Even Loria gasped. When she had given the second part of the code to Glosis, she had probably immediately come to know the first part herself and had got to know the location of the goat king.
“That is so far away,” Glosis said. Her eyes had become slightly unfocused as she appeared to be wondering how many other obstacles she might have to go through to reach to the goat king.
“It isn’t,” Loria said. “If you want to go to the goat king then I can help you.”
“How?” Glosis said. Her eyes went wild and impatient. “Tell me! Tell me!”
Loria seemed to be slightly taken aback by the sudden change in Glosis’s behaviour. But she continued speaking.
“A while ago a great sickness came to Sarotok,” Loria said, “It was caused by a black wind, the like of which I had never seen before. The sea can bring strange dangers and it was one of them. With the black wind all the citizens of Sarotok began to fall ill, and began to die.
“I was the only one spared for the entire event had occurred in the period of a day and I had stayed in the castle the entire day and the black wind couldn’t get inside the castle for I had closed all the windows. I was broken. All my people had died and I didn’t know how I should perform the last rites of so many people. And then to my surprise my people began to rise.
“They moved about as though they were living but they weren’t. They were just moving, breathing corpses. I was frightened. Nothing could be worse than what was happening. I was at loss as to what I should do. I decided I would have to send my people to the Four Tortoises with the hope that the Four Tortoises would feel pity for them and either grant them afterlife or make them living again.
“I sent a pigeon to the land of the Four Tortoises with a portal seed. The other seed I planted in the circular lake that surrounds Sarotok. The lake became a portal connected to the land of the Four Tortoises. I commanded my undead citizens to go to the Land of the Four Tortoises.
“But then I found out that they couldn’t travel to the Land of the Four Tortoises because being undead they didn’t have any mana which was essential to go through the portal. I went through the portal myself to the land of the Four Tortoises. The pigeon had apparently sowed the seed of the portal in a great lake which was not far from the great pillar on which the tortoises write the reality of the world of Arun day in and day out. But I couldn’t get the tortoises to hear any of my complaints about my people becoming undead.
“They were so lost in their writing that they didn’t even notice my presence even as I begged them to make my people well again. I had to return to Sarotok in vain. But it astounds me that all the time I was in the land of the Four Tortoises I was so close to the goat king and yet never realised he was there too.”
Chapter 41
“I think you have helped us enough,” Glosis said. She mumbled a short word under her breath and Loria was thrown several feet backwards. She had gone unconscious, much like Oli, the octopus woman who was still unconscious in the pond in the island.
Glosis and her henchcats opened the door and rushed outside.
The moment the last of them were gone that Julia shape shifted to her human form and rushed to the unconscious Loria. I too deactivated my Liquefy spell and rushed to Loria.
“For once I thought Glosis wouldn’t do any harm to Loria because she was helping Glosis,” Julia said, “but I was wrong.”
“We should be hurrying to the lake,” I said to Julia. I recalled the time the undead dogman had tried to pull me underwater. I wished now if only he had been successful. I would have probably been in the Land of the Four Tortoises by now and perhaps I would have even met the goat king before Glosis.
“We are sorry, but we must leave you here,” Julia said to the unconscious Loria and brought her arms to a less awkward and more respectable position.
Julia and I ran out. We saw in the distance that Glosis and the cats were fast moving towards the lake, while a few of the cats were engaged in combat with Gnaria, Gulor and Zunzu. Some of the cats were already on the ground, dead.
Glosis leapt into the lake even as Julia and I reached Gnaria and the other two. I shot the rope spell at the cats, so that we needn’t bother fighting them. I quickly told Gnaria and the other two that the lake was a portal and then our group raced towards the lake.
“You are sure the lake is a portal, right?” Gnaria said in a last moment of hesitation at the edge of the lake, for there were many undead dogmen teeming underwater.
“Well, we can only find out, right?” I said as I dived into the lake.
As I pierced the surface of the lake and went down, the countless undead rushed to grab a hold of me. And then the countless undead disappeared and the water acquired a slightly different and clearer colour. A notification appeared in my vision.
You have used a portal
You have been stripped of 50% mana
I swam up to the surface of the lake, and realised that I was in an altogether different lake to the one that I had dived into. There was something very beautiful about the place. The trees were greener, the flowers were brighter. The sky was bluer and the frothy clouds were among the most perfect clouds that I had ever seen in my life. A considerable distance from one end of the lake was a great circular ground. At the centre of the ground there was a great stone that was at least two hundred feet in height. At the very base of the stone were four giant Tortoises who were busy scribbling something on the four sides of the stone.
And then I turned my head and saw that at the other end of the lake there was a massive tree, at the base of which the roots had formed some kind of a box-like structure. It was around this box-like structure that Glosis and her cats were huddled. Some of the cats were furiously chopping on the roots that formed the box-like structure.
With a great gasp, Gnaria surfaced beside me and she was soon followed by Julia, Gulor and Zunzu.
