Warden's Path

by Heath Pfaff

  I turned from the freshly opened door and began walking down the path I’d originally been on. My staff was in hand now, the weapon tapping on the ground as I walked with it. That tapping was the only sound accompanying me as I moved. The halls were always quiet here, but for some reason that quiet seemed exceedingly ominous just then. The tap of my weapon on the ground was a welcome break to the emptiness. Certainly it gave warning to anything lurking ahead of me, but it also served to center my focus and keep my mind from wandering down dark avenues. Besides, I was certain that whatever was waiting for me already knew I was on my way.

  I reached the end of the hall and turned, but only managed one more step before I stopped short. The hallway ended abruptly, looking like it had been torn directly from the building, and in front of me a section of forest opened up. It was dark in the woods ahead, very dark, and I recognized the sight even as I was alarmed to find it where it was.

  I hadn’t seen this stretch of woods in a long time, but it wasn’t easily forgotten. It was the forest from the very first challenge I’d ever done through one of the traveling doors. I recognized the lay of the land. I could even make out a piece of the crumbling temple lying amidst the fallen foliage on the ground. The season was different. There was snow on the ground, and the trees had lost their leaves. The moon hung overhead, lighting the scene more than it had the first time I’d been here, but it was unmistakable. That place was burned into my mind.

  I took a step back. No, I wasn’t going to just walk out into this place. The hissing rattle of the skeletal creatures that inhabited that place sounded from somewhere in front of me, or my imagination let me believe I heard such a sound. I turned around and started back up the hall, leaving the forest behind me. I rounded the corner to return to the hall that had taken me here and stopped again. The hall was different. Ahead of me a red light was flashing, illuminating a long and strange corridor.

  This new corridor was clearly the design of intelligent people, but I’d never seen anything like it before. There was no stone or wood, and the floor had soft lights embedded inside of it that put out a steady, flickerless source of illumination, as though a bit of the sun’s glow was cooled and trapped within it. The red light that flashed ahead of me looked man made as well, though I didn’t understand how it worked. It looked as though it was turning behind a glass dome, but it didn’t flicker either. Whatever flame created the light was completely steady.

  A disembodied woman’s voice floated through the air, the words a mess of syllables that I couldn’t understand. It was like I’d passed through a door. This clearly wasn't the common tongue at all. There were symbols etched on one wall, writing. “O D Y S S E Y” I couldn’t make them out. I guessed that they were letters by the regular shape and repetition, but what they spelled was beyond me. All I knew for certain was that I didn’t want to be wherever it was that I’d found myself. This place was strange, stranger even than the forest. I turned around to head back the other way and found the hallway I’d just passed through missing.

  Another red light was turning at the end of this new passage and the hall. The corner I’d just come around was nowhere to be found. I turned back once more in confusion, but there was only more of this strange, otherworldly corridor bathed in red by the flashing, turning glass light. Panic was beginning to set in.

  The disembodied voice spoke from all around me once more, seeming to rise from everywhere at once. The phantom that spoke it sounded somewhat indifferent, as though it had no interest in whatever it was talking about. I began to walk down the hall, not eager to remain in one place. I had this strange feeling that I was being hunted, though I couldn’t place why I felt that way. I walked until the hallway split into two different directions, each another identical corridor with red light flashing along the walls, and white lights marking the ground at regular intervals. There was writing on the walls with arrows beneath them, but again the writing was beyond me, glyphs that looked similar in styling to the ones I’d first encountered.

  “Galley.” One indicated, and the other “Recreational Deck.” I frowned at the two separate phrases for a moment as though staring would decipher the symbols, and then finally picked the longer of the two and started walking that way. A part of me hoped I would run into someone who knew what was happening, and another part of me was afraid to find out what sort of creatures might live in a place like this.

  I walked for a bit more and slowed as I saw someone standing in the hallway in front of me. They were dressed in black robes, their hood drawn low over their face, and though they were facing me, I could make out little about them. Their hands were held in front of them, each in the flowing sleeve of the other arm. The person looked like they might belong to some kind of religious order, though I didn't recognize the attire. I approached carefully.

  “Do you speak common?” I asked as I drew nearer the figure. I still had my staff in hand, though I was using it like it was a walking stick, and not like the weapon it was. This was intentional at the moment, an attempt to put whoever this was at ease.

  The person in the robe didn’t immediately respond, instead choosing to stand still in my path. It wasn’t exactly blocking the hall. I could go around, but seeing this person just standing there took away all inclination I had to go forward.

  “Do you speak any language at all?” I asked, guessing whoever it was didn’t know what I was saying. “Words?” I added hopelessly.

  It shifted the slightest bit, turning so that it was looking directly at me. It didn’t raise it’s head, so whatever face lay beneath the hood was still cloaked in deep shadows.

