by P. G. Thomas
*******
The man in purple stood, “It is coming along nicely. I think tomorrow we may be able to finish this section of canvas.” Moving down beside her right leg, he held out his hand. The strong silent man handed him a long sharp metal object, which he jabbed into Lauren’s leg at an angle, avoiding any major arteries, and pushing it in until it hit bone, he then dragged it back, and Lauren screamed. When a branded slave beside the man in purple held up a plate, two other branded slaves moved the purple sash that covered his mouth. Picking up one of the pieces of meat, he nibbled it off the bone. “The cook had the most ingenious idea. He cooked up the hands of that elf with a new seasoning, which is quite delicious. Would you like one?” He looked at Lauren, but she never answered, “No, okay.” Thrusting the metal object back into her leg, he dragged it across the bone, causing her to shriek obscenities at him. “I was thinking, Thorn, why not end this? Issue an Earth Bond, telling those that hear it to surrender. Many that would die will live instead. Think of how many lives you will save. If you tell them to bow down before the Royal House, they will live.” When Lauren spit in his face, a slave wiped it from his forehead. The man in purple looked at the silent man, “Expose the bone.” As the slaves replaced the purple veil, the large silent man moved to the far end of the table, tying Lauren’s right leg down. Taking a sharp knife, he selected an area of her lower leg that had few veins in it, and driving it in until it hit bone, he dragged it back twelve inches, and Lauren filled the room with a blood-curdling scream.
“The new pain medication seems to be working. Did you increase the dosage?” The silent man nodded in agreement. “It seems to be working very well.” The man in purple looked at Lauren, “I thought it was only fitting that I should mark you, Thorn, so that you will always know that you are my property. You would think my brand would be enough, but my three-born brothers also practice the same, and they may try to claim it to be their own. To be truthful, they are only hacks, having no vision or talent. Their best looks like what tasty young kids would draw on a wall.” Pulling skin and muscles back, the silent man dug hooks through Lauren’s pink flesh, and tying them off, after he had exposed the white calf bone, he handed the man in purple a sharp knife. “I thought I should sign my work where only I would be able to find it,” and he began to carve his name in the calf bone of Lauren’s right leg, and she shrieked in agonizing pain. After Lauren had passed out, the man in purple turned to the mute, “Tomorrow, when we are done, bring in the healer, as we cannot afford to let her die. Then we will bring in her brother.”
*******
When Ryan looked at Samantha, he saw the bloody, lifeless body scream at him. Hearing another scream, he woke, feeling the ropes that held him down. Ripping them apart with so much anger, he broke the bed. Going into Gingaar’s room, he saw her crying.
“They kill her, Ryan. She is dying.”
Storming down the stairs, the moment many feared now looked upon them. Brook, Nur, Fen, Fodu, Hakk, Zack, Gayne, and Mirtza all looked at Ryan, who was angry. To him, anger was like the sun, and he was on Pluto, a universe away from it.
He approached Mirtza, “Magic man, find me Lauren.”
“I have no idea where she is. We have nothing to locate Earth Mother with.”
“That’s not good enough. When we first came here, I was told how you used your bracelets to travel far distances, a portal. You used them to travel back to the Ironhouse mine. Open me one that’ll take me to her.”
“If John was here, he could explain—”
Ryan’s voice resonated with hurt, anger, and rage. “John isn’t here, and she’s dying. If we get back home…no, when we get back home, if Lauren and Logan aren’t with us, if their parents hear they have lost two more children, their last children, they won’t see Eric, John, or Zack, they’ll only see me, and they’ll blame me. That family will not suffer another tragedy so long as I live. They will not bury empty caskets never knowing what happened.” [Systems…Corrupt…reroute…offline…] “Magic Man, open me a portal, NOW!”
Fen moved to block him, “Brother. Wrong is anger, calm you need to be.”
Ryan’s words were dry, deliberate, and slow. “Some people think better under pressure. Pressure I can provide. Magic man, I await your answer.”