“What are they doing?” Gnaria said, pointing at the cats that surrounded the box-like structure. A few of the cats had spotted us and they were jumping into the lake to come and deal with us.
I very well knew the answer to the question, because there could be only one answer.
“The goat king is inside that box-like structure,” I said. “Now ready yourself because we are in for a fight.”
I did not have sufficient mana to use the liquefy spell or the rage barbarian spell. So I pointed my paw at one of the branches of the tree below which the box-like structure was and activated the Long Hands spell.
The next moment I had pulled myself to the branch and directly below me by a few feet was the box-like structure. Glosis was tapping the cheeks of the goat king who was lying inside the box-like structure in an effort to wake him up. In the lake, Gnaria and the others were dealing with some of Glosis’s cats.
Presently one of Glosis’s cats threw a dagger at me, having seen me hanging from the branch.
I let myself fall off the branch in an effort to avoid the dagger, but many of the cats pointed their swords up at me and for a split second I was certain that I would die. But just then I felt an invisible force around me and the force transported me some distance from the cats safely.
As the invisible force let go of me, Julia materialised next to me.
And then a voice spoke, a voice that could only belong to someone who had been sleeping for a long time and had only just awoken.
“Who… what?”
“It’s me, Glosis, your wife. One of your wives at least,” Glosis said, who looked like she had unlocked the key to immortality by awakening the goat king.
“Ah… Glosis,” the goat king said, still very sleepy, “I remember…”
“The quill, my love. I need the fifth quill,” Glosis said.
“The quill… yes, I am sleeping over it, but I do not think I am allowed to give it to you.”
Julia leapt towards Glosis and the goat king who was still lying inside the half destroyed box-like structure formed by the roots. Glosis turned her head sharply
towards Julia, a glass container in her hand. In a second the glass container had sucked Julia inside it.
“This one’s got better glass,” Glosis said to Julia who was banging her hands against the wall of the container. The cats' attention had been so far taken by the awakening of the goat king but now they turned towards me.
One came baring his teeth and wielding a sword. I didn’t know what to do, even as a second and a third cat came from the sides, as I had no mana for any of my spells.
Wait a minute, I still had the air arrows.
I shot one at the cat coming from the front. As he was stunned for a moment, I snatched the sword from him and leapt out of the way of the cats coming from the sides. And then, all of a sudden, another cat threw himself against me, and I fell to the ground. The world danced in front of my eyes. As the cat raised his sword to bury it into me, his belly was left unprotected and in a bid to save myself, I thrust my sword into his belly. He let out a cry of pain, but he still brought down the sword towards me. But my sword embedded in his belly had sucked all strength out of him and by the time the tip of his sword came near my face, I simply shifted my head a few inches and his sword was buried into the soil next to my head. The cat was also dead by that time. I quickly sprang to my feet and grabbed both his sword and the sword that I had plunged into his stomach.
The first cat that I had stunned with the air arrow threw a kick at me. I evaded it only barely and swung my sword and the next moment I realised that I had chopped off a part of his leg and blood spurted out of the stump. Taken with the pain, the cat dropped his sword and fell to the ground and clutched his bleeding stump like a mad cat. I didn’t expect him to attack me anymore.
But I got too lost observing the bleeding stump of the cat. I watched my health drop as I experienced a hard kick on the back and was thrown forwards. Four cats were over me in no time and were pinning me to the ground, my face against the grasses. My swords had already been taken from me. It was a very helpless moment.
But just then one after the other cats who were pinning me to the ground began to drop dead. Finding myself free I turned my head and saw that Gnaria and Gulor had together killed the cats, while Zunzu was flying above me with a smile. They had also dealt with all the cats in the lake.
The goat king meanwhile was sitting near the box-like structure of roots and dazedly observing Glosis and a few of her followers run along the circumference of the lake and they were undoubtedly headed in the direction of the four tortoises who were busy writing on the great stone. There was what looked like a quill in one hand of Glosis while with the other she clutched the container that had Julia.
My back aching, I went to the goat king. He looked very much like Hoovemine, the goat lady that I had met earlier, except he had a beard.
He looked up at me, his eyes not much focused.
“She… took the quill,” he slurred like a drunken cat, “we need to stop her, or she can rewrite the reality of this world.”
Rewrite the reality? That sounded frightening the more I thought about it.
“Stop her,” the goat king said, “stop… stop... her.”
Gulor splashed some of the water from the lake onto the face of the goat king and the goat king suddenly stood up with a start.
“Who are you?” he said to us, looking fully alert.
“You said Glosis is going to rewrite reality,” I said to him, ignoring his question, “how is she going to do that?”
“By writing on the stone with the quill of course,” the goat king replied matter-of-factly.
Chapter 42
The next minute all of us were racing after Glosis and her followers who were already a good distance ahead of us. I just wished I had enough mana for another Long Hands spell, but I didn’t. I just hoped my mana would be back soon for I would really need it.
