by Sam Ryder
“It always did,” Vrill said, a faraway look in her eyes as they flickered with demonlight. “Until it didn’t.”
“Could you be any more dramatic?” Beat said. Despite her attempt to show confidence, I could hear the nervousness in her tone.
“Truth is never dramatic,” Vrill said.
“I can see why you like her,” Beat said. “A barrel of monkeys wouldn’t contain more laughter.”
“What are monkeys?” Vrill asked.
“I’ll explain later. Where does this trail lead?”
“There are no maps for Annakor.”
“I thought you said it was called Allomir? And that you’ve been here many times?”
“The Morgoss renamed it when they overthrew the Three. Annakor means death of sky, earth and sea. And I have been here many times—that’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
“The paths change.”
“Change? How is that possible? It’s…rock.” I wasn’t such a dummy that I didn’t know that the earth could change due to erosion by water and wind and seismic activity. But that took years. The way she was describing this phenomenon made it sound like the changes occurred overnight.
“Like I said before…this is a place of dark magic. It just does what it does.”
Awesome. So we were navigating blind now. For all we knew, this very path could lead us off a cliff.
It didn’t. Instead, the path grew steeper and steeper, until we were forced to grip our torches and weapons with one hand so we could use the other to claw our way up. The Black was fully upon us now, and yet we still hadn’t seen a single monster. Or heard one for that matter, which was eerie as hell.
The path leveled out abruptly, moving forward a few yards before veering sharply to the right and out of sight around a large outcropping.
“We are close,” Vrill commented.
Her words felt true. But close to what?
We followed the path around the boulders, our three haloes of flickering demonlight creating a glowing Venn diagram, intersecting in a tiny area toward the center, pulsing like a beating heart.
Rather than continuing its path upward, the trail skirted the edge of the mountain, rounding the side and circling around behind it. Even if we wanted to, backtracking would be a time-consuming endeavor, especially if the path had already changed behind us. In my mind, we’d passed the point of no return.
Cliffs rose on both sides of us now as we passed between two competing mountains. If monsters surrounded us on both sides now, we’d have no choice but to fight through them to escape. Clambering up or down the hillside was no longer a possibility.
The end of the cliffs appeared at the edge of our torchlight, like a massive door reaching all the way to the black sky. Or at least so it appeared. In reality we couldn’t see how far the “door” stretched upwards, because it was swallowed by the Black.
“We’re here,” Vrill said, stopping just before the end of the cliffs. I craned my neck to see what was out there. There was only blackness, until we stepped forward and the cliffside no longer obscured my vision.
Whoa. That thought was the understatement of my entire time on this planet. Where I should’ve only been able to see darkness, there were hundreds—no, thousands—of stars, flickering in the distance. Not stars, I realized. Torches. Like ours.
Demontorches.
They rose from the ground, where they were the most numerous, into the starless sky, angling toward a central point, with fewer and fewer torches on each layer. Like a pyramid of lights.
No, I thought. Like a fortress.
“Welcome to the Blight of Annakor,” Vrill said.
“Looks more like motherfucking Mordor,” Beat said.
I couldn’t argue with that. There was nothing for it. “Let’s go kill Sauron and destroy the Ring,” I said.
TWENTY-TWO
A RIDDLE SOLVED
Vrill was still hung up on the whole Mordor-Sauron-Ring thing. “So this was a story? What does it have to do with Annakor and the Morgoss?” she asked in that innocent way of hers. It was endearing, if I’m being honest. She was the perfect mixture of innocence and complexity. I liked that.
“On Earth, it’s common for people to compare real life situations to popular culture,” I explained. “It breaks up the monotony of our boring lives.”
“Oh,” she said, though I wasn’t sure she really understood. Her world seemed so different to ours. I mean, shit, they used group sex—or maybe my man-brain was just fantasizing that it involved groups—to rejuvenate themselves, the same way humans ate food together. Or at least some humans did. I usually grabbed a frozen dinner and ate alone with my virtual friends and the colonies of aliens trying to eat my space marine’s face off.
“Shh,” Beat said. “Do you hear that?”
I didn’t at first, my mind still full of my own noisy thoughts. I concentrated, tilting my head toward what Vrill had referred to as the Blight of Annakor, that dark fortress lit with a thousand demonfires. There. A thumping sound, dull and distant, like the beating of a drum, or the bone-vibrating bass of a tricked-out car sound system.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Birth,” Vrill said.
“Birth of what?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out. Come on.”
She started down a twisting, turning path, leaving us no choice but to follow. The path narrowed, the terrain falling away on each side, until it felt like we were Olympic gymnasts on a balance beam. Beat used her spear to center herself, a tightrope walker’s pole. My giant hammer was less useful, and I had to lean to the opposite side to counteract its weight. Vrill danced along the narrow stone causeway like it was as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge.
I made the mistake of looking over the edge.
At first all I saw was abject darkness—not a surprise considering we were well into the longest Black yet—but then…
Eyes. Hundreds of them, as red as hot coals, burning deep in the abyss.
My mind spun and took a wrong step, one of my feet clipping the edge of the path. My leg buckled at the knee and I knew I was a goner. Whatever was down there was about to feast. On me.
