Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller

by Jason Anspach

  A thought occurred to me at that time. That I was being arrogant. That I was assuming that because I didn’t know, no one else did. That Last of Autumn, who knew of this place and knew to come to this place, couldn’t know its stories. I resolved to lament less and learn more.

  There was a thick, almost throbbing silence down here in the gloomy darkness below the shattered upper levels.

  She led me along a passage whispering, “The gotaur are excellent trackers. They’ll follow. This way.” Using basic linguistics, it was pretty easy to figure out who the gotaur were. The goat men. But what about the centaurs? Surely the half man, half horses couldn’t try to come down here.

  As if on cue I heard the clop clop clopping of one of them at the top of the ruined stairs. To them, the elf was a prize worth folly.

  I followed, and soon we were threading our way along a narrow passage that, had I not been plus-oned by the Moon Vision, would have had me stumbling blindly and probably sending me off into a bottomless pit.

  Yeah. There were pits down there, and no bottom was visible from along the ledges. It was that kind of place.

  “What about that demon?” I whispered. The silence pulsed and breathed like a living thing.

  She said nothing.

  Soon we came out into an underground cavern that was kind of like a pit in its own way. A small waterfall fell from ground level high above, cascaded down the side of the ruined shaft, and disappeared down into the darkness way below. There was no splash. No sound of any pool down there in the deep dark. At least, not that I could hear from the ledge we found ourselves inching along.

  The moonlight reflected off the falling water, providing more illumination here, and that was good because the ledge around the side of the shaft was much too narrow to be navigated comfortably in the dark. Or comfortably in the light, for that matter. I wondered if the centaurs would manage it. I could hear the hooves above making their way down through the upper levels.

  We were moving toward a fissure in the wall along the side of the shaft on the far side. Well below where we were. The ledge was on a slight grade, corkscrewing downward. And the closer we got to that fissure, the more we worked our way around the shaft, the stronger was the foul stench. Which was strong enough to begin with. There was something about that fissure that didn’t feel right. That crack in the wall felt like an infection in the very being of this place. Even with the ruin of the temple and the caves below, the fissure itself was a separate thing from all of it. Separate and far worse. I knew that. I felt it. Something rotten and festering was in there, and its cold malevolence was inside my mind.

  The demon.

  She’d said that. Last of Autumn. In my mind.

  She pointed and whispered the word once more. Aloud this time. Pointing toward the fissure. The doom crack.

  “Demon.”

  My plan, if anyone was asking, would have been to do the exact opposite of what we were currently doing. Which was continuing on around the ledge straight down toward the spot where the fissure in the wall waited.

  No one was asking.

  I flipped the selector switch on the MK18 to kill. Opting for full auto instead of semi, considering ammunition reserves and loaded magazines, or “kill sticks” as the Rangers called them, weren’t exactly surplus. Still, I intended to be hard to kill.

  Be meaner than it, the sergeant major had said.

  We were creeping, me making as little sound as I could, Autumn making none, closing on the ragged fissure in the cave wall. Then she stopped.

  She turned to the raw rock wall and whispered something. I barely caught it in the throbbing malevolent silence. It was a Tolkien word, and I had no idea what it meant. But what happened next was pretty cool all the same.

  “Málo.” That was the word. She whispered it softly. So quietly that I barely heard. As though she didn’t want to wake someone—or something—up. And then just barely, the cave wall slid inward from two sides of a silvery seam that hadn’t been there a second ago. There was a darkness beyond the gap in the wall and she looked back at me once, happiness and relief crossing her earnest features, and then we slipped through the crack in the wall.

  A second later, as the centaurs and the gotaurs came down into the cave well, the hidden door closed behind us.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  We found ourselves inside an alcove. Something the size of an office storage room. But a secret storage room behind the real live actual secret door we’d just gone through. Something straight out of a murder mystery set in a haunted house, or a fantasy story about lost and hidden kingdoms long forgotten beneath the earth. Or a pirate novel, for there were pirate treasure chests inside the room, along with a wide wooden plank of a table piled with strange vials and bottles of colored liquids all of which glowed iridescently.

  A sudden, peculiar thought popped into my mind. Perhaps one of these contained coffee. I hoped, really. I joked and said so in that way where you’re really not joking.

  She had no idea what I was talking about and I had to fight off a brief bout of ennui when I realized there might perhaps be no more coffee left in the world. I resolved right then and there to find some, grow it, harvest it, and brew it myself.

  I had no idea how to do that.

  But… I could learn.

  The secret door, when I turned around to look back at it, looked like a door from this side. A silver door. Whereas on the other side it had looked like part of the rock wall we’d been crawling along. It was crossed with a silvery tracing of lines that shimmered magically in the darkness, showing runes I didn’t understand and the image of a crescent moon beneath a snow-capped mountain.

  “What is this place?” I whispered in the closeness of the room.

