by Cory Huff
He stepped into a dark room, Liam and Sophronia following close behind. He ran ahead. Sophronia saw that grey stone flecked through with white made up the interior of the tower. It had been carved directly into the spire by deft hands. The wind coming off of the ocean swirled around the outside of the building, making a howling sound. There was also an irregular knocking sound, as of something was banging against the stone of the tower. The morning sunlight streamed in behind them, illuminating this windowless ground floor. It was perhaps ten feet across and circular. Two feet on the far side of the room was taken up by a staircase that went up to the next level. There was a utilitarian stone fireplace to the left. It was empty. She thought she could see the faintest hint of ashes smeared on the bottom of the fireplace. To the right was a nook carved into the wall. Aidan stepped into it and said, “there’s a rectangular space just long enough for a person to lay down. What is this place?”
“Aidan, get out of there!” Insisted Sophronia from the doorway. Aidan turned and looked at her.
Liam put a hand on her shoulder, “Sophronia, I think it is ok. It's obvious nobody lives here. It’s got that same abandoned feeling that Hidden Atania had.”
She shrugged him off and stepped inside to look around. There was a heavy wooden beam leaning against the wall next to the door. It looked like there were braces used to put the beam in place to bar the door. She wondered why it hadn’t been blocked before. The ground floor tiles were in disrepair, one sticking up out of the floor, but it otherwise appeared intact. She circled the room once, turned to look at Aidan and Liam, and threw up her hands. She sighed in exasperation. “Fine. I guess it is abandoned.”
Aidan snorted and walked up the steep, narrow spiral staircase to the second level. Sophronia rushed after him, “What are you doing?” The wind and knocking sound grew louder. The second level had two more of the niches carved into the rock. “I think these are sleeping quarters, but they look uncomfortable,” she shouted over the wind. Stairs were leading to a third level, and he continued up without hesitation. Sophronia followed close behind him.
The third level was smaller still. It was also windy inside. There was a short staircase leading to a trap door, but the wind was coming from a door hanging open on the third level. The door was repeatedly caught in a burst of wind and slammed into the interior wall. Aidan stepped to the door and hesitated. Sophronia looked out from behind Aidan.
There was a large balcony carved from the tower directly through the rock to the ocean side of the spire. It was perhaps twenty feet wide, with just the tower side of the rock face left. There were iron rails fastened to the stone. Aidan stood in the doorway with a look of awe on his face. The wind howled in a deafening roar across the rock and through the doorway. He stepped out onto the balcony, and the wind gusted, pushing him back through the door and nearly knocking him down. He shook his head and tried to shut the door.
The door shook as he took the edge in his hand. It was a heavy door, and he had to brace himself to hold it still. Sophronia grabbed on to help. They began closing against the wind when another large gust pushed the door back into them. Aidan stumbled back and was caught by a pair of sturdy, weathered hands. Liam spoke so quietly he was barely audible above the howl of the wind, “careful boy.” He then helped push the door shut against the wind. It became much quieter. The drop in volume was unnerving to Sophronia. She looked around and saw the eighteen inch wide windows carved through the rock walls. They were quite deep. The walls were ten feet thick at the base, so not much light shone through those deep, narrow openings.
“This place is a lot like Hidden Atania isn’t it?” she said. She thought about the crumbling library they had explored together. This tower was less luxurious than that ruin had been but in better repair. No books though. No new Ogham secrets.
Liam looked at her for a long time and nodded. “We should be careful,” he said.
“What happened in Hidden Atania? You told me that you explored a forgotten part of Atania, but something happened there?” Aidan asked. “Come on. We’re in this together. Spill it. What happened?”
“The woman you fought in my house,” said Liam. “Her name is Mindee.”
“We didn’t meet Mindee in Hidden Atania,” Sophronia quickly interjected.
