The Eight Walls of Rogar: An Epic Fantasy Adventure Series! (The Lost Kingdoms of Laotswend Trilogy--Book One)

by Woodward, William

  A few more seconds with the silence and dark pressing in on him was all he needed to make up his mind. There would be no waiting. He had to get out—now. Feeling stiff and sore after sleeping against the unyielding rock, he stood and, with a groan, reached back to rub his shoulder. If he were to stand shirtless before a full-length mirror, he had no doubt he would see bruises covering the majority of his body, the largest being a lovely purple flower blossoming at the point of impact on his shoulder.

  Would have been worse without the armor, he thought again. He had been embarrassed by the gift, and by his father’s insistence that it made him look gallant. He certainly didn’t feel very gallant now.

  Working hard to ignore the dread that had crept into his heart, Andaris concentrated on hugging the wall and taking slow, tentative steps through the darkness. After some time of this, his efforts making him feel wholly dispirited, an idea occurred to him. It was so obvious, he couldn’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner.

  Coming to a stop, he dug through his pack until his fingers closed around a small metal box. From the box, he pulled a rod of flint and a steel striker. Scraping the striker against the rod, he showered the space ahead with bright yellow sparks—fireflies to light his way. He grinned, feeling clever, for now he could see, after a fashion, and could hopefully distinguish where he was going from where he had been.

  And so on he went, moving through the caverns, spraying an almost steady stream of sparks before him. Taking turn after turn, he walked down long corridors, in and out of echoing chambers filled with great spears of stone thrusting from the floors and ceilings.

  At one point, he saw a series of small interconnected pools, the sides and bottoms of which were covered with luminescent moss. In addition to the moss, many of the pools contained a peculiar assortment of luminescent fish, most no more than two or three inches long, eyeless minnows swimming this way and that, locked in some kind of ritualistic dance. For a time, Andaris stood transfixed, watching the tracers of light dart back and forth through holes in the walls, their purpose unfathomable, twirling about one another with extraordinary speed and grace.

  Perhaps they glow because they eat the moss, he mused, a faint smile kissing his lips. He knew eventually he must leave the pool behind, but felt extremely reticent to do so. Here was life…and light—reminders of the outside world--a world he could only reach by cover of darkness.

  To be sure, the green ambiance was pretty to look at, and…a real comfort to boot. The trouble was, it was not even bright enough to navigate this room by, much less beyond. Which meant, apart from aesthetics, it did him no good at all. Staying here would just delay the inevitable. No amount of wishful thinking would change that. Besides, for all he knew, this was some creature’s watering hole. What else lives down here? he wondered, looking around with concern.

  The shadows shrank and stretched as he stepped away, as he sent the sparks arcing through the air, lending his surroundings an eerie, otherworldly quality. Flint won’t last forever, he realized, his stomach twisting with fresh anxiety. When he scraped it all away, what then? It would be difficult not to panic, lost and alone in the endless night.

  At first, even in the midst of such dire contemplations, he managed to keep his spirits up. Just around the next bend, he kept telling himself. Not much farther. He was certain to find the way. It was only a matter of time.

  Hours later, however, after having traveled ever deeper into the buried recesses of the earth, Andaris’ doubts greatly intensified. The caverns were immense—tunnels sprouting off of tunnels leading into chambers of varying shape and size, some no bigger than his bedroom back home, some hundreds of paces across. Most of these chambers were riddled with openings, but now and again he would come to a dead end and have to turn around.

  Trying to make sense of it all, he began carving arrow marks into the walls with his knife, finding the rock to be quite porous, crossing through the marks when he had to backtrack. It was a good idea, which, once again, he couldn’t believe he didn’t think of sooner. The pool would have made a good reference point. He hadn’t refilled his waterskin, fearing that the pool was tainted. Now he was beginning to regret that decision. If his water did, in fact, run out, he’d much rather risk contamination than go without completely.