  She sat on a stool and stared up at the ceiling as she fumbled in her cloak and brought out something wrapped in fragrant-smelling leaves. Cakes. She handed me one and then began to eat her own almost ravenously. She must have had a high metabolism—that would explain her speed and her apparent need for calories. She ate, chewing fast, still staring upward as though she could see the centaurs and gotaurs coming down the ledge above. Her long ears twitched delicately once or twice at some noise I could not detect, and I realized she was using her ears, and their most likely fantastic ability to hear, to triangulate the current position of our enemies.

  It was pretty clear to me what she’d done. She’d led them along right down to the fissure that was much more than a mere crack in the cave wall. It felt like something far worse. Like a doorway you didn’t want to go behind, and might not be able to leave once you did.

  And then she’d ducked us into a secret room right outside her trap.

  That was clever. Ranger clever.

  Outside and above I heard the muffled clop clop clop of centaur hooves. The hissing giggles of the hunting goat men. The gotaurs, she’d called them. They were close to the door, but the silence between us and them was like an invisible thing that could be felt and not seen. Like stuffy white noise inside a pair of headphones. I had to assume it was magic of some sort. Some feature in the door. But I was more amazed they, the centaurs especially, but the gotaurs too, were coming down, hooves and all, along that narrow ledge. And then, as if an answer must be provided for my disbelief that they would attempt such a thing… one of them fell off the ledge out there. A centaur. It went neighing off, whinnying in terror as it fell for what seemed forever into the deep dark depths below.

  She seemed to read my mind.

  “No,” she said softly as the centaurs and gotaur began to cry to one another. Some no doubt advocating that they turn back now. Others enraged and braying in their unknown language. “They cannot hear us in here.”

  And after a few moments they started down again out there along the sides of the well. They were resolute in their intent to do evil. They would have what they’d come for, no matter the cost. />
  The first centaur passed just outside the well-hidden secret door and continued on along the cavern ledge toward the crack in the wall.

  “This place was the… a holy place…” she said. “To the Dragon Elves that were first… after the Great Ruin. They built the temple above and… delved the sanctums and catacombs below. Vast and extensive. They did things… things… that should not be done. Not… known.”

  Something rattled out there in the main shaft. Rattled like a diamondback out in the lonely desert scrub when you’re walking all alone and suddenly realize you’re in someone else’s home. Time to be careful. Warning. Danger. Warning you to get away from it or face the consequences of bite and poison as you lie there dying. I knew that sound. I’d hiked and camped a lot in the Southwest with my dad when I was young. This sound sounded a lot like that rattlesnake warning inside my head. But also… not. Somehow different. Somehow wrong. The rattle started off almost slow, and seductive. Like a Middle Eastern musical prelude to a keening desert dirge. Only for a few seconds. And then it was loose and wild like sudden electricity live in the air all around us. And the sound of the rattling was lost in an otherworldly hiss and moan that sounded wrong on every level you can imagine. Cold water splashed across my spine as invisible long-legged spiders ran up into my brain. That’s how I heard it. But I also knew… and this is where it gets weird… I knew where the seams in the universe began to show. I could hear what it sounded like to the centaurs and the goat men.

  Suddenly I had the worst, or weirdest, headache I’d ever had. Just for an instant. Only a flash. Then it was gone. It was like my mind, and my brain, were on fire for just that second. That wasn’t the worst part. The sudden fever… that was normal, or what I realized was now normal. My mind always burning with thoughts and ideas and dreams just like every human mind out there. Fever was normal human thought. And then suddenly when that moan and rattle came from the dark fissure… I knew for a fact it was from the dark fissure… when it moaned, when it wailed… it wailed for the longing of a void it called the Outer Dark. Oblivion. Destruction. Home.

  Out there now, as the fever of normal thought returned and the call of oblivion faded from my mind, I could hear the sounds of tentacles and the neighing screams of the centaurs as they were snared, entangled, and then strangled… and finally dragged toward the hungry thing inside the fissure. The ancient oblivion thing. The thing of evil. The demon.

  The thing that had nothing to do with any of this.

  The gotaurs tried to flee, but the whipping tentacles came for them too, erupting from the fissure and snaking out into the void of the cavern, questing for souls, anything, to consume to abate the pain that was the thing in the crack’s nostalgia for oblivion. The Outer Dark.

  My sudden worst-ever weird headache was gone and all I had left was a memory of losing my place in the universe at the height of it. I was sure in that horrible half moment between existences that the thing in the fissure had a thousand lidless eyes. And each and every one had looked straight at me in the brief moment before the slaughter. The feeding. The frenzy. The memories of beautiful nothingness. Its eyes, every last one of them, were so very ancient and so very old. They had seen other horrors beyond the imaginings of sane and rational minds. Other worlds ruined. Other endless voids known.

  “Are you okay?” she asked as I came back to myself in a cold sweat.

  Yeah. Now I was back in the small secret room alongside the ledge in the well and the sounds of the rattles and whips were fading from the universe. As if withdrawing from reality. The centaurs and the gotaurs made no sounds. And I knew they never would again.

  Autumn seemed worried as I sat there bathed in my own streaming cold sweat. All I knew was I was pretty sure I never wanted to have that kind of headache again. Or hear… hear the rattles and the… the sound of endless nothingness.