“No, but everything that happened there is because of her,” responded Liam. “We ran there because of her. You showed me that library with all of the ancient books. A magical water Sidhe nearly killed us, and Elder Kaufman saved us. Mindee chased us down at my house because we didn’t finish her off. We didn’t find the solution we were looking for.”
“Ok, but what happened?” Asked Aidan.
“Aidan, do you know what the Ogham is?” Asked Sophronia.
“No.”
“Do you believe in magic? In fairy tales?”
Aidan just stared at her.
“Do you believe that fairy creatures exist?”
“Are you saying that you saw fairies in Hidden Atania?”
Sophronia looked at Liam. They both nodded. “Yes, Aidan. Fairies are real. They call themselves the Sidhe, we saw them in Atania. We went into Hidden Atania to find a way to stop them from killing us. We failed, and that’s why we are on the run now.”
Aidan woke up in the dark on his bedroll. He couldn’t see the stars, and he remembered that he was indoors. Inside the stone tower, in one of those niches made for sleeping. Why was this tower built here?
His dreams had been full of bug-eyed, green-skinned creatures with swords and daggers, as well as a swordswoman made from the very waves trying to kill them. One of the Tuatha as a magic-wielding assassin? Aidan’s head swam as he thought about what Liam and Sophronia had told him.
His childhood fairy tales were real. Apparently.
His stomach ached. He felt around for his pack and realized that there wasn’t enough room in this niche for it. He felt his way around the inside wall until he got to his bag. He dug in and pulled out some hard tack. They should hunt. What time was it? With the doors shut it was impossible to tell. He felt his way up the stairs, trying to be quiet and not wake the others. It was quiet.
He climbed to the top of the stairs on the third floor. There had been a trap door there. He wanted to lift it and see what was up there. He felt around in the darkness until he felt the wooden trap door and he pushed up with all of his might. He felt a latch give way and the trap door flipped over on its hinge and slammed into the stone above.
“What was that?” Both Liam and Sophronia spoke at the same time.
“Just the trap door. Sorry,” said Aidan.
“What are you doing now?” Came Sophronia’s exasperated voice.
Aidan ignored them.
He thought about how they had spent the better part of the morning telling Aidan about what had happened leading up to and in Hidden Atania. The attack on Sophronia in her home and the murder of her brother. The goblins in the woods. The library. The crumbling ruins. The near-death experience on the beach and Elder Kaufman saving them.
Things seemed to get better between him and Sophronia as he listened. When they had finished their story, Aidan was floored. “Thank you for telling me all of this,” he had said. “I’m so sorry about your brother,” he felt emotion welling up. “I guess I know what it’s like to lose someone.”
“Nia was your friend, right? You two knew each other a long time?” asked Sophronia. “You wanted me to write a song about her. Why don’t you tell me about her? I only know her a little bit.”
She had listened as Aidan told her about Nia being the weird hermit in the woods that only he knew. He had cried after just a few minutes and excused himself.
Now, looking up at the stars outside, listening to the howling wind that was still going strong, and feeling the buffeting lashes that struck down at him, Aidan reached up, pulled the trap door shut with some difficulty, and came down the stairs in the dark.
“Thank you,” said Sophronia. She almost sounded pleasant instead of exas
perated. “Let’s get back to sleep. We’ve got a lot more travel ahead of us.”
“Ok.” Aidan felt his way back down the stairs to his niche. He laid there, unsleeping, missing Nia and feeling confused. He wondered what the Creator was doing. Why had the Creator sent him down this road and then abandoned him?
He closed his eyes even though he knew sleep would not come. In his mind, he spoke to the Creator. “Dear Creator, what am I doing here? Is what Sophronia said true? Are the Sidhe real? Did you receive Nia to your home when she passed away? Will her spirit be with you even though she didn’t believe?”
His breath hitched, but he held it and pushed the crying down.
“What am I supposed to do here? You said that a friend needed help, and I came to help her. Did I fail?”