When Glosis reached the tortoises, she jumped onto the back of one of the tortoises and began writing on the stone with the quill that she had taken from the goat king. The tortoise didn’t seem to mind at all. Heck, he probably didn’t even realise the presence of Glosis on his back.
“No!” the goat king cried, falling to his knees.
The followers of Glosis began to laugh, and even as we watched, Glosis grew in size. She grew taller and taller and became at least half the height of the great stone. The followers meanwhile became double their previous sizes.
Glosis threw away the container that had Julia in a different direction from us, and then she began to laugh, a mad laugh, which proclaimed that she had become the most powerful being in the entire world of Arun.
Glosis then pointed her paw at our group. A great ball of fire shot from her paw towards us. We turned and fled because it was the only thing that we could do to save ourselves. While the ball of fire didn’t fall on any one of us, when it struck the ground it created such an explosion that the intensity of the explosion threw all of us in different directions.
The entire place was smoking as I turned my head and saw that there was a great crater on the ground where the fireball had hit. A few metres away from me was Gnaria, down on the ground, struggling to get up. I forced my aching limbs to take me to her.
“Are you okay?” I said to her, helping her to get up. And then I realised that there were tears in Gnaria’s eyes.
“We have failed, Timmy,” she said to me. From the corner of my eyes I saw the goat king and my other friends move fast towards the lake in an attempt to save themselves because it was certain that once the giant Gnaria saw that we had survived the fireball, she would send another one at us.
“We haven’t failed till we accept failure,” I said to Gnaria. “Let’s move towards the trees first. Let’s figure out what we can do.”
Gnaria nodded, her eyes big and teary. I kissed her on the forehead.
“It’ll be okay,” I said to her. And then I pulled her along towards the trees near the lake.
By the time we were hiding behind a tree near the lake, the smoke created by the explosion had mostly gone. Glosis was looking about the ground with a pleased expression on her face. Maybe she thought that she had killed us?
The goat king meanwhile was hiding behind another tree together with Julia, Gulor and Zunzu. He beckoned to us when he saw that we were also alive. Gnaria and I made our way to them, making sure that Glosis wouldn’t spot us.
“Is there anything we can do to stop her?” I asked the goat king, who I hoped had some answer since ultimately the entire quest was centred on him.
“The best we can do is to take the quill away from her,” the goat king replied thoughtfully and then his eyes suddenly went wide, as he was looking at Glosis in the distance. “Look she’s writing something more on the stone!”
And indeed Glosis was squatting and writing something on the stone. As I watched, the tortoises stopped writing and looked around them as though they were out of the trance they had been in during all the time were been writing on the stone.
“The tortoises are no longer writing!” Gulor said.
Glosis began to laugh as panic caught the tortoises and one by one they began to flee away from the stone and began coming in our direction.
“She must have written on the stone that the tortoises are no longer required to control the reality of the world of Arun,” the goat king said.
“So whatever you write on the stone with the quill becomes reality?” I asked.
“Precisely,” the goat king replied, “the quill that Glosis took from me is much more powerful than the other quills that the tortoises have. The reality written by that quill can take over the reality of the other quills with much ease."
I hadn’t used any of the spells for a while and I now observed that my mana was back to optimum. I could do my spells once again. The knowledge of this empowered me, and made me feel that even though it would be very tough, it would still be possible for us to take the quill away from Glosis.
And then suddenly I observed something flying a good distance above Glosis,
who had presently stopped writing and looking about the place like she was thinking what she should destroy next.
My heart leapt as I realised what the flying object was.
It was an ant.
A giant ant.
One with wings.
Atop the ant were my parents.
How the heck had my parents come to this place?
The flying ant dived down towards Glosis and began to encircle her head, landing on it several times. It seemed like my parents and the ant were intent upon making Glosis lose her head by irritating her.
Glosis tried to swat the ant, and many times my heart almost stopped as I thought that she had hit them. But the next moment I would notice that the ant was still airborne with my parents atop it and I would breathe a sigh of relief.
Glosis could have easily written something on the stone which could have made my parents and the ant go away. But she didn’t do that. She was obviously way too irritated to even think about that. I had a sudden idea come to my head.
“This is our chance,” I said to the others, “stop Glosis’s followers from catching me and I think there is something I can do.”
And without waiting for them to respond, I raced away towards the ground, away from the safety of the trees.
As I neared Glosis and her followers, the followers saw me and they ran towards me. Their legs had grown longer and stronger and they were very fast. But the goat king and my friends had also rushed after me and now they threw themselves at Glosis’s followers.
Feeling very grateful to my friends, I made my way towards Glosis, whose attention was fixed on the flying ant. Just then one of the followers came in front of me, snarling. Heck, even his sword was bigger now. He swung his sword.
But before the blade of the sword could hit me, which it would have definitely for I was very slow compared to him, the cat suddenly froze and I realised that somebody had thrown a paralysis spell on him. I recalled my mother saying to me a long time ago that paralysis spells were easier to get when she had been younger and I looked up and my eyes met with those of my parents.
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