Something hit me hard under the armpit, arresting my fall. With one foot on and one foot off the bridge, I looked at Beat. She stood like a female goliath, her legs slightly bent and even with her hips. Her lips were sewn together in determination as she held my bulk aloft with her outthrust spear. Then, inch by inch, she hefted me back to safety.
Something snarled from in the pit, angry at having its supper stolen from it.
“Thanks,” I gasped.
“You owe me,” Beat said with a grin. She turned and continued down the bridge without another word.
I took two deep breaths and then followed. My heart was still pounding in time with the “Birth” drums, but I wasn’t scared. Which amazed me. Back on Earth, with my limited experience—okay, no experience—in life-or-death situations, I would be shitting my pants right now, curled up in the fetal position and sobbing.
I barely resembled that guy anymore. In the short time since I’d landed on this planet, I’d gained a measure of courage I used to only have when I played A-Civ.
Don’t get cocky now, I reminded myself. The Black is young—you could still get eaten by something with three rows of teeth.
With that sobering thought battering around in my head, I made it to the end of the narrow, twisting bridge, where my companions were waiting. Beyond them was a door, or at least that was the closest comparison I could come up with. It was twice as tall as me, and thrice my wingspan. The barricade appeared to be made of heavy-looking metal, banded with long iron buckles that crisscrossed in several locations.
It was one big ass door.
“Should we knock?” I said, trying to overcompensate for the fact that I’d almost died.
Vrill looked at me like I was mad.
Beat sniggered. “First we should check for a doorbell.”
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br /> Vrill aimed her what’s-wrong-with-you-people look at my fellow Warrior. “It’s a door,” she said, enunciating each word like she was speaking to someone slow. “You just open it.”
With that, she dug her heels in and shoved against the right side of the massive metal door. For a moment nothing happened, but then, with a groan, the slab began to move.
“It’s a door, dummy,” Beat said, flashing a grin in my direction.
“I thought it might be locked.”
We joined Vrill, helping her shove the door far enough open that we could slip inside. When we were clear, the door sprang back as if on a spring-loaded hinge, slamming behind us with a thud that reverberated through my teeth.
The sound of beating drums stopped instantly, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because the door blocked the noise or because whoever was beating them realized we’d entered their domain. I shoved that thought aside and focused on the door.
There was no handle on the inside, and I couldn’t imagine any of us would be able to get our fingernails far enough into the seam to provide the leverage to haul it back open.
Which meant we were trapped. In a monster castle. Great. This night kept getting better and better.
Vrill said, “We won’t be leaving this way,” and marched off, thrusting her torch in front of her to chase away the shadows.
Beat said, “She’s a tough bitch—I like her,” and gave chase.
After staring at the door for another long second, I followed. I angled the light from my own torch to the opposite side, peering into the retreating gloom. A massive pillar rose before me, disappearing into a ceiling of darkness. The column was painted with scenes that once might’ve been nice. It was hard to even think that word—nice—in this place, but it was the only way to describe the scenery that previously filled the curved sides of the pillar. Horses roaming a lush countryside. Flowers blooming on hills painted with gold hemlock. In the distance, a white fortress nestled amongst majestic purple mountains.
I knew that’s what lay behind the current paintings the same way you could squint and make out the scene behind a frosted window in winter. Now, however, the artist’s whimsical landscape had been altered, limned with kohl-black streaks and red slashes that transformed the horses into winged monsters with eyes of fire. The blossoms bled from their petals, crying tears of crimson. The landscape was harsh, ash-covered stone with jagged edges. And the fortress, which I now realized was the transformation of Allinor to Annakor, was black, its trio of vaulted spires piercing the sky like the spikes of a thrust trident.
So the monsters are grim artists, too, I thought. I could just make out the original colors as they sought to pierce the stranglehold of blacks and reds.
“Hey, you coming?”
I glanced up, seeing Beat’s muscular form illuminated by her torch as she looked back at me. Unconsciously, I’d stopped to stare at the pillar painting while the others moved further away. I blinked and shook my head. I needed to be more focused or I could screw things up for all of us.
I was about to cross the gap between me and my companions when I noticed a pot resting beside the pillar. I frowned and stuck my torch in its direction to see what was inside. Is that…
Yes. Paint. It appeared to be white, though it was hard to tell in the fiery lighting, which tinted everything orange and red amongst the pressing shadows.
The pot of paint looked utterly out of place in this room. I felt…drawn to it. Which I knew was weird and dumb, because, well, we were in a monster fortress hunting the worst of the worst monsters themselves, so the last thing I should be thinking about was paint.
I fought off the urge to inspect the pot further, catching up to Vrill and Beat, who were standing before a wall, looking up. The wall was painted black, save for strange markings etched in white. It looked like an ancient language, the kind you might find scrawled on the walls of an old tomb filled with cobwebs in a classic Indiana Jones flick.
Illusa allora, the words said.
“Is that Latin?” I guessed, though I knew nothing of the origin language. I took three years of Spanish in high school, though I had to admit I didn’t get very far beyond gracias and Feliz Navidad.