“The bracelet only takes you to a spot you already know, and we have no idea where Earth Mother is. If we knew where she was and had a unique stone from that area, then I could send you there. I would send an army there, but I do not know where that is. I am without power to help you.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a piece of wood, which Lauren had given to him one night after Alron had died. “This is a piece of her staff that she broke from it.” He looked at the Earth Mothers, “She was told the staff is unique, is that true?”
Brook nodded her head, recognizing the dark Core Wood.
“Magic man, here’s the key you seek. So open the door.”
Gingaar screamed as Brook and Nur grabbed their heads. Mirtza, Gayne, and the Ironhouse brothers felt it also, almost doubling over.
Brook pushed back the pain, “John and Eric should be back soon. Ryan, you should wait for them!”
“She could be dead by then. Magic Man, remove your damn bracelet and grant me access to the one I love. If you don’t, I’ll go through each person in this town until I find one that’ll help me. Eric isn’t the only one who can fill the night with screams.”
“Mirtza, do as he says,” advised Gayne, who had fear in his eyes.
“I will do like you request, but I cannot guarantee that it will find Earth Mother.”
“It’ll find the staff. Now quit wasting time.”
“Zack, go with him. She needs your help,” suggested Nur.
Once outside, pulling off his bracelet, Mirtza dropped the piece of staff through it. As it disappeared on its passage, he pointed it forward, and a large shimmering ring floated forward and stabilized, but the formed image was black.
“See, Ryan, It failed to work,” advised Mirtza.
He advanced into the portal with Zack following.
“She is Ironhouse,” Fen said, and the three Ironhouse brothers walked into the portal with large axes resting on their shoulders.
*******
The suns were close to the horizon, as Lauren’s Earth Guard raced away from the fleeting light. Erust rode up beside Panry, pointing to the large dust cloud in the distant grasslands, “Do you see that?”
“I do not understand why. It must be why Earth Mother flew out here. It will have to wait.”
Even though they heard it, it was and was not an Earth Bond, “Panry, I’m sorry.”
He had a pained look on his face, anger in his voice, “She apologizes? She is Earth Mother and will not apologize to any.” Digging their heels into the ribs of the magic horses, they galloped into the night.
*******
Watching the portal shimmer away, Ryan, Zack, Fen, Fodu, and Hakk stood in the dark room, waiting for their eyes to adjust.
Zack spoke first, “Keep quiet, Lauren has been here.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?” asked Ryan.
He sniffed the air, “If I concentrate, I can bring forth certain abilities from the others in my zoo. I can smell her scent and Logan’s, but there are many black-clad soldiers here also. Let’s just go slow, and let me see what I can figure out.” Since Zack’s eyes adjusted to the dark better than the rest, he led them to a door, which he opened slowly. Being a large dimly lit room, at the far end, light escaped from under a door at the far end. As they quietly moved towards it, Zack stopped, and moving to a different nearby door, he listened against it and then opened it. “Logan is in here somewhere.”
[Online. Analyze. System failure. Repair Status: Partial. Safeties: Negative.] Ryan raised his glowing hand, filling the room with light.
“Turn it down, Dude. They’ll see it.” The light dimmed.
Standing in the large room with a dirt floor, there were no window
s or contents of any kind, except for a winch hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room. Under it, a large iron box sitting in a hole, and the top being level with the floor. Zack sniffed the box, “Logan is inside.”
Ryan looked at him, “What?”
“Logan is inside,” whispered Zack.
[Control compromised.] Going over to the metal box, Ryan, without any help, lifted it out of the hole. Pulling off the lock, he opened it to reveal a bag that moved. Extracting it out, he ripped it open to reveal a struggling Logan, his head covered by a metal mask, having his hands and feet chained. Through the air holes, Zack could hear Logan’s labored breathing.
Ryan whispered to the Ironhouse brothers, “Since he probably can’t hear us, he doesn’t know it’s us. I’ll remove the mask while you hold him down. Just don’t let him scream out.”
Fen, Hakk, and Fodu grabbed Logan as he tried to struggle, but his body was so cramped the dwarves were able to control him. Grabbing the lock, Ryan crushed it. Removing the mask, Logan looked up, his face bruised, and a gag was stuck in his mouth.
“You’re okay, it’s Ryan. We’re here to rescue you.”
