenous, he thought.
“So, Marcus, I’ll ask you again, what—”
Somehow he knew the answer. Perhaps his brain had been working in the background all this time, or it could have been the things he had felt and seen, but somehow he knew. “They hunt and kill for magic,” he trembled with the thought that he could be a killer. “They have to have it. They—”
“We,” corrected Elba.
Marcus swallowed hard. On one hand it was difficult to understand, but on the other, it felt good to talk about it. He continued: “We are drawn to it, and when we find someone with it, we have to have it. It’s lust of sorts; we take it, we drain it.”
“It goes further than that, actually, but for now, yes, this is the nature of
the Dun-Bhar.” Elba pointed to the pit. “Even after death, they crave it and seek it out, Marcus. Just because we die, it doesn’t mean that who we are changes. Life is your time to master yourself and determine who you are, because once you die it is done, and those tendencies are there; they are part of you.”
“You mean ‘we’, right?” Marcus asked. Elba made an odd face. “You said ‘they.’”
“Not all of us believe that the way of the Dun-Bhar is correct, but it is something you will have to deal with. The choice is yours. If you’ll come with me, I’ll explain.”
As Elba led Marcus around the cave’s path, he couldn’t help but watch the spirit shadows and skeletons fight over the magic residue left by the sphere.
“As the Crypt Keeper, I have a unique perspective on all of this, Marcus,” she said. “I suppose that is why they always bring you to me. You see, here I care for the dead, so my life is really death.”
“What are all these doors?” he asked to divert his attention from the pit for a while. He thought he knew already, but he had learned that nothing was ever as it seemed with Elba.
“This is the final resting place of Dun-Bhar. When they are drained completely of their magic, they die, and I collect them. The magic of the catacombs is enough to keep them here.”
“How do you know where to find them?”
“We sense each other, and, of course, the magic. We are always drawn to each other, like when a shark smells blood.” Elba stopped in front of a door in the wall. “As promised,” she waved an arm in front of the carved-out door.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you I’d show you your father.”
Marcus didn’t know what to say. He simply gazed into the blackness carved out of the wall in front of him. He had never met his father, and now somehow his thoughts went to his sister. It just didn’t seem right that she wasn’t here.
“Well, go on,” Elba encouraged. She laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him ahead of her torch.
Marcus walked into the darkness and waved his torch, lighting the chamber. The torchlight moved across the room to fall upon a looming stone statue of a strange creature. Startled, he stumbled and fell then crab-crawled backward.
“Don’t be afraid,” Elba said as she fixed her torchlight on another stone creature on the opposite side of the room. “They’re just statues, Marcus, intended to frighten off thieves and to symbolically guard the dead. No one gets this far, though. I do that well enough on my own.”
Marcus gained his footing and took a closer look. The statue’s familiar head had a beak, its neck and tail were scaled. The body was that of a lion, but winged like a bird. He placed his torch in a wall-holder and Elba did the same on the opposite side of the room.
The musty chamber was almost barren. First, he noticed that the statues loomed over a large stone box in the center of the room. An ordinary slab of the same stone was affixed to the top of it. Etched in the base of the box was the word: “Fith.”
A few feet before the box stood a small stone stand. The stand wasn’t tall, measuring only up to Marcus’s chest. Atop the stand was another stone box, smaller, but identical to the larger box just a few feet away.
“Is my father in there?” he asked, pointing.
“Yes.”
“And this?” Marcus approached the small box on the stand.
“Don’t touch that,” she snapped, reached out, and grabbed his hand as he was about to touch it.
Marcus shrunk. “Sorry, I—”
“Over here, please,” she extended her arm toward the large box.
Marcus obeyed.
When he approached the stone slab, he saw that the surface wasn’t as smooth as he thought it had been. The sight of the statues had rattled him. Embedded at the top, almost buried in the slab, lay a crystal skull. Beneath the skull; a sprawling script that Marcus didn’t understand.
“What is that,” he asked, “that writing?”
“That is the final spell put over the grave of the Dun-Bhar.”
“Spell?”
“To protect them and their possessions. I perform them myself, and as far as I know, only I can break them.” She placed her hands on the top of the box and mumbled something unintelligible. The result was spectacular.
The writing on the slab began to light up slowly. Smoke tendrils curled up from each letter until they disappeared. Marcus heard a gasp of air as the stone slab slid away from its resting place.
“Marcus, I give you a great gift,” Elba said solemnly and stepped away. “Today I give you your father.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“You have two paths before you. You can choose to end up like them,” she thumbed the door to the chamber, “or you can end up like your father—at peace.”