Aidan wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t think he had failed. He had a sense of expectation, of waiting. The same feeling that told him that he needed to help a friend told him to wait, to be patient. The will of the Creator had not yet played itself out.
Aidan shook himself. Why should he wait on the will of the Creator? What had it gotten him? A dead father and a dead friend. He would not wait on the Creator anymore. If the Creator wanted Aidan to do something, He could come and speak to Aidan Himself.
Aidan rolled himself up in his blanket and forced himself to think about something else. He replayed their story about the fight with the goblins in the woods. He wished he had seen Liam unleash a powerful burst of magical energy. That would be amazing.
Liam heard the sound of the trap door slamming open again, and Aidan’s voice sang out “sorry, are you up?” That was all he needed to decide it was time to get up. Sophronia had gone downstairs earlier, and this was the second time Aidan had climbed the stairs.
He stood up on his bedroll and walked out onto the second floor’s main living area. The tiny windows let in the morning sunlight. Sophronia was coming up the stairs. When she saw Liam, she said, “that tilted tile on the ground floor is hiding a metal trap door. You were right. They built an escape route. There’s a wood ladder to an earthen tunnel. Weird.”
Liam smiled. “It makes sense. It’s what I would do if I were a builder.”
Aidan had left the trap door open and was standing on the top step, his body half outside the building. He crouched down and spoke to them, “I was thinking this morning. Why was Liam’s Ogham so forceful and powerful when Sophronia’s didn’t do much to that Mindee?”
“What?” Responded Sophronia. She looked shaken.
“Liam threw Mindee down a hill right? Isn’t that what you said? Why did that work but your thing didn’t work? Did you do it wrong?”
“No, I didn’t do it wrong. My invocation stopped the goblins from coming up the hill,” she seemed defensive, and Liam wasn’t sure why.
“Ok,” replied Aidan, and then he popped back up to the roof. He yelled something that disappeared into the wind.
Sophronia and Liam looked at each other. “My invocation worked. I did it perfectly,” she said.
Liam shrugged. “We got out alive. That’s all that matters.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Asked Sophronia.
Liam looked at her again. “What?”
“You think you saved us,” she said. “You think he’s right. He doesn’t know anything Liam!”
“Sophronia, I don’t know what happened on that hill. Neither do you. We are playing with fire. We don’t know what the Ogham is, what it can do, or what will happen to us if we keep using it.”
“I know,” said Sophronia. “I studied it. I practiced. I know the diagrams, the structures. I taught myself how to do it with painstaking research and practice. You’re just blindly flailing.”
Liam walked down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Asked Sophronia.
“I’m getting packed for the day. We’ve got more travel.”
“We’re having a discussion! I want you to admit that I know more about this than you do. I want you to admit that what happened on that hill was luck!”
“So what if it was?”
“Then you can’t do it again! If it was luck, then that means we’re all in trouble because what I did wasn’t enough, and you can’t do it again.”
He shrugged again. “We got away.”
“How can you just shrug like that? What happened there was very serious! We could have died! I’ve been studying for years and years, and I still couldn’t make it work. What are we going to find in Ghealdar, a city that is supposedly abandoned? Are there more people like Elder Kaufman? Is that where he learned to do these things?”
Liam began packing, “I don’t know Sophronia. We will find out when we get there though. I imagine it will become obvious quickly. So what good has studying and worrying over the problem done? You spent all of that time training and what happened? I did just as much as you, and I can freely admit that I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Liam heard her sputter in anger. He tried to placate her, “It could very well be that what you have done so far lays the groundwork for major accomplishments in the Ogham, but the evidence right now suggests my guesses are just as good as your education. We’re babes in the woods right now Sophronia.”
“I’ll show you babe in the woods,” she muttered.
He heard Aidan drop through the trap door and practically fall down the stairs. He was shouting something incoherent about barbarians. Liam wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly, “Did you just say what I thought you said?”