  At the next intersection, he took a right. He had heard that if you are lost in a maze, the best way to find your way is to keep taking right turns. Can’t make things any worse, he decided.

  But after he had taken a total of thirty-six right turns, he was just as lost as before. He shook his head in disgust as he came to yet another intersection, wondering from what fountain of wisdom he had gleaned such infallible advice. Right turns indeed, he thought. Whoever came up with that probably never even set foot in a maze. He sighed deeply and, because he didn’t know what else to do, took another right.

  A couple of steps later, Andaris came to an abrupt halt. He was scraping the flint, but nothing was happening. He tried it again and again. A few brief sparks highlighted his strained expression, and then, once more, he was engulfed in blackness.

  “No,” he whispered. “Please.” Chest heaving, he shut his eyes, dropped his tools, and sat down. Long minutes passed. What was he going to do? He was lost and alone—trapped. He could die down here and no one would even know. He clasped his hands together to stop them from trembling. Normally, he was pretty good at keeping his emotions in check, thinking it unseemly to do otherwise, but now, sitting there in the dark, feeling very small and very frightened, the tears began to stream down his cheeks.

  He’d left without telling his family where he was really going, saying only that he was visiting his Uncle Del’s farm on the outskirts of town, knowing that the truth, particularly for his doting mother, would have been too upsetting. He shook his head in disbelief. What have I done? he thought. It had all been a game to him. Deep down, in his heart of hearts, he had known he would return. He had just needed some time away from things, a few days, perhaps a week, to assert his independence. He’d not considered he could actually get hurt…or even die.

  What will they do if I don’t come home? he wondered. But he knew. He could visualize it all too well—his mother’s kind face drawn with worry, his father and brothers out searching for him, combing the countryside for his tracks. His father was a fine woodsman, able to follow the coldest of trails, but even he had his limits. What have I done? Andaris thought again.

  This continued, the crying and self-deprecation until, like a sip of water to a man dying of thirst, his father’s words came back to him. “When everything seems hopeless,” he had said in his deep, resonant voice, “remember that you have Rocaren blood.” Andaris would never forget that night around the glowing embers of the campfire. It had been just the two of them, and for the first time in his life his father had spoken to him like a man instead of a child.

  He rubbed his eyes and took a steadying breath. Come on, he thought. Pull yourself together. Can’t just give up. Picturing his father’s face, so stoic and proud, he found the strength to open his eyes. I can be strong, too, he thought, slowly getting to his feet. If I must.

  With his left arm pressed against the wall and his right searching through the air, he began again. Never in his life had he felt so helpless. He could see no better than a blind man, and yet could swear the darkness was moving about him, full of unspent malevolence.

  It’s only in my head, he told himself, once more coming to a stop. But in the absence of his footfalls the silence wrapped around him, perfect and absolute. He heard nothing. He saw nothing—almost as if he had ceased to exist.

  “Rocaren blood,” he said, voice sounding frail in his ears, like that of a stranger. He repeated the statement over and over as he walked, clinging to it for courage. Was this to be his fate? To travel through the silence and dark until his legs gave out, to die without even a hand to hold for comfort?

  The longer he spent in the caverns, the more unreal it all seemed to him. At times, h
e wondered if he wasn’t actually asleep, at home in bed...and this was all just a bad dream. How long have I been in here? he wondered. It felt like days, though how could he know? With the stars and sun hidden from him, he had no way to gauge the passage of time, no way to measure its movement beyond counting the seconds.

  After many more hours of empty wandering, Andaris’ eyelids grew too heavy to hold open, so he curled into a tight ball on the ground and fell asleep. When he woke, his hands were clutched so close to his chest that they had gone numb. He was cold and weak, but it did not occur to him to eat. Then, once again, he was shuffling along, only vaguely aware of where he was and what he was doing. It would be so easy to give in to the darkness, to just lie down, close his eyes, and never open them again.

