“Aghh! Dammit! Bandits, seriously? Come on! Get out of my ARMOR!”
Everyone looked over as his last word resounded through the forest and the mountain range.
A barbarian let out a yell and smacked him with a stone axe as another struck him with a rusted axe.
“Put your weapons down and I’ll let you go,” the ar- mored knight said.
Another attacked him as he danced, still trying to get the ants out of his armor; he struck the man and sent him flying into a group of three others, dropping them to the ground. He moved through the attackers nearest him, leaving them groaning on the ground in a few short seconds.
A dancing knight—well, this is a first!
“It’s just one person!” a barbarian yelled as they piled in to fight the knight, who was out in the open instead of the now-entrenched dwarves in the carriage formation.
“Dave, I summon you!”
In contrast to the knight’s words, the air was stirred up. A golden glow appeared around the knight’s arms, grow- ing bigger and more radiant before the light turned in- to a large head and golden scales that flowed from the knight’s arm.
“A dragon?” Krosem asked. Seriously, he was not sure what the hell funny mushrooms, numbing leaves, or dizzy herb he had taken this morning for this to happen.
The familiars started to look at the dragon in awe, not listening to their contractors, looking like subjects meet- ing an emperor, unsure what to do in such a situation.
The dragon looked down upon the world as the knight’s arm stopped glowing. The dragon, over one hundred meters long, circled around the knight in the sky.
It raised its head in the sky, letting out a roar.
“GROOOOOAAA—” The familiar seemed to catch sight of the dancing knight, who seemed to be putting his right hand forward, its left and then shaking it all about.
Its roar was cut off as it tilted its head to the side, as if to ask just how he had got such a master.
“Bandits!” the knight said, shaking and jiving around.
The mountain barbarians turned bandits seemed to come back to their new and much stranger reality as they sent attacks at the knight, who oddly dodged all of the attacks, while somehow making it look like a dance number. The attacks merely bounced off the golden dragon in the sky.
The dragon let out a snort. Smoke clouds appeared out of its nostrils as it looked at the bandits.
The bandits all looked at the dragon and the knight. Even Krosem felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise. A man rushed forward with a yell.
The others gathered their voices just as the first man went silent; the dragon bit down on them and the man disappeared into their body.
“You’ll get indigestion from the armor, Dave!” the knight said, sashaying to the side and shaking his shoul- ders.
The dragon let out a series of yowls as if impersonating the knight’s words, rolling its eyes. It let out a breath of lightning, which arced between the bandits as if it had eyes of its own, creating a golden circle of light as ex- tra-crispy, well-done bandits fell to the ground, smoking slightly.
Dave didn’t seem to be in a merciful mood as he yowled and complained. He’d disregarded the bandits and the dwarves already as he berated his master.
“Run or else we’ll all die!” one of the bandits yelled.
“Oh, come on! I was asleep as well! It’s not like I wouldn’t have called you out! What do you mean, you’ve been talking to Bruce and Penelope? Why was Wendy asleep?” the knight asked.
“How does someone have such a powerful familiar? Are they a Knight of the Light?” a bandit asked as they all ran away as fast as their legs could take them.
“Knight of the Light—what poet bardic ass made up that little rhyme?” the knight complained as he shook his leg. A few bugs fell to the ground and he stopped moving around.
The dragon continued to answer with yowls and roars as the remaining bandits made a run for it and the dwarves checked on one another.
Krosem lowered his blunderbuss in stages, looking to his other dwarves. “Tend to the wounded?” he said, just not really sure how to comprehend what he had seen and was seeing.
“Anthony!” An irate voice came from the boulder-cov- ered plains.
Krosem looked over to see a dark-gray elf jumping across the boulder nimbly. She didn’t even look at her feet as she jumped from rock to rock.
Not fair! I have to watch when I walk up stairs because they’re all a blasted human’s size or even worse, beast men! He let out a snort, angered at the elves’ nimbleness.
There was a sound of rock hitting metal. The knight looked around, a rock pinging off his helmet.
“Hey, sorry—stepped into that ant nest and then went all up my armor,” Anthony said.
“You—!” She brought herself up short as she finally was able to see all of the dwarves, the caravan, and the trees as well as the barbarians on the ground. “What did you do?”
“Dave did it,” Anthony said, innocent as can be, not un- derstanding her words, as he pointed up at the golden dragon.
“Dra—dragon?” the elf said in surprise.
Dave swam through the air and looked down at the elf, examining her with bright eyes.
The elf was sweating as Anthony, the knight, looked back to the elves.
“To the Ancestor’s rest,” he said.
Krosem stopped. That greeting was ancient, something that was only used by the oldest dwarves who remem- bered a time after the great war.