As Logan’s eyes adjusted to the light in the room, his eyes began to focus, and he was overcome with relief. Reaching down, Ryan crushed the locks that bound Logan’s hands and feet, pulling out the gag.
Zack called to the Ironhouse brothers, “Massage his legs and arms to get the blood circulating. We may have to wait for a while before he can walk. Ryan, dim that light. Everybody be quiet.”
As the Ironhouse brothers helped Logan sit up, he quickly filled his lungs with the much-needed oxygen from the stale basement, and he began rubbing both feather tattoos at the same time. They began to glow, which they had never done before. Breathing deeply, he felt Sister and stood. “Where’s Lauren?”
Zack was surprised to see him walking towards him. “Her scent heads toward the far door.”
Pushing him out of the way, Logan headed towards the door, as the others quickly followed. Then they all heard her scream.
[System online. Emotional conflict. System…offline.] As Ryan ran past Logan, his clothes melded to his stone body. Throwing his shoulder into the door, the metal reinforced wood, meant to keep unwanted guests out, exploded into the room, and Logan, Zack, and the Ironhouse brothers rushed in behind him.
They saw Lauren stretched out on the table, looking to be unconscious. When Logan saw the large man standing beside the table with the metal gloves, heat jumped from the various fireplaces, finding the gloves, and taking less than a second, they went from cold steel to super-heated white-hot metal. With the gloves falling to the ground, they left behind two charred stumps, causing the large silent man to fall to his knees in pain. Another figure stood on the opposite side of the table, wearing a purple sash across his body and face, but he vanished as fast as he had appeared.
Racing over to Lauren, Ryan broke the chains that held her down, and the sight of the grotesque injuries shocked his body back to normal. [Online. Analyze damage. Engage Repairs.] The right side of her, from the top of her thigh to the base of her armpit, was an elaborate brand, most of which was still red. Not only were her wrist and foot broken, but large cuts on her legs had also been closed with crude stitches. As Ryan tended to Lauren, the Ironhouse brothers searched the room, routing out another silent man from the back.
“Logan, you’re lucky he didn’t scream,” advised Ryan.
“His tongue is missing. He screams, but nobody hears him. Cover her up and get her out of here. The rest of you go with him, as you don’t want to be here right now.” Ryan picked up the limp body, as Zack led them back to the first room, and the dwarfs brought up the rear guard. Logan looked down at the two silent men, “Did you know that the body is mostly water? I’m very talented with water.” He began rubbing the tattoos, as thoughts of Lauren filled his head. As the larger man started to turn blue, the smaller silent man started to turn red, as his body unwillingly accepted the additional heat from the first. Both were shaking; one from the cold, one from intense heat, and then both fell to the ground, silent like their tongueless mouths. Joining his sister several minutes later, they had laid her out on a table, having covered her with a blanket. While her body was cold, she still breathed.
“I cannot find it.” Fen was frustrated.
“It has to be here,” began Fodu. “The portal sought it.”
“Only Earth Mother can find, only she can see it,” said Hakk.
Having spent hours with Lauren, when she cried or slept, Ryan would look for her staff. He eventually determined that if you looked directly at it, it would never show itself, but if you watched carefully, you could catch a glimpse of it in the corner of your eye. Lifting his hand, he filled the room with light, and scanning everything, he spotted it under a table. Picking it up, he wrapped her left hand around it, hoping that it had special powers for times like this.
Going up to his sister, Logan felt her weak pulse, “Where’re the others?”
“It’s just us,” replied Ryan.
“Where’re we?”
Ryan shrugged his shoulders, “We don’t know. Mirtza opened a portal so we could find you.”
“So, what do we do next?”
“We get you both home,” advised Ryan, who then went to pick up Lauren.
Logan stopped him, “No, let me carry her. I can keep her warm. Finish your rescue.”
Leading them into the big room, Zack found a door with the scent of fresh air. Listening to it, when it was safe, he opened it to a set of stairs that went up. Advancing to the top, he listened again at the next door. “It’s quiet on the other side. I think it goes outside, but the scent of black-clad soldiers is thick.” Opening the door, they walked out into a small fort-like structure with a large stonewall, which surrounded the building they had just exited. Once they were in the courtyard, Logan took in several deep breaths, and calling to the magic, looking at the stone building first, he then looked at Lauren. Suddenly, a fire erupted inside the structure, being so intense, flames shot out from the windows. With timbers turning to ash in seconds, the building collapsed in on itself.