  I opened my mouth to speak again, but a wave of words struck me then, whispers crawling through the air to swim across my flesh. I felt like I couldn’t catch the speech with my ears, not all of it, like it was a living thing that was trying to escape me.

  “ . . . know you . . . seen . . . the pit . . . Wurm . . . “ A terrible screeching hiss sounded and then another flood of words, faster and more harshly crackling through the air. “ . . . sees you, Lillin . . . darkness . . . the time . . . seeping . . . you will . . . “

  I recoiled from the second onslaught, and the thing before me stepped forward. I reacted on instinct alone. My Will snapped forward and the thing in the robes flew backward, crashing into the wall behind it. I shifted the grip on my weapon into a more offensive hold and advanced.

  “What are you?” I demanded, but my words were pointless. As the robes struck the wall they crumpled into empty fabric, falling to the ground.

  “Lillin.” A voice whispered into my ear, the breath from it tickling the small hairs on my neck, and I spun, staff lashing out behind me, whistling through the air as I added the force of my Will to the blow, a wave of spinning energy sweeping from the end of my weapon. Nothing was there. Nothing.

  The strange halls were gone. I was standing in the passageway that should have stretched in front of the barracks again. My mind was skipping, trying to find the moment when things had changed, trying to understand what I was seeing and experiencing, but it was difficult to put it all together. The impossibility of the situation left me reeling for a moment. My stomach lurched as though I’d been spinning around for too long and I had a strong urge to heave up my breakfast. I pulled this under control and took a few steadying breaths.

  I started to walk again, heading in the direction that would normally take me to the place I’d been told to go. I just had to find other Wardens. That terrible sensation of being followed clung to me as I went. I caught myself looking back over my shoulder frequently but I was making progress. Two halls connected the way they were supposed to, and then another. I tried to relax. If things were going to go back to normal I could do this. I would find the others, and then I would go looking for Korva if she wasn’t already back with them.

  From somewhere distant I heard a metallic scraping sound, two pieces of armor sliding over one another in a rough, grinding way. Of course I recognized the sound. I’d heard
it before many times. Once you’d been near a golem the sound of them stuck in your mind. It was the kind of thing nightmares were built from. I remembered that the golems were out of control. They’d been attacking people.

  The sound happened again, closer this time, coming from somewhere just ahead of me. I had to keep going. My destination lay forward, and as long as I was making progress I couldn’t turn around, even if that meant encountering one of the golems, the old guardians of the school. I’d dealt with them before. I’d never had to fight one, but I’d been around them. I could manage it once more. They weren't as strong as Wardens, though they had the advantage of being covered in heavy armor. They couldn’t use Will as a weapon, and they could be destroyed by being dismantled, even if that was very difficult. Take off their head, and they were as dead as a person left to the same fate.

  I reached the corner, the one I knew would put me within range of the noise I was hearing, and I hesitated for a moment. I once more found myself taking deep slow breaths to center my focus, calming myself and sharpening my mind. I could do this. I was a Warden, and this wasn’t something I had to fear. I rounded the bend in the hall.

  The golem was standing at the far end of this new corridor. This passage too was where it should be. I was not far from my destination now. The golem was facing my way, and as soon as I rounded the corner it took a step in my direction. I popped the latch on my weapon and split it into two parts.

  “Stand down, golem. I am a Warden of the Iron Will, and that is an order.” I said, my voice sounding firmer than I expected it to, though I was backing it with Will, letting the guardian know clearly that I was a Warden. The golem stopped in place. That was exactly what should have happened. It was supposed to acknowledge my orders unless it was on a task of higher import as designated by the King, or one of his high ranking advisors. “Go to the Rift and don’t come back until someone orders you to.” I commanded.

  The golem didn’t move. Instead a terrible, rasping noise spilled up from inside of it, echoing out of the metal body and rolling down the hall, careening from the walls. It took me a moment to realize I was hearing laughter. This was the laughter of the golem. It was a sound I’d not only never heard, but had never expected to hear. I wasn’t even sure it was a sound that could exist.

  “We take no orders from Wardens.” It rasped in its metallic voice, and then something black and terrible slid up behind it, stepping out from one of the doors next to it. At first I didn’t know what it was. It moved in a strange way, body jerking and lacking grace, but yet with surprising speed. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was seeing until my mind latched onto an unwelcome memory, a fragment of time I’d frequently revisited, but never willingly.

  “They’re what came before the golems.” Ghoul’s voice drifted from my memory. “They’re named as I am, Ghouls.”

  Remembering helped me to make out the details of what I was seeing, the ichor covered body, the skull with flesh peeled back to expose the bone, the long, curved horns rising up and back from the crown of its head. This was a horror from long ago, one that was even worse than the golems, one without sense or reasoning, just an unending desire to destroy.

