Ravinor

by Travis Peck

  This miracle had taken place nearly seven years ago, almost to the day. Holan recounted the beginning of his bad luck to himself for the hundredth time of the day. He had been doing well. His business, transporting goods in and out of Styr, had been thriving. He had a dozen wagons and strong teams to haul their cargo to their destinations. Business was prospering, and so was his personal life. He had meet Henna and married her right as he had started up his business. Making a decent living had been hard at first, but as their business grew, things got better and better. The triplets came and Holan and Henna had never been happier.

  One day, one of his drivers came by his house, or rather was carried there, after suffering a bad spill, so Holan had to take the man’s route. He had spelled his drivers many a time and thought nothing of it. The route was only a two-day journey to the town of Nyad’s Crossing. He had done the route many times before hiring his drivers, and he had done it since a few times when someone needed a day off. He had kissed his wife and children goodbye and started on his way.

  The weather was fine, and the team was good-spirited and ready to work. They had made good time, and he thought he would be back a full day early if his good luck continued. Of course, that was when his luck completely abandoned him. Had he known how his life would end up, he would not have struggled so hard to survive the attack.

  Ravinors. A small coven, but more than enough for him and his team to meet their end. If not for the six hulking draft horses occupying the ravinors’ attention, he would have been eaten within moments. As it was, he was left wounded; he was given a parting slash from a ravinor who decided that the horses would be a heartier meal and left him to scamper away.

  He had managed to crawl his way into a sheltered cave in the riverbank that the water had eroded away when it was running high. The pain from the wound, and the weakness from blood loss, rendered him unconscious for a full day. When he finally came to, he felt the fever take over. He curled up in his den and shivered and shook in the grip of the ravinor infection.

  It was his first time visiting hell. What else could it have been but the Taker’s domain? He had found himself in a field of tall grass where the sun was shining brightly overhead. It was pleasant for an indeterminate amount of time. Then he was suddenly transported into an endless hallway where the Taker himself was chasing him. Holan never could make out the figure behind him through the black miasma shrouding it, but luckily, he had awakened before the hallway came to an end.

  He eventually came to, and for a moment, could not recollect where he was. Once he began to remember his situation, Holan realized he was desperately thirsty, so he crawled over and took his fill at the riverbank. He had been so parched that he drank too much and threw most of it back up. He hardly had any strength left after the fever, but he knew he had to get out of the area before the ravinors found him.

  He was ecstatic to be alive. No one he had met before had ever survived the infection of a ravinor-made wound. But he had! Thanks to the Giver! He had made his way to the site of the attack by clinging to trees to keep his body supported while he moved forward on weakened limbs.

  His wagon was still where he had left it. His horses were gone but for bones and the bloodstains on the grass and road that the ravinors had strewn about during their gorging. Luckily, the compartment under the wagon seat was untouched, and he had several loaves of bread and wheels of cheese stored there for his journey. He polished off a whole loaf, and half a wheel of cheese, before he began the trek back to Styr. He kept a keen eye out for any sign of ravinors as he stumbled back to the capital.

  Holan returned a hero. A survivor! His wife and children greeted him with screams of joy when he arrived safely back home. Though grateful, he was unable to come up with a reason why he and his family had been so blessed. That night he had his first dream. It was different from the fever dream when he was running through the fields and the long hallway full of closed doors. Now he was observing the scene from above.

  People walked through the same field that he had. Some of them blinked out of sight; others were still there when his viewpoint suddenly changed to the corridor. He quickly learned that there was someone even more terrible than the monster he had assumed was the Taker who chased the people who weren’t lucky enough to escape as he had. Even though that creature was a being of darkness and shadow that boiled with a terrible hatred for mankind, there was another that terrified him more. Her. Alone in the room or atop the unnatural cube amidst the masses of hungry ravinors, witnessing the ravinor Goddess scared him more than anything.

  After that first horrible night, Holan had passed off the dream as nothing more than his mind—understandably traumatized in the wake of his ordeal—struggling to deal with what he had been through. Of course I would have a few nightmares. His old man had fought the Nøm-Ünish savages for two terms of service and had woken up the family more than once screaming during the nightmares he had once he returned home.

  He did not discuss that dream with his wife, though she couldn’t help being aware of it with how he had thrashed around in their bed and yelled out as he woke. He had the dream nearly every night since then. For the next few months, he just tried to get through the night. He was sleeping poorly, but he was still hopeful that his strange nightmares would end sooner rather than later. Holan was wrong.

  The only solace he found was to drown his senses with strong drink during the day and night. He would go to bed insensate or—just as effective—pass out where he may. He still had the dreams though. It seemed he would always keep that curse with him. They seemed less real if he drank enough, and he was more apt to forget the details of the dream and the people he saw in it.

  Holan’s business suffered as he found himself in the local taverns earlier and earlier each day. His drivers quit, and he had to sell all but one team and wagon that he now drove himself. At least, he drove it when he actually had customers willing to risk shipping with him, and when he was sober enough to do his job—two events that rarely coincided. He would have the dream wherever he had to stop for the night, and it seemed that being out on the countryside only made the dreams more vivid. Even a few bottles of Nyssan fire-liquor no longer kept the dream at bay.