Zack looked at the pile of charred rubble, “Why, Logan?”
“I just wanted to introduce myself. Nobody does this to my sister. If you mess with her, you mess with me.”
Chapter 23
With the first sun cresting the eastern horizon, Hakk pointed in the opposite direction, “West, go there we need to.”
A large wooden gate stood closed before them. Going up to it, Ryan kicked it open. Logan was looking down at his sister, concentrating on generating warmth, which he transferred to her body, and he never saw the army camped on the other side of the gate: the huge army.
“Should have waited for Eric,” advised Zack.
Ryan shook his head, “Do you really think that’s going to stop me?”
After the Ironhouse brothers had looked at the army, they turned to Zack and Ryan, neither of whom seemed to be worried. Fen looked to his brothers, “Time too much they spend with us. Outlander no longer and both are now dwarf.”
Hakk reached for his ax with a smile, “Our blades are sharp, but this day we will make them dull.”
Fen screamed to the heavens, “Father, this day your death we avenge.”
As the three brothers touched their axes together, they screamed “IRONHOUSE,” causing birds to take to the sky, making small mammals flee to underground burrows.
The black-clad soldiers should have fled also, but they remained.
“Before my father died,” began Zack, “during the divorce procedures, he gave me a necklace. He said it was a piece of a real Triceratops, but he was a bit of a dinosaur himself. During the accident on the bus, it became part of me. I’ll take the left. You take the right.”
Ryan smiled, “Works for me.”
After Zack had gone out of focus, slowly a huge beast that had not walked for millions of years came into focus: thirty feet long, ten feet
tall, covered with thick skin that resembled armor plating. A huge shield-like plate covered its head, having two large horns protruding from it, and a smaller third one just above the nose. The beast roared, stomping its feet.
When Ryan looked back at Lauren’s limp body, he screamed to the heavens. [System overload. Threats present. Auto function engaged. Does not exist. Disengage. Auto select: Implemented. Halt. Abort. Armor selected. Implemented. Offense. None. Command. Kick ass. Abort. Abort. Abort….] Flexing his body, he brought it forth. Without understanding it, Ryan just accepted it. With rage ripping through him, he grew in size and bulk: eight, ten, twelve feet tall. His clothes melded to his body, as his skin turned to granite. The dwarves would later describe him to be a rock troll. Bending down, he picked up a log from the broken gate, which he brought up to his shoulder like a baseball bat, and started to walk forward.
The black-clad soldiers had started to move towards the gate when they saw it explode out, and even though they had watched the two little men transform into nightmares, they still continued to advance, driven by the unknown.
Zack, the dinosaur, rushed into the crowd of black-clad soldiers, trampling them, impaling them on his horns, flinging them to their deaths. Those behind him met his huge tail, which crushed rib cages and smashed skulls. When Ryan swung his makeshift bat with one hand, swarms of soldiers flew through the air, their heads ripped from their torsos, and the wounded he stomped to death.
Some soldiers tried to circle behind the nightmares, attempting to outflank them so that they could attack from behind. Instead, they found a different nightmare: Ironhouse. Dwarven axes ripped through poorly constructed armor, slicing two, three, four bodies at a time. The brothers, trained and armed by dwarves, had fought side by side before, and working like a finely trained orchestra, they conducted their song: the death of black-clad soldiers. While their Pappy was never much of a music fanatic, they knew he smiled at the songs that the choir now sang.
Ryan stormed forward, picking up and throwing wagons into the horde, pulling out tent poles, he skewered more soldiers. As his right hand swung the huge bat, his left hand picked up black-clad, using them to beat others. Still they failed to fall fast enough. When he roared at them, super-heated steam hissed out, cooking them alive. Vomiting out lava, black-clad screamed twice; once when first burnt, again when they tried to pull the molten rock from their bodies. Zack, covered in blood, his feet thick with black-clad soldiers, charged them repeatedly.