Marcus nodded and then moved forward apprehensively, stepping up onto the stone platform that supported the large box. He wasn’t sure what he might see; or if he wanted to see it. He had never met his parents, and until this moment, it had never crossed his mind that perhaps it was better that way. Not having met them he was unaware of any flaws they might have, and could imagine them as perfect.
After a moment his curiosity got the better of him and he leaned over the box, peering inside for some time.
Marcus looked back at Elba, his eyebrows came together, and then he looked into the box again before he stepped down.
“I know death can be hard to see,” Elba reached to comfort him, “but you need to know the difference—”
“What kind of sick person are you?” he asked, taking a deep breath as he stepped back down. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved, or disappointed. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
Elba rushed to the large box and pushed the stone slab to the floor without apparent effort. She gaped into an empty tomb and then looked up at the chamber ceiling. Then, she screamed like nothing Marcus had ever heard.
Elba’s eyes searched the chamber. “Who could have done this?” She huffed and paced the room like a wild beast. Her fingers flexed like claws. “It’s my solemn duty to protect these catacombs. I’m the Crypt Keeper! In the hundreds of years I have been entrusted with this burden, I have never once lost someone to a grave robber, or any other force. There have been many attempts, and I have dealt with each accordingly, but this? There is no explanation. I placed him here and sealed this tomb myself.”
Marcus didn’t understand what she was saying, and he certainly didn’t know how to feel about it. Was she suggesting that his father was missing? This was a lot to take in.
“Is my father alive?” he asked with widening eyes, trying not to sound too hopeful or too stupid all at once.
Elba recoiled at the question, seemingly jarred. “No, Marcus,” she slowly put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, “I buried your father here myself. He is gone.”
“Why did you bring me here? Even if he was here, I wouldn’t understand. You could have told me all this in the courtyard.”
“Don’t you see? You have a difficult choice to make, Marcus. This decision will determine how you die. You can end up like everything you saw in the catacombs, or you can rest in peace.”
“What do you mean?”
“You must choose the life of the Dun-Bhar, forever hunting the others and killing them for their magic, or you must look for another way.”
“Another way?”
“There are other ways of expanding your magic, more natural ways. A group of us take this approach and renounce the other. I wanted to show you your father, Marcus, because he chose another way and found peace. Those who go the way of the Dun-Bhar find no peace.”
“How did he die?”
“He died saving you and your sister,” Elba said. “That should do for now.”
“But I have more questions.”
Elba sighed. “Something unprecedented has happened here today,” she ran a finger along the burial box and considered the dust. “We must discover who took your father, and why. Only I can do tha
t. Then there’s the small matter of saving your grandfather, and finally, your decision. I’m afraid we don’t have much time.
Marcus asked, “How do we find my grandpa?”
“For that, I will have to teach you how to use magic. And before I can do that, I will need your decision.”
Was she asking him to give up magic altogether? He tried not to think of his magic sphere that she had dashed to pieces. It had filled him with such exhilaration, such power. As he considered it further, he realized that the orb had filled him with other things too: anger, hatred, and blood lust. Something about the magic was all-consuming. What would she do to him if he said he wanted to stay true to his nature and to the Dun-Bhar? She was asking him to decide his fate; he sensed it. He was scared of the Crypt Keeper.
“What if I want to try the way of the Dun-Bhar for a while?”
“A while?” scoffed Elba as she shook her head. “Do you realize what you are saying? You would be willing to go down a road of blood and slaughter just to obtain more magic? Are you really a killer, Marcus?”
A killer. He let the though germinate for a moment. He was just a kid, not a killer. It was odd to think of it that way. But the magic made him feel so good, and so powerful. Then he remembered what Elba had looked like when she fell to the ground, seemingly dead. No, he thought again, it didn’t feel good, just powerful, and needy. He couldn’t get enough. Those skeletons and spirits, though dead, still sought it out even when their hands couldn’t lay hold on it.
“Help me, Elba,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
“This decision must be yours, Marcus. I will say this, however; if you think you can dabble in the ways of the Dun-Bhar, if you think you can put one foot forward in that direction without slipping and falling, you are mistaken. As you have seen, strong forces are at play, too strong for any one of us to control once we have embraced them.”
With his mind wandering, Marcus shook his head. He thought of the people that took his grandpa. They said that they were Dun-Bhar, and he wondered if they would drain him like he had been drained. He shuddered and said, “I just want my grandpa to be safe.”