Three (The Godslayer Cycle Book 3)

by Ron Glick

  “Malik, my father,” said the young man, digging deeply into his own flesh with the blade. “I have not yet healed from my last lesson, and again I find myself owing penance.” Fresh blood seeped from the deep wound, and Geoffrey pressed the new leather strap over the wound, returning the blade the surface of the leather. “May my humble blood letting remind you of my devotion.” He pressed the blade of the knife again into his wound, burying the center of the leather strip below the surface of his skin, holding it there while it soaked up the lifeblood from the wound. “May my taking into my body the skin of another being, overcome in conflict, imbue me with the spirit of your faith.”

  A full minute passed as Geoffrey held the leather in place. “May the binding of this wound provide to you the peace of my heart, for I hold no malice in my heart for you, only love.” At last, the young man withdrew the blade, the leather now held in place by coagulation. “May this penance cleanse me in your eyes, and my spirit come to rest in your fields of valor when I at last walk free of this world.”

  The young man took hold of his shirt, raising it again over his shoulders. The blood of his previous wound was readily drunk in by the shirt's fabric, but Geoffrey made a staunch effort to not show discomfort. “In all I do, I act in your faith. Forgive me my impurities and grant me the strength to never waver in your service. To you I give my soul in eternal servitude. Bless me, for I do this for you and no other.”

  At this last, Geoffrey Goodsmith bowed his head in final supplication. He held this position for several moments, inwardly reflecting upon his devotions. When he was finished, he raised his head and without hesitation returned the blade to his satchel and threw it to his shoulder.

  “Thank you, my Lord, for your blessings,” he said to the wind as he set off at a trot towards the town below. “I will not fail you.”

  Malik stood for a moment, looking to where a few drops of Geoffrey Goodsmith's blood had fallen upon the ground. The side of his mouth turned up in a wicked leer.

  Mortals be such fools.

  Chapter 7

  Bracken felt the entire world freeze in front of him. The cold, finality of limbo reached out and clutched his heart deep in his chest, stilling the organ with greater rigidity even than the granite that had been Bracken's legacy a lifetime ago.

  And then the dwarf's lungs betrayed him, and he inhaled sharply, raggedly taking breath as his lungs fought the constriction of his chest. His lungs drank deeply, unbidden - but the lungs could only take in so much before his diaphragm forced it all out again. Like a great rubber cord that had been stretched to its limit, the air reversed direction and rushed from his lungs. But it did not escape alone.

  Bracken's roar was primal, raw. It carried the weight of mountains and avalanches, the voice of the great underworld from which the dwarves had been birthed. In this one bellow, the exiled dwarf embodied all that it was to be a primordial force of nature. It was rage mixed with grief tainted by pain - a deep and incredibly fundamental agony that even this great discord could not come close to embodying. There was so plainly more that was unable to be expressed, yet this was all his mortal frame could expunge from his soul.

  As the echoes of his cry rumbled into the distance, Bracken's axe blade fell with such force into the earth at his feet that it shook the ground in synchronicity with the reverberation through the air. The ground where the blade bit visibly rolled like water at the initial impact, then warped back towards the intrusive scythe which had breached its shell.

  Bracken had no more strength left. He collapsed to his knees, oblivious to all else around him, his mind unwillingly flashing back to scenes of the past. He so did not want to remember, but his soul needed to keep the wound raw.

  When Bracken Hillfire first came to Oaken Wood, he was only looking for a community that was far enough from the beaten path that he would not be found, yet with enough trade to support a business all the same. He had spent nearly five years traveling the surface world by that point, earning coin by delving into caves, lairs, ruins or any other hideaways for the denizen races of Na'Ril - essentially, anyplace where treasures lost and stolen could be recovered.

  In the surface world, the dwarf had been known as a delver, called an adventurer by some. He had joined up with parties of others of like mind, taking on great risk to seek treasure by force from renegade bands who had either outright stolen it for themselves, or who guarded the dilapidated and otherwise abandoned ruins scattered around the world where lost treasures could be found. Five years of this incredibly hazardous work had made Bracken wealthy beyond most surface-dwellers' imaginations. But it had never erased the ache the dwarf had carried in his heart, no matter how many hostile opponents he had overcome.

  In spite of his proficiency for battle, at heart, Bracken was a peaceful soul. All he had ever dreamed of was to mine his father's claims, and to one day delve after his own ore and gems. His clan had not even been amongst the merchants who would travel to the surface to barter the minerals away - he was at heart a worker, not a speaker of words, and all he ever desired was to be a miner until the end of his days.

  Bracken's brother had set him up to fail by convincing his clan that he was guilty of patricide. He had not slain his own father, but everyone he had ever known believed he had. And so his hopes for a simple life had been shattered. There was no hope of peace when one was condemned of being a sire-slayer. And so Bracken had fled - abandoning his true name, his heritage, his people.