  No. Not me. Never again. No thanks.

  “T-tell me.” I was stuttering when I tried to speak. I just wanted her to talk now. Like I knew her voice was an anchor in a universe I’d suddenly realized wasn’t as empty as I might have imagined it to be in times previous. And right now, I needed her voice, that comforting anchor, in order not to slip off into some void between the cracks where real monsters like the thing in the fissure lie in dark and unfound places, dreaming dreams of endless destructions.

  “Tell me what was that w-w-word…”

  She looked at me and I could feel myself sliding toward a ledge with nothing beyond. A vast nothingness you could never get yourself out of. And no place to grab on to.

  “Th-th-the one w-with… door!” I spat out finally. And then she began to talk, and the more she did so in her soft voice with all its depths and comforts, the more it brought me back from that edge at forever. And slowly, I began to feel better. “Oh-oh-open.”

  A brief look of confusion crossed her beautiful features for a moment. And then she understood what I’d asked. The meaning of a word I’d heard. My own kind of anchor. The game of languages.

  “Málo,” she said. “It is… High Speech… for friend.”

  “I-i-s that the l-l-language… of the Dragon El-el-elves?”

  She nodded.

  I nodded back, forcing myself into the very act of communication like it was a handhold I might grab to arrest my slide off the universe along that Forever Edge where the thing in the fissure lay waiting.

  High Speech, I thought, and felt my mind find where it was supposed to be, and not where it had wanted to go. Toward that edge, and all the oblivions beyond. The edge along the well of the universe.

  The point of no return.

  The Tolkien language from our past. That game of linguistics scholars. Here, it was called High Speech. Okay. Good. I could work with that, I told my chattering, shaking self.

  “G-g-g-good.”

  “When we reach my people…” she began, and she uncorked one of the small vials that had been on the wide table in the room. It was filled with a vibrant emerald liquid. Small wisps of fragrant rosemary came from its unsealed top. Glowing green in the soft and silent darkness between us. Only the silver tracery of magic in the door provided any kind of light by which to see. I sensed that the thing in the crack stifled the effects of Moon Vision. Like its darkness was a drowning thing that smothered everything that got near it. “You must only speak in Grau Sprache or High Speech. Never Shadow Cant. Never… with… my… people.”

  I asked her why.

  “No. It is… never done. Not… outside must know of… it. Otherwise there will be… much death.”

  I told her I understood. And that she would need to start teaching me phrases I could use in High Speech. She looked unsure for a moment, but, like the realist I would find her to be, some kind of irony in a world that seemed so fantastic, she taught me my first words of High Speech. Elven. Yes and no.

  Yes: lá.

  No: alá.

  Easy. We were off and learning and my fear-struck mind, which had felt like it was coming unraveled in ways I’d never even imagined, was coming back to where it needed to be. Playing the games and puzzle-riddles of languages. To me, worlds had fallen apart before. And language, languages, the study of them, had always been my safe harbor for as long as I could remember. A shelter against uncertainty and chaos.

  I took a deep breath and whispered, “Málo.”

  She nodded at me. Friend. Her beautiful silver eyes shining brightly. Brighter than I’d ever noticed. She blinked once… and it was like I knew her even more now. Friend. Málo. It was a powerful word here. To her… it meant something more. Like a drink of water to a dying person crossing a desert all alone for a very long time. Seeking an oasis by rumors alone.

  Friend.

  A drink of water from that real oasis.

  Yes.

  Lá.

  Like a gamble that had somehow paid off despite the odds. That was the look in her eye
s too.

  “What happened to the Dragon Elves?” I asked in the silence. She shook her head sadly and offered me the vial of iridescent emerald liquid. It smelled good. Like rosemary and mint.

  “Drink.” She said it first in Shadow Cant Korean, then in High Speech Tolkien.

  I did. Instantly I felt warm, and good. Refreshed and not tired. Yeah, it wasn’t coffee. But it was good. And where I had felt tired and ragged and cold from the endless events of recent days, now I felt empty of all the garbage of those same days and nights. In fact, I felt like I’d just gotten a great night’s rest and a solid workout the morning after.

  I felt calm and relaxed, and my coffee addict’s mind wanted to always feel this way. Always.

  She watched me as my mind processed the wave of good vibes.

  “Dragon Elves are…” I looked up toward the ruin above this secret room. The fallen temple and the rotten cavern beneath it. The ruins hinting at former glories long-ago passed. “They are gone now?”

  She nodded again. Sadly.

  “Was this their home?”

  She smiled wanly and looked around, taking in a deep breath that seemed to indicate either peace or the acceptance of some burden she had carried for all her days. I couldn’t tell which.

  “No,” she said, and she began to open the ancient brass-bound pirate chests on the floor, removing small and curious items, including more potions. She called the emerald vial a potion. What an amazing thing. Like I said, it wasn’t coffee, but it would do until I started my own farm.

  “Fallen… Tarragon… was their home. But… not… no… anymore.”