“Are you trying to make fun?” one of the dwarves asked.
“I did not mean any offense. I am sorry if my words or my speech is a bit rusty. I have not used it in some time.” The man didn’t speak in common, but in ancient, Dwarvish.
It took even Krosem some time to figure out all he had said.
“How do you know ancient Dwarvish?” Old Raldras asked in ancient Dwarvish, his words more halted and slower.
“I learned it from an old friend. I helped him out and he helped to smith my armor and helped me talk to Tairlyn Stone Hammer to forge my blade.” The knight’s tone re- laxed a bit, as if following memories.
“Tairlyn Stone Hammer fell in the great war five hun- dred years ago!” Raldras’s voice turned angry.
“Well, I can’t forge a maker’s mark, can I?” The knight pulled out his sword. The dwarves tensed up, but he handed it pommel first to Raldras.
He took it with an angry snort and took out an inspec- tion stone. The runescript lit up as there was a reaction with the sword. A mark appeared at the bottom of the blade.
“It’s her mark. How were you able to?” Raldras had a number of questions but the man simply took back his blade.
“Not sure, for the most part. How are the dwarves?” the man asked.
“We forge and we prepare,” Raldras said. “Prepare for what?” Anthony asked.
“For the second coming,” Raldras said, repeating words that had been said for generations.
“Ah, then we really must not have won.” Anthony’s words turned to common before he returned to ancient Dwarvish.
“Good work. Hopefully we don’t need it.” Anthony pat- ted Raldras on the shoulder. “So where do your travels take you?”
“We are heading to the city Sonis to conduct business,” Raldras said.
“Is that on the way?” Anthony yelled back to the dark elf and then turned around. Dave was still staring at her.
“Dave! Go and move the trees blocking the road, please!” Anthony sounded embarrassed he’d forgotten about the two of them.
Dave swam around the dark elf and headed for the tree. He grabbed it with his claws and carried it off with ease.
“Is Sonis on the way?” Anthony asked the dark elf, who looked rather shaken by the whole experience.
“Y-yes. What is that?” She pointed at the dragon.
“Don’t worry. That’s Dave. He’s harmless. Well, maybe not harmless.” Anthony let out a short laugh. “But he’s a good friend. Anyway
, Sonis?”
“It’s on the way,” the elf said.
“Dave, get the other trees—don’t want to cut off the road,” Anthony said.
Dave looked almost bored as he casually threw trees to the side that would have taken a team of ten dwarves struggling to move.
“Mind if we hitch a ride with you?” Anthony asked Ral- dras.
“Uhh...”
“Certainly!” Krosem looked to Raldras. “It seems the pass has become more dangerous. It would be good to have some help.”
He might seem crazy as hell, but he has flair. Krosem grinned, feeling that it might not be so bad to befriend this dancing knight.
“Thanks! Dave!”
Dave moved back toward Anthony, swimming around his back and becoming thinner before he passed through Anthony’s armor, spiraling around his arm all the way to his hand before the glow died down.
Several of the dwarves had been hit; only two were in bad condition. With their short stature, it made them harder to hit and Anthony had showed up before their caravan had been overrun. If it had been a few minutes later, then it might be another story.
With the battlefield now safe, they quickly healed up and reloaded their weapons as a few skirmishing dwarves checked the bodies that were left behind.
Krosem was cleaning his blunderbuss when there was a voice from inside the carriage he was leaning against.
“That dark elf, her markings on her ears and her ear- rings—those mark someone as elven royalty,” Raelynn, the real leader of the group and the daughter of his sworn lord, said.
Krosem looked over to the dark elf, who was helping with the wounded. Her ability with healing poultices and her own healing items were much better than what the dwarves had available.
“What is she doing with Anthony then?” Krosem asked.
“I only heard that there was a group of dark elves in the northern reaches of the Stoha Mountains.”
“Far away from home.” Krosem loaded a shell into his blunderbuss and kicked the foregrip forward. “Unless we want them to ask questions, it might be better if we didn’t ask our own.”
He looked over to the children and people from the real caravan. There were a few dwarven guards among them, but to cover up everything, they had tagged along with a group of traders heading to Sonis anyway.
I hope that we weren’t the ones being targeted. They’re good people and if we’re the reason they’re getting attacked, that would be unfortunate.
He slapped his side-loading magazine into the blunder- buss. “We have three more days until we reach Sonis. There’s plenty of time for something to go wrong.”
***
Aila looked ahead to Anthony, who was talking to the driver. The two of them laughed at something.
She pulled up her cloak more.