  Life upon the surface was not something the refugee dwarf had ever planned for. He had no love for humans, with their short life-spans and fickle pursuits. But he had needed to survive, and his innate strength had been his greatest asset. The greatest obstacle to this however was the double-edged sword of prejudice. Just as he cared nothing for humans, humans distrusted a rogue dwarf in their midst, as well. So even the most basic jobs - simple labor, construction or even cleaning out a horse's stall - were reserved for the vagrant surface dwellers and denied to Bracken by virtue of his race.

  Falling in with a band of delvers had really been a stroke of good fortune. Delvers saw great worth in the axe-wielding outcast that others simply did not. It helped that delvers by nature were often outcasts themselves, but at the end of the day, it was really the only path Bracken had short of becoming a thief to survive.

  Spending his time with so-called adventurers was one of convenience for Bracken. Though he spent five years moving from one band to another, he never truly formed any real affinity for any of their members. It was work, a means by which he could live a somewhat comfortable life in his exile, and little more.

  While in the company of the Wyrms, his final delving band, they had come upon a map to the mythical city, Drae Elbus. Drae Elbus had been an ancient civilization of utopian splendor, said to have been lost to demons being set loose upon its citizens hundreds of years ago. Though its location was well-enough known, many a delving party had been lost seeking to plunder its lost wealth.

  There were even roving bands of a loosely formed militia group known as the Knights of Drae Elbus formed for the express purpose of keeping intruders away from the ruins, fearful of what could be unleashed. Stories told that the Knights were descended from the survivors of the lost city, but no one knew if there was any truth to it. The map which the Wyrms had found purported to lead through a passage under the walls of the city and into Drae Elbus' depths, bypassing the Knights altogether.

  The map had proven true - in so much as it had led to a passage not guarded by the Knights. What the map had not told was that the passage had not been built to provide external access to the fallen city; it had been built as an escape route, designed to seal itself behind should anyone use it. Presumably, it had been created as a point of egress - one which would seal behind anyone escaping the city. The architect of the passage clearly had not thought of someone using it to enter, so that when a large wall fell behind the Wyrms halfway into their exploit, it presented the very real danger of having their own esc
ape cut off.

  Once within the walls, the Wyrms had found themselves beset upon by all forms of denizens, ranging from goblins, to draconians, to great beasts none had ever seen beyond the walls of the doomed city. The band had spent nearly a week fighting for survival before they had managed to escape - but once they had, their journeys through the vaults and passages of Drae Elbus in their quest for an escape had led them to the discovery of more caches of coin and treasure than they could ever conceivably carry. Once they had located and fought their way through a breach in the great city's wall, they had been labored down with a king's ransom worth of riches.

  The Wyrms had entered Drae Elbus as a party of ten; they had exited as a band of four. Two humans, an elf and Bracken himself had survived the adventure - and for Bracken, it had been enough. He had never lusted after the lifestyle as his companions had. Weighted down with his own share of the rewards, he had declared his life as a delver done, setting out to find some reclusive place to settle, to establish a small business, and live out his remaining days in peace.

  Oaken Wood had not been on any map. It was not a specific location that Bracken had traveled to. It had simply been on a path he had chosen to follow. He had planned to head into the Wildelands, to find one of the many rumored communities founded by outlaws like himself. Oaken Wood had simply been on the path to his eventual goal. But it had all the criteria he had been seeking - and best of all, it had no tavern nor inn. With trade routes passing through it, it made sense to have one built there, and this had been Bracken's sole motivation for selecting the town at all. It was just a collection of buildings in the right place along his journey inland.

  The dwarf had not expected to form any bonds of kinship with the residents. He had been a largely amiable member of a number of delving parties through the years without ever forming any true friendships, and he anticipated the same here. He would be a business owner, but that did not require him to form any bonds beyond that. Besides - this was a town of humans, and humans had never expressed any genuine affection for dwarves.

  That had changed almost immediately. As soon as Bracken reached an agreement with the townsfolk of where he could build his tavern - an area along the town's border unclaimed by any other - the citizens went out of their way to make him feel welcome. Where he had been shunned in the larger communities he had traveled through, here just outside the border of the Wildelands, he was accepted without reservation. The prejudice against his race simply did not exist here - and it had caught the dwarf unprepared.

  What Bracken had not understood at the time was that the bulk of his interactions with humans had been with those that had chosen to follow the New Order, a pantheon of Gods which had risen to power some three hundred years before. They were a divisive lot by nature - each of the Gods jealously seeking to take power from each other, and their faithful emulated this trait. Their so-called devoted would go so far as to mutilate the flesh of their own kin should they not follow the whims of the divinely appointed representatives in their communities, calling them heretics and transforming them into pariahs of society.

  Bracken had seen it as a path to faith that encouraged prejudice and bigotry, that rewarded the most basic instincts of mortal depravity. With a society that so readily turned on their own, how could they ever be seen to accept someone who was from elsewhere?

  This fanaticism did not exist in Oaken Wood. It simply did not. This community was still precisely that - a community. It existed because its citizens had come together to build their lives together, and they had never been tainted with the doctrine that inspired self-aggrandizement. It was not because this township had been some last bastion of Old God faith - though there were clearly those who held to the old ways here. No, it had simply been a place untouched directly by the New Order.