Aidan nodded, “There are at least a dozen of them. I saw them on the rise of a hill. They looked like the men in the alley who…” he trailed off as if unable to speak. He took a deep breath and then said, “who killed my father. They can’t be more than than a mile away. I…I think they saw me standing on the tower doing my forms against the wind.”
There was a brief moment of calm before Liam nodded. “Pack up. We leave now, as quickly as we can. We avoid the hills and head East. Perhaps whomever we’re supposed to meet in Ghealdar can protect us.”
“What if we stay here?” Said Aidan.
“Then we’ll be trapped,” said Sophronia.
Aidan rolled his eyes and said, “We have a stone tower. The door can be barred and locked. Couldn’t we lock the door and tell them to go away? Throw rocks at them if they try to climb up?”
Sophronia shook her head, “We only packed enough food for a two-week trip. What happens when they decide to wait outside?”
Liam started grabbing his things and throwing them in his pack. As he knelt, he saw the tilted floor tile and the trap door underneath it. “We escape through this?” Liam’s voice floated up to Sophronia and Aidan. “How far did you go down that tunnel Sophronia?”
“Just a few feet,” she said as she ran back down the stairs, pack haphazardly stuffed. “I don’t know if there’s a way out at the other end or not.”
They all looked at each other, uncertain of what to do.
Sophronia shrugged and stepped down onto the ladder into a pitch black chamber. She whispered a quick Ogham invocation for the first time in three days. A white flame appeared floating just above the palm of her left hand. She held her hand up and looked at the passageway leading East below the tower. Liam could see that it was a roughly hewn tunnel in the earth. Down there at the bottom of the ladder, the room was perhaps six feet wide by eight feet deep. There was a passageway which was about five feet wide and continued in pitch darkness. Sophronia took a few steps, then jogged a ways, her light disappearing in the distance. “Sophronia? What do you see?” That was Liam.
“It keeps going.”
“Great, let’s go,” said Liam.
“Wait, why don’t we take an opportunity to take some of them out?” Asked Aidan.
“Still feeling bloodthirsty, Aidan?” Liam regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
Aidan’s excitement immediately drained from his face, and he went very still.
“Aidan, I’m
sorry,” started Liam.
Aidan’s voice was wooden, “Do you want to try to fight them off and drive them away or not?”
Liam considered for a moment. There wasn’t time to make Aidan feel better. “No, let’s go. The more of a lead we have, the better chance we have to get away.”
“Ok. I’ll pack.” He turned silently and quickly moved to his bedroll. He quietly packed as Sophronia emerged from the hole. In just a few minutes they were all ready to go.
“Aidan, go close the trap door up top. Sophronia, help me bar this front door. The wooden beam is heavy.” They got the beam settled into the door braces and headed for the exit. Liam hurried them down the hole, coming down last. As he put a foot onto the ladder, he heard someone at the door, trying the handle. He froze, staring at the beam to see if it would hold. It did.
“Liam,” whispered Sophronia. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”
Liam nodded, but he couldn’t look away. He heard the thud that sounded like a kick. Then another. A moment of silence. Muffled shouting. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of an ax head splitting wood. The door shuddered. They were chopping their way into the tower.
Sophronia’s hand grabbed his foot, dragging him down the ladder. He held on to the underside handle of the hatch as she did.
2. Underground
Liam lowered the trap door while Sophronia and Aidan waited below. As the trap door settled into place, Sophronia invoked her little white flame again.
“I think I can place a glamour on the trap door and make it harder for them to find it,” Sophronia said, and then she drew a series of lines across her arm, carefully and methodically speaking a string of syllables, and then flinging her arms up towards the trap door. Liam felt a tingle across his skin, and he saw Aidan shiver. Sophronia slumped down, almost falling to the ground, but then standing back up immediately, said, “I feel a little weak and dizzy, but it is manageable. Let’s go as fast as we can. The Ogham will push them away from the fireplace, but I’m not sure if it will work for very long. It might buy a few extra minutes.”