  His business was virtually non-existent only a year after his “miracle.” His wife took the children and moved back to her mother’s house in the Fourth by the end of the second year. Holan did not blame her. She had stuck it out with more hope than he had. When his family had finally given up on him, he had sold the house and moved into his current shack. He gave half the money to his wife to help with the young ones and used the rest to keep himself in drink for the next few years.

  ***

  Now Holan was running out of money and still the dream had not stopped. He refused to go on any longer in such a state. He had tried to stop drinking before, and following the horrific week of fever, shaking, vomiting and otherwise praying for death, he would only make it a few nights before the terror of the dream turned him once more to the dubious solace of the drink.

  Holan, once he finally managed the difficult task of finding rope and some bricks in his inebriated state, made his way over to the edge of the canal behind his shack. He sat down and began to tie the rope around his ankles, waist, and shoulders. Then he secured the bricks to the rope.

  Holan had known a man who had tried to do this, but he had only tied the bricks to his ankles and ended up floating up from the depths once he had passed out. The man had been saved but could no longer function as he once had. Holan had seen into those alert eyes and quailed at the feeling of being stuck in one’s body with no way to move, speak, or to communicate anything at all. If that happened to him, it would just be himself and the dream and nothing else. Holan shuddered and added a few more bricks to his makeshift harness. Even through his deeply intoxicated state, he knew that such a fate would be worse than the one he was trying to escape.

  When the bricks were secured tightly to his body, Holan struggled to stand but jus
t managed it. He was satisfied with the weight. He stood staring at the water flowing by, thinking of the turn in his fortunes that had led him to this course of action. He would never have considered doing this when his family still lived with him, and certainly suicide would have been far from his thoughts before the dream started, but now he just wanted it all to end.

  He had come to the realization, after a month of having the dream, that it was not just a reaction to the stress of his ordeal. The dream was real, or real in some way. The poor people in the midst of it were lost souls. The lucky ones either escaped or died. If they died, their souls blinked out of the dream. At least that was his guess of what happened there. The rare survivors blinked out too, but it felt differently to him. Though he was happy to see it, the few survivors did little to balance the negative of what he was seeing nearly every single night. He did not know why the Taker had cursed him with these dreams, and no longer cared, for it would all be over soon.

  Building up his courage for a final life-ending leap, Holan paused as he saw something floating down the canal from the inner rings of the city. He paused and waited for the slow-moving current to reveal what had interrupted his jump to death.

  He squinted his eyes, trying to force his alcohol-blurred vision to focus in the darkness. The lump drifted closer, and he was finally able to make it out.

  It was a body.

  In his current state, all he could muster was mild curiosity at the mystery of who this had been in life. Then he heard a noise behind him and threw himself flat to the ground. The weight of the bricks crushed his breath out of him as the extra weight landed on top of him. He was already turning his head to make sure that whoever was approaching would not interfere with his task.

  Holan noticed that the body had lodged itself on the shoreline of the canal. A small dam had formed where some pile of flotsam had wedged against the canal edge, making an area safe from the current that drew the body in.

  Another branch snapped, and he was reminded of the stranger nearing his location. He held his breath as the person reached the shore of the canal, only yards from where he lie. The figure had a cloak on, and its hood up. Holan could not make out any features with the darkness shrouding the figure. The stranger was clearly intent upon retrieving the body. Perhaps it was a peacekeeper on his rounds. He quickly dismissed that idea as the person suddenly went on all fours the last few yards to the body.

  All thoughts of ending his life vanished at what he witnessed next.

  The figure pulled the corpse onto the shore. Then the cloak dropped, and then—

  Holan suppressed a scream—barely. He was terrified more than he had been during the ravinor attack that had ruined his life.

  The stranger’s cloak dropped to the ground as whatever had been giving it shape now flowed over the short distance separating it from the corpse like a thick cloud of swarming gnats. A strange buzzing reached Holan’s ears from his vantage point as he looked on, stunned. The swarm of tiny dark spots, only barely visible by the moonlight reflecting off the canal’s flowing waters, gathered around the corpse’s head for a moment before suddenly coursing through the dead man’s gaping mouth.

  Holan had to bite down hard on his hand to stop from screaming.

  The corpse jerked and twitched, and its arms and legs flailed and thrashed on the bank of the canal. Holan could not force his eyes away from the ghoulish scene before him. He wished for the corpse to be still like it should.

  Just as suddenly as it had begun to thrash, the corpse stopped its writhing and rose unsteadily from the ground. It stooped and picked up the cloak that the thing had used and draped it over its shoulders. The corpse then walked away from the canal. Its movement became more natural by the step.

  And, once again, Holan’s life was utterly transformed.