Vrill shook her head. “I don’t know what Latin is, but this is the language of the stars, also known as the language of the gods.”
“Like the Three?”
“Yes. It is not spoken often, even here, but this language is said to hold great power.”
Where was a good gods-language translator when you needed one?
“I think it’s a riddle,” Vrill said.
Wait…what? “You speak god…ish?” I said.
“I’m not fluent, but I’ve picked up a few things over the years. Eve knows the language well enough, and we used to be…friends.”
Mind. Blown. Twice. I wasn’t sure which was more surprising, that Vrill could speak this strangely beautiful god language or that she and Eve had once been anything more than spiteful enemies.
“What’s it say?” Beat asked.
“Begin anew,” Vrill said.
As soon as she spoke the second word, bad shit started to happen. There was a groaning sound not unlike when we’d opened the big ass door.
That’s when the slithers started falling from the ceiling, turning this into a real scene from Indiana Jones.
One of them landed three feet away, its head twisting around as its beady eyes met my stare. It hissed and then struck.
I was ready. I landed a blow with my hammer on its head, but my blunt weapon wasn’t the most effective against snakes. Instead of being a good snake and dying, its tail wrapped around the handle and it twisted its head around once more, snapping at my arm. I flinched back, dropping the hammer and barely avoiding those inch-long fangs.
Beat was already on the move, shoving past me to stab it through the mouth. The tip of her spear went all the way through and out the back. Gods, I was lucky to have a Warrior like her at my side.
I couldn’t dwell on how lucky I was, however, because everything else was beginning to feel pretty damn unlucky. The room now had more than a dozen slithers undulating across the floor. All of them were focused on us.
“We need to solve the riddle,” Vrill shouted, slashing her blade twice to chop one of the snakes into three pieces. Blood spilled out, filling the cracks between the stone floor tiles.
Begin anew. As soon as I thought the two words Vrill had spoken, they were replaced with: What has the nasty hobbitses got in its pockets? It wasn’t an exact quote from The Hobbit, but close enough for me to feel like our present riddle was as unsolvable as the unfair question Bilbo had posed to Gollum in order to escape with the Ring of Power.
Begin anew? WTF?
Another snake coiled and snapped at me, and this time Beat was busy with her own snake. I simply…reacted. I bobbed to the side like a boxer avoiding a knockout punch and lashed my hand upwards to grab the snake just beneath its fanged maw. The serpent wriggled and squirmed in my grasp, but I was determined to do my best impression of the late Steve Irwin, except not because I loved snakes, but because I despised them.
I squeezed. Hard. So hard that the snake’s eyes bulged and its tongue flicked out and its mouth gagged open. So hard that my hand went through the godsdamn snake’s scaled body, which erupted in a torrent of blood and filth, pouring over my arm as its head flopped from its body.
I released a rough battle cry and grabbed my discarded hammer from the floor, unwrapping the dead snake carcass that was coiled around it. I flung the lifeless snake aside like dirty laundry and then charged into the mass of snakes.
I knew I wouldn’t be the one to solve the riddle, but I could give Vrill and Beat the chance to figure it out. Snakes struck at me as I plowed through the center of the space, but I managed to block them, using my hammer as a shield, shifting it from side to side. I miraculously reached the opposite side unscathed, spinning around to check whether my plan had worked.
Yep. Every last
slither had spun in my direction to pursue me.
Which made me wish my plan had been a little less successful.
Instead of batting at the first slither that attacked, this time I pretended its head was a stake that needed to be hammered into the ground. The serpent tried to dodge the blow, but the head of my hammer was so wide it couldn’t move fast enough. I smashed its brains out. Yay for me.
The next snake learned from the one before it, skirting wide to the side and approaching on an odd angle, giving its compatriots a chance to attack from the opposite direction. Awesome. They’re learning to flank. Since when did snakes understand battlefield strategy?
I backed away, trying to improve my position, but then slammed into something I hadn’t expected to be there. The pillar with the savage painting.
It was something, at least, a barrier I could use to my advantage.
I slipped around the perimeter, hoping the snakes would flow to one side or the other. My foot glanced off something and I almost kicked over the pot of white paint.
For some reason, Vrill’s translation of the riddle popped into my head the moment I saw that pot. Begin anew.
I froze, which almost got me killed, because the slithers were hot on my heels now. I managed to block another strike with my hammer, dropping my torch to scoop up the pot in the other hand. There were hisses all around me now. I was already past the point of being out of time, so I just reacted based on instinct, slinging the pot haphazardly at the mural painted on the outside of the pillar.
The pot exploded just above it, thick, white liquid bursting out, slapping against the pillar and oozing down. White fingers reached downward, obscuring the graffitied artwork, erasing the dark lines and red slashes. Bye-bye demon horse. Bye-bye bloody flowers. Bye-bye Annakor.
A slither struck at my ankle and I lifted my leg away before stomping down to crush its skull. Another slithered in from the side, rearing up like a cobra and snapping at my face. I ducked, grabbing my dropped torch and shoving it upward. There was a sizzling sound as the demonfire scorched its scales and it jerked back with a hiss.