  Certainly, there were those who believed in the New Order in Oaken Wood. In fact, they were certainly in the majority. But they held to a simpler version of their faith - in the principles represented by the Gods themselves, not by the mortal apostles who spoke for them upon the mortal plane.

  Many came forth to not only welcome Bracken into their midst, but many more contributed to helping him build his tavern. Though he had more than enough wealth to hire these people, they offered their labor without cost in most cases - and those that did accept gratuity, it was never in the form of coin, but rather in calling upon the dwarf's prodigious strength to help in various jobs on their own properties. Oaken Wood was indeed a community of equals, and for the first time since fleeing to the surface world, Bracken was made to feel as one.

  Amongst the first people who had come to welcome him to Oaken Wood had been the local druidess, Maribel Goodsmith. She had a pre-adolescent son who came with her at times, but usually her visits were alone. It had amazed Bracken that a beautiful woman of some thirty-odd summers would feel so at ease with such a gruff-looking person as himself, but she never had a moment's hesitation in his presence. She was just at ease with Bracken as she had been with the women in the town.

  Of all the people the dwarf had met in Oaken Wood, Maribel had been the one he had come to admire above all the rest. And after two years of hard labor, when he had completed his tavern - named ironically after his former band - he had even formed a bond with her son, Nathaniel. In fact, one of the fondest memories the dwarf had years after meeting the lad was when Nathaniel had asked him to just call him Nate - a genuine sign that he had come close enough to the dwarf to have a personalized name. The dwarf's accent made pronouncing “Nathaniel” sound like a flower, the boy had said. Bracken had laughed that the boy had even known a flower that sounded like “Nat'anyel” in the first place, but it had been enough to impress upon the dwarf the boy's growth into maturity, concerned about how people saw him, yet shared with the likes of an exiled dwarf.

  Nate had spent many a day over the following years in the dwarf's company. Whenever a traveler would come through who had any experience with the Game, Bracken would get drawn into a match and Nate proved to be a quick study himself. After a time, Bracken had found himself drawing out his cards even when travelers were not present, to play only with the young man. And after a year's time, Nate had even been able to hold his own against roving gamers, too.

  Bracken had never had the privilege of children, but he had found pride in his relationship with Nate that he could not have described as anything other than paternal.

  When tragedy had struck - when the New Order finally brought its darker ways to Oaken Wood - Maribel had been lost to both Nate and Bracken. The dwarf felt her loss as keenly as he might have that of a wife, even though there had never been anything closely resembling romance between them. In his surrogate role as a father-figure to Nate, he had also formed a bond with the young man's mother. And losing her had crippled him as surely as if she had been his beloved.

  Bracken understood Nate's grief, for he shared it. There were many who felt Maribel's loss, for she had been a resource upon which the entire community had leaned. She was an herbalist, a fertility mistress, and even a healer. But regardless of how much she had value to the residents of Oaken Wood, she represented a personal loss for Bracken and her son, a loss that bonded the two more than they had ever been before.

  The dwarf had taken Nate into his home, as it was. It was little more than a room in his tavern, but it was shelter. And there Nate stayed, becoming an even more integral part of his life. In more ways than one, Nate became his son in everything save the name. The young man became the closest thing Bracken had to family, and he knew the feeling was mutual.

  Eventually, Nate had grown into a man. He married and had a child of his own. And for a time, it seemed that the terrible loss of his youth had been set behind him. Nate's family became Bracken's own, Nate's son Geoffrey like unto a grandchild. The dwarf had even come to see Mariabelle as a daughter-in-law, in spite of Bracken's reservations about the girl. She was, after all, the daughter of a man Bracken held directly responsible for Maribel's murder. He h
ad held the belief - then as now - that Nate had only chosen the girl because her name had been so close to his lost mother's. The dwarf feared that Nate's desire to find a woman to replace his deceased mater was a disaster waiting to happen, but he had kept his silence - and the two had seemed to have found genuine happiness, in spite of Bracken's predictions of dread.

  And then this thrice-damned God business had begun. In the space of two days, the Old Gods had returned and taken even more from Nate than ever before. Mariabelle had been murdered herself - in a tragic symmetry to Nate's own mother being taken from him - and Geoffrey taken. And, if Bracken were to be honest in his own heart, he genuinely believed the young lad dead by now, as well. He would never have confessed that belief to Nate, but their failure to find any sign of the child could only mean that his own life had also been extinguished.

  Bracken had inherited more than an obligation for these losses - he had taken the burden on himself as surely as if he had made the killing strokes himself. He had taken a place in this family's life - been a surrogate father, grandfather and trusted confidante. But in the end, he had been powerless to save any of them. The dwarf's harsh exterior hid the burden well, but it was nevertheless a weight of grief and regret that he always carried.

  And now. Now, his failure was complete. He had overseen the deaths of the entire line. First the mother, then the wife and child, and now the young man himself. Every Goodsmith with whom he had taken on a familiar role was gone - slain, taken or outright wiped from the face of existence. And in each instance, for all his remarkable strength, Bracken had been unable to spare any of them.