  When he could finally force his petrified muscles to work again, he quickly stripped off the rope and bricks, now feeling more sober than he had in weeks. No. Months. Terror did that to a person. He looked back to the canal and shuddered. He gave his first honest prayer of thanks to the Giver in a long time and scrambled away from the water. He dashed into his shack and slammed the door shut behind him.

  Panting heavily with his back up against the door, Holan slid down it as he landed on the floor with a slight jolt that he barely felt. Exhaustion, aided by the lingering effects of the weeks and months of insobriety, allowed him to close his eyes, where for the first time in a long time, he felt the dream was not the worst thing that could happen to someone.

  When Holan woke the next morning, the first task he set to was to throw out all the alcohol in his shack. The bottles shattered on the rocks as their contents spilled out into the canal. He informed the healer in his area what he would be going through and paid her most of the rest of his coin to make sure he survived the harrowing time ahead. He made his way back to his shack and braced himself for what was coming. He had never been more certain in his life that he would never drink again. And he would never consider taking his own life again after seeing what had happened to that corpse.

  After a blurry and nauseatingly foul week, Holan rejoined the living as a changed man. He posted a note to his wife and children stating his intentions and praying that they would eventually take him back. For the first time in a long while, he faced his day without drink and with acceptance of his curse.

  Chapter Thirty

  THE PATH LEADING UP the interior of the mountain became a narrow tunnel with steps carved out of the rock. The steps were wide and high, and the extra effort made Martel’s calves and his tender ankle burn as they climbed. On and on they climbed. The tunnel led them ever upward. Every dozen steps, torches burned along the sides in iron cages that had been driven into the stone. Drops of oil caught fire and fell to the rock below, leaving scorch marks on the steps underneath each flaming brand.

  Plain wooden doors were set periodically within the tunnel wall to either side, and Martel wondered at their purpose. Were they apartments for high-ranking ravinors? Or perhaps they were workshops or storerooms? He did not ask the escorts and kept up the strenuous climb, resigned to the fact that they would not stop until they reached the pinnacle of the mountain lair.

  At last the tunnel leveled off and ended at a single door. The door was ornately carved oak. Two horizontally running black iron bands, one near the top and the other at the bottom, gave strength to the door. Martel tried to get a better look at the delicate carvings, but he could not make out what scenes were being depicted because the two giants did not give him the chance for further study. One of their escorts obscured his view as he rapped loudly on the door.

  The door swung inward, revealing two slight figures who were dressed in clothing that were of similar quality that Martel would expect to see in the inner districts of the capital. A man and a woman. He changed his mind. They were young, a boy and a girl—twins. The black hair on the boy was kept neat and trim, and the girl had a tightly woven braid that hung almost to her waist. The two giants bowed low and shut the door behind them. Martel did not hear their footfalls echoing away so they must have taken up positions outside of the door.

  Beside him, he felt Yurlo tense at seeing the two virtually defenseless youths, but he saw the islander’s muscles relax after a moment. Martel had no doubt that the man could easily subdue these two, but there were still the two giants outside the door to contend with, not to mention the thousands of ravinors between them and the entrance—an entrance which would be impossible for them to open.

  The three captives walked through the doorway. The stone floor was perfectly level and had been finely polished to reflect the natural grains of the rock it had been carved from. Veins of color ran through the floor in every hue imaginable. Martel saw a bright yellow vein that branched off to the right as it ran up the wall. There was a fortune of gold in this room and probably more that had been mined out when this room was being excavated.

  The interior rock was carved into shapes and decorative designs t
hat doubled as support pillars that ribbed the high walls as they narrowed into a dome twenty yards above. The dome had a ring of round portals set with clear glass that alternating with the hard rock. Martel thought the result was crown-like.

  Light poured down from the high windows. The room would not need any man-made, or ravinor-made, light until the sun went down. Several rock pedestals rose around the perimeter of the circular room. Clearly the rock was left behind during the excavation as it seamlessly flowed into the floor. Each pedestal had a glass fixture sitting on its top. From the number of pedestals, Martel guessed the occupants would have plenty of light to read by. And he knew there was reading to be done with the number of bookshelves in the room, some freestanding, others stored in carved niches in the rock walls. Tomes upon tomes filled these spaces, tenfold what his own mentor had in his tower. And he was a renowned scholar.

  Besides the two youthful twins in the room, the spokeswoman—she must have hurried on ahead of them once they entered the lair—stood next to an older male trueborn who had long gray hair and a styled beard. He sat in a chair positioned at the foot of the throne. Two suits of armor, even larger than the their escorts had worn, stood to either side of the throne. Each imposing suit was posed at the ready and was completed with an axe that looked to be able to fell a silverwood in one swing.

  Martel only noticed the others briefly, for he was now entranced by the figure sitting regally upon the throne. The Ravinor Queen. Resplendent in a shimmering gown, the ravinor matriarch sat with her head held erect. A circlet of gold rested above her brow. It was bedecked with gems, and each stone was large enough for him to retire on for the rest of his life. The gems were suspended from fine threads of spun gold, hanging only from the sides and the back of the circlet so that none of the precious stones obscured the queen’s view, or especially the view of the queen.