  In the end, it was neither courage nor strength of will that prevented him from doing so. Long after both had abandoned him, what kept him going was an unlikely mixture of boredom and habit. You see, lying in the dark, waiting to die, turned out to be terribly dull. He simply became used to putting one foot in front of the other. There was nothing to do except walk, so he walked.

  Shortly following his seventy-fourth right turn, Andaris stopped, rubbed his eyes, and gazed in wonder down the length of the corridor, his sluggish mind straining to believe what he was seeing. “Is it real?” he whispered.

  The corridor opened thirty or forty feet from where he stood into a cave with a low ceiling. The floor of the cave glowed with a soft yellow light. A draft of sweet-smelling air blew through the tunnel, awaking his senses like a slap across the face.

  The way out! He had found it at last. Next thing he knew he was running. He’d barely been able to stand, and now he was running.

  Relief flooded through him as he approached the hole, as he came smiling and blinking into the glorious sunlight. It occurred to him, as he emerged into the brilliance of a clear, sunny day, that the opening was different. No matter, he thought, filling his lungs with fresh air. At least I’m out.

  Moments later, though, while shading his watering eyes with his hand and squinting up at the mountains, Andaris frowned. There, in the distance, set dramatically against the pale blue of the sky, were four snow-capped peaks.

  Snow? But just yesterday they were bare. Could the storm have dropped so much? No, he decided. They even look different…steeper and more jagged. But how’s that possible?

  Turning back to the hole from which he had just emerged, he pursed his lips, trying to reason it out. Set into the side of a grassy mound, the hole appeared to be nothing more than an oversized animal burrow. If he had traveled underground from the cliff to here, then why couldn’t he see it? As far as cliffs went, it was quite large. It should have been visible for miles. He’d reached the foothills before even entering the cave, and yet save for the distant peaks, could see only flat forest in every direction. He couldn’t have gone that far. Could he?

  And what about the trees? he wondered, really noticing them for the first time. Fingar was a roughly equal mix of oak and pine, and now there wasn’t an oak in sight, and the pines were bigger around and had a bluish tint to their needles. What’s going on here? he thought.

  Determined to find some answers, Andaris spent what remained of the afternoon and most of the evening scouting through the forest around the opening. By the time night settled across the land, he had given the entire area a thorough once over, but still hadn’t a clue as to where he was or what had happened. He didn’t see how he could have traveled so far beneath the earth, though supposed he must have. What other explanation was there?

  Weary and dismayed, he arranged his blankets within the mouth of the cave and lay down. In the morning, he would broaden his search. There had to be something he was overlooking. Hopefully tomorrow he would discover what. Missing the warmth and security of his own bed, he slipped into a restless slumber, heart aching as he pictured the house in which he was born--cedar cottage tucked behind a hill, surrounded by well-tended fields, small stands of oak trees, and clear running streams.

  Going Home

  The first blush of dawn bathed the forest in amber hues. Dew glittered on the ground like diamonds, refracting the light in a sparkling dance. Something had woken him, a low snuffling noise. Focusing his eyes in the direction of the noise, Andaris became rigid with fear, for no more than a few feet away stood a creature out of myth and legend. He recognized the curving horns and bulging eyes from the stories he’d heard as a child, stories which found their origins in the Shallae. He blinked, trying to clear it from his vision, but to no avail. As impossible as it seemed, he was lying directly in the path of a macradon.

  The beast stood over ten feet tall, covered from top to bottom with coarse gray fur, its muscles bunched and swollen, its eyes black as coal. Andaris had been told that macradons could eat twice their weight in flesh, which, assuming the creature before him was typical of the breed, meant several hundred pounds. He’d also heard that they were many times more ferocious than any bear, and could, despite their immense size, outrun a deer at a full sprint. The beast opened its slathering maw in a wide yawn, took in a great gulp of air, and expelled it in a brilliant billow of mist, revealing row after row of jagged teeth. Andaris held his breath and remained as still as possible, feeling sure it would hear the thundering of his heart.