  It roared then, a scream that would have rendered a person’s throat to blood and torn flesh. The sound was close enough to human that the tone and inherent wrongness of it were disturbing on a fundamental level. It was just enough amiss that it struck at the mind in a worming kind of way, eating away at my expectations of what was possible. The ghoul came on fast.

  My training with Korva had prepared me to fight with both Will and weapon. I didn’t wait for the thing to come to me, to engage me on its own terms. I leapt forward, a pulse of my Will thrashing forward ahead of me. I didn’t bother to direct it, which might have been more effective, but would have also taken a focus I couldn’t quite muster. Instead, I let the wave of power crash into the ghoul even as I swung my first strike for its horned head. That too was propelled by Will, and all the strength I could muster. The blow was devastating.

  Black muck and shards of skull exploded away from my weapon, sending the creature staggering to the ground, most of its head a mess of putridity upon the floor. It twitched where it crumpled and I took a step back from it, surprised at how effective the blow had been. I didn’t take my eyes from it, however. I remembered Ghoul warning me that these things didn’t really die. They just kept going. To destroy them they’d been torn to pieces and the pieces taken far away from each other and disposed of, but even then they’d continued to move. Even as I watched it, I could see it coming back together. The splatter of bone and blackness crawled quickly back across the floor, and the monstrosity was already staggering back up despite the fact that half of its head was gone.

  I came forward and struck again, focusing a powerful blow on the back of it’s spine, striking once with a Will strengthened blow, and then two more times until it’s head was torn from its body by the power of pure blunt force. My hands were ringing from the effort of the blows even though I’d used Will to counter some of the impact. I was using what Korva taught me as effectively as I could.

  The ghoul kept on standing up, it’s head, what remained of it, hanging by just a few scraps of flesh. One of its clawed hands struck for me, a lightning quick slash in my direction that I only just managed to dance away from at the very last instant. It staggered towards me, the first step uneven, but the second more sound.

  “You can’t stop us. The Wurm is coming, and he will not be stopped.” The golem in the hall’s voice echoed down the corridor as I was forced to backup again, pushed away by the ghoul’s new violent onslaught. I attacked it time and again, delivering powerful sets of blows that tore at its body, and broke its bones, but it wouldn't stop coming for me.

  Despite all of my training, despite how incredibly powerful I’d become, this was an enemy that I couldn’t defeat. I was fighting a battle in which my opponent would never tire, and would never stop. Death was the only possible outcome. I had to get away, and I had to do so immediately.

  I sprang forward, launching the most powerful attack that I could, aiming every single blow at the thing’s legs. I hit them time and again until the ghoul was crawling on stubs across the ground, the pieces quickly trying to right themselves, but it didn’t matter. This last attack was just buying me time. I ran. I didn’t go back the way I’d come. That wasn’t where I needed to be. Instead, I charged for the golem at the other end of the hall.

  I jumped, strengthening the movement with my Will, and also using the power to grab the walls as I hurled myself forward. I’d been warned about doing this. Applications of Will to your own body were dangerous. Small uses, like adding a push to your hand as it swung a fist, or speeding up the motion of your legs during a jump were alright. They could still be risky, but the chances were a Waren wouldn’t break themselves. Grabbing yourself as a whole and propelling yourself bodily with Will could break you to a state that repair would be difficult. Your Will was a part of you. You couldn’t use Will effectively on itself, but that was what I did.

  I felt like I was flying for a moment. I shot through the air so quickly that things became a confusing blur. My body screamed in protest, and my Will tore through me in a terrible way, a way that left my mind reeling. I didn't so much land on the other side of the Golem as I did hit the ground hard, rolling across it as instinct took over and tried to help me recover from the impact. It had to be instinct because I couldn’t draw my mind into coherent thought at all. I was dazed, and I hurt everywhere. It was like falling from a great height and landing on your back. It hurt to draw breath for a moment, and I wasn’t sure I could at all. I thought I might black out. Somehow I was running. As my focus on the world came back into place, I was pushing with everything I could muster, the hall speeding by me. I’d made it past the golem, though I couldn’t remember all of the details. I’d tried to throw myself over its shoulder, and I supposed it had worked. I didn't want to slow down or look behind me.

  I
made it to the end of the hall and took a quick left down the next branch, careening off the wall which I used to push myself around the corner. I almost ran face first into a Warden standing in the hall just a few feet from the door to Forge. He drew his weapon, startled by my sudden appearance, and another Warden to the other side of the door drew her weapon as well, though when they saw me they stood down.

  I didn’t recognize the woman at all, but the male I knew very well. “Gaveech.” Relief washed over me, though I turned around then, looking back down the hall, my weapons still in hand. “I was being chased.” I said, my eyes scanning the halls behind me. It was strangely silent. I peeked back around the corner, but that was still as well.

  “Lillin, we thought . . . you’ve been missing for three days.” Gaveech’s tone was strained, and he looked more than surprised to see me standing there.