“Still cold? Don’t worry, we should be out of the last of the winter pines and down into the evergreen forests soon. Once we leave the mountains behind, it can get nicer, warm even,” the driver, Krazzack, said with a smile.
He had a bandage on his head and shoulder where he had been hit with a sword, but the younger dwarf, al- though he showed some signs of pain, was quickly heal- ing. But even now, his hand rested on his four-barrel gun and his eyes looked over the forest with a calculating look.
“It’ll be good to get away from some of this cold.” Aila smiled at Krazzack.
I remember when I got this quest from Mother. I was so excited to be going south, to the warm, sun-touched lands. Seeing the other races. All I’ve done is run into the worst parts. Her eyes fell on Anthony once again. And found even more mysteries.
“Still, all of these open spaces, the birds—it is strange. Nothing like a cave overhead and the fireflies moving around with the heat of the furnaces on one’s skin.” Krazzack sighed.
“Missing home?”
“Ah, well, I’ve always wanted to leave, but now that I’ve left, I want to go home. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want to go right now, but I thought I would leave and never look back. But now, I just, I don’t know, appreciate it in a different way than I did before?”
“I can understand that.” Aila smiled.
She saw some of the dwarven children jumping about on the caravan. These trader kids moved around without a worry, mimicking the battle that had just happened and worshipping Anthony.
So those markings, they’re familiars. So he’s able to control five familiars? Just who is he? And someone controlling a dragon—there are only a few people in the entire human empire who can do that.
***
When they stopped, Aila and Anthony decided to make their camp a bit away from the others. Anthony didn’t need to eat or sleep, but so as to not freak them out with the fact there wasn’t a human under that armor, but a skeleton, they did their best to hide the truth.
When it was the second night, Aila overheard Anthony talking to the children. He had told them stories of great dwarven warriors the first night to calm them down and send them to sleep, so the second night they demanded more stories and were filled with questions.
“I heard that the Dwarven Legions are made up of the strongest fighters of all the races!”
“They can’t be stronger than Sir Tree Knight!” another said. They’d missed Anthony’s name completely and called him Sir Tree Knight instead. He didn’t seem to mind, almost used to it.
“Well, I’m not a knight or a member of the legions. I’m a Guardian from the Order of the Five. I don’t pay homage to the gods, but it is not unknown that they might bless warriors heading into battle according to their cause. The Order of Five don’t fight for one race, but all of them. We seek peace, but many times that means fighting,” Anthony said with sadness in his voice.
“A Guardian? What is that? Are those like the cham- pions from the different races?” a young dwarven girl asked.
“Something like that.” Anthony patted her head, and she smiled happily at the attention.
“Do not follow others blindly; do not harm others that do not wish you harm. Live a good and happy life, trying to help others along the way. With just these goals, peo- ple can live a great life. Warriors of all kinds are powerful and strong. They can wield unimaginable power, but that comes with a cost. Living a life filled with happiness is the ultimate payment you can give me, or any warrior who fights according to those tenets. Magic is not just spells and familiars, or earth, flame, and runescript. What just one person, with the right mindset, can do.” He put his finger against three small dwarves’ chests, one by one. “It can change the world. Small actions pile up bit by bit to create great change. Warriors might change a fight, but you can change the world. Isn’t that some- thing incredible?”
Aila was moved by his words as she headed back to their camp.
“So what would we need to do?” one kid asked.
Anthony saw an older-looking elf standing in front of him and other Guardians. There wasn’t a crowd, just the Guardians lined up in formation and the old man stand- ing in front of them.
He wore a kind smile on his face, but his movements car- ried a lethality in them that would scare enemies and re- assure friends.
Everyone focused on him.
“Do not follow others blindly; do not harm others who do not wish you harm. Live a good and happy life, trying to help others along the way.” Anthony repeated the same words that the old elf had said, feeling that it was a lifetime ago.
Chapter: Border Crossing!
“Well, this is where we go our separate ways,” Krosem said.
They were standing outside of the border city Usi. It was more fortress than city. It looked over the plains to the south of the Stoha Mountains and was one of a series of cities that lined the border on the beast men side.
If one squinted, they could see the humans also had their own opposing fortresses, the two sides watching one an- other.
The land in between was like it had been forgotten: grasses grew wildly, covering up the war-torn ground, making them lo
ok like chaotic hills instead of open wounds in the ground. Birds flitted overhead but few ever landed as if they, too, could sense that this was a place of death and destruction.
Getting closer to the battle-worn fortresses, one could see the earthen works around them, creating a network that ran between fortresses, creating a fighting line from the north, through the jagged mountains and down into the plains in the south to the vibrant and mysterious Deepwood.
Death Knight Box Set Books 1-5: A humorous power fantasy series Page 4