  The thing rocked back and forth on its thick haunches, glistening snout sniffing this way and that, eyes darting about as though agitated. Andaris shrunk against the floor of the opening, staying perfectly still when, to his horror, its eyes met with his. He felt his blood go cold in his veins, for in those eyes he saw not an ounce of reason. They were empty, flat, and utterly pitiless. The macradon tilted its blocky skull to one side, as though unsure what to make of him.

  Go away, Andaris thought. Please….

  With a sudden thrash a deer bolted from behind a tree.

  The macradon heaved its massive body around and went crashing through the forest after it, moving out of view to the sound of breaking branches and snapping limbs.

  Andaris lay there a moment, stunned, attempting to come to grips with what he’d just seen. Then a single question jarred him into action—what if it comes back? Wasting no more time, he stuffed his things into his pack and crept from the hole like a mouse, heading away from the mountains in what he hoped to be the general direction of Fairhaven. Danger seemed to lurk behind every tree.

  How was it possible that macradons were real? Their mere existence punched gaping holes in his tidy belief system, because if they were real, what else might be real? And what about that deer? he wondered. He couldn’t be sure, for it had darted by in such a blur, but he was almost certain its coat had shimmered like a rainbow, flashing in the morning damp from one color to the next.

  I’m losing my mind, he decided. I’ll probably end up like poor old Mr. Krandike. Now long dead, Jovan Krandike had ventured into Fingar Forest in his youth and returned forever touched. At least that was the polite description. Andaris remembered him well from his childhood. The eccentric old man had filled his and the other children’s heads with an inexhaustible variety of fantastic tales about distant lands and magical creatures, about knights and dragons, kings and queens, and castles in the sky.

  Andaris had been mesmerized by the stories, even more so than his friends had been. Mr. Krandike had planted a seed in the fertile soil of his young imagination that would one day sprout and grow, reaching far beyond the borders of Fairhaven. All those stories growing within him, day after day, year after year, had made his world seem unbearably bland.

  Now, however, he found himself beginning to seriously rethink his views on provincial life. His existence back in Fairhaven, boring as it had been, had at least been safe. He had not expected the lands beyond to be this treacherous. It was all very humbling. He had been so arrogant, so eager to show the others the error of their ways. Suppose he’d come across the macradon while lost in the caverns? What then? He could picture the hairy beast with its broad mouth too full of tee
th, waiting for him like a nightmare around the next bend. His pace quickened. The more distance he put between himself and that monster the better.

  The first thing he was going to do when he got back home was take a hot bath and pull the burrs out of his hair. Then he’d eat a big steaming bowl of his mother’s potato stew and sleep for a week. Adventuring wasn’t at all what he’d expected. None of his books had prepared him for how dirty and tiring it would be, not to mention lonely. An image of his best friend came to mind. Gerold, with his tangled mop of red hair and mischievous eyes, had always been able to cheer him up when he was feeling down, possessing many of the qualities that Andaris lacked, including a seemingly endless supply of confidence and charisma. No matter the situation, Gerold could handle it, going through life with a wry grin on his face, as though there were some secret to which he alone was privy.

  Wish he was here now, Andaris thought, realizing how many things he’d been taking for granted. “It could always be worse,” Gerold was fond of saying, and Andaris was beginning to agree. Perhaps a life behind the plow wouldn’t be so tragic after all. It was certainly better than being lost in an uncharted forest full of monsters that wanted to have him for breakfast.

  In an attempt to calm his nerves, he began to hum a tune. Looking around at the crooked, claw-like branches, he faltered, took a long swig of mead, and then started up again, the words to the song running through his mind, comforting him as much as he could be comforted.

  Come on boys lets go, go, go,

  Come on boys lets row, row, row,

  Bend those backs and flex those oars,

  We’ll get that gold we all adore,

  Another day and we’ll be back home,