***
More frightening than any of these terrifying creatures though, had been the boat upon which they had arrived, a miniature pirate ship that had been moored against the caves. It was not the type of boat that had caused the dragnor’s blood to run hot with fear though, nor was it the immense cannon mounted on it front, or even the enormous metal spikes that lined its sides. No, what was so terrifying about this particular boat was the flag that flew from its mast - the flag of Roobatzi. The flag of The Professor.
By the time the dragnor had reached this point in his tale I had already realised - as I am sure you will have too, dear reader - that he, like all bullies, was a coward at heart. It therefore came as no surprise to me that his reaction upon discovering the presence of the forces of The Professor within his own woodland home was not to attempt to glean more information by sneaking closer to the danger, or even staying where he was, but to turn and flee. And flee he had, as fast as his short, bowed legs would carry him, until he had once again arrived at the small, round cottage of Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones.
Once there he had stopped at the front door to catch his breath for a few moments before knocking, when he had heard voices coming from inside. One of the voices was clearly that of Mr Jones, but the other – which he described as being reminiscent of “the echo of steel being sandpapered within a deep cavern” - he was quite sure he had never heard before.
Both voices were too muffled by the thick wooden door to be able to follow the conversation properly, and so, intrigued by the few brief fragments he was able to make out, Grahndel had slid around the cottage’s curved wall and peered in through one of its tiny, porthole windows. What he saw when he did so had astounded him.
The stranger had been the last man he had expected to see. Indeed, he was not a man at all, but an enormous Gravlier – a giant, orc-like creature with skin the colour of coal and one piercing, unfeeling, snake-like yellow eye. Where the other eyes should have been there was merely an empty, scarred socket. There, in the middle of Hanselwood forest, in the middle of Mr Jones’s living room no less, standing with his enormous body hunched over and his head scraping the ceiling, stood the formidable, fully-armoured figure of Captain Blackheart.
Whether due to a sudden increase in bravery, or merely the paralysation of fear I couldn’t tell you, but, rather than once again turning and fleeing as would have been his normal reaction to being confronted by any situation involving the slightest scent of danger, Grahndel had stood his ground and waited to see how events would unfold.
“I just need more time,” Aurelius was saying, sounding far from his usual, calm, composed self.
“YOUR TIME IS UP!” Blackheart’s voice bellowed loudly enough to rattle the pans hanging above Aurelius’s stove. “You made a deal with The Professor, and he kept his part of the bargain, now it’s time for you to keep yours.”
“But, you don’t understand...”
“I don’t have time for buts, and I don’t need to understand. A deal is a deal and you made this one of your own free will, you’re one of us now whether you like it or not.”
At that point the dragnor’s tiny, spindly fingers had lost their fragile grip on wooden frame and he had fallen to the floor with a crash.
Eager not to miss out on what was being said, he had quickly scrambled back up to his previous position in order to regain his view of the disussion. But when he reached the windowsill his view had changed, rather than being faced with a view of Blackheart’s back from across the room he was now presented with the Gravlier’s angry, snarling face, separated from his own by only a thin pane of glass.
This time the little demon had, understandably, fled and had spent the days since hiding out, laying low, and forcing others to prepare his meals.
The end of Grahndel’s tale was met by silence as I sat contemplating what I had just heard.
Once again my supposed friend’s character had been called into question, and yet, even in the face of such damning testimony, I couldn’t bring myself to believe him to be evil...but was that simply because I didn’t want to believe it? While Aurelius’s bizarre and eccentric character had always led me to be somewhat suspicious of him, my instincts had always told me that he was not, at heart, an evil man, and my instincts were usually very trustworthy. Nevertheless, the evidence against the flamboyant fernator was mounting fast. Was it really possible that he had simply befriended me in order to try to recruit me for the tundrala? Or, worse, to kill me before my powers could come into bloom and pose a threat to them?
No, I thought, shaking myself, I knew Aurelius, and I knew he wouldn’t do something like that. Why would he have gone to the trouble of seeking me out in the first place if that was the case? After all, as impressive as it may have seemed to me as an eight year old boy, it wasn’t as if my power was earth-shatteringly important or ever likely to be the deciding factor in the battle between the tendrala and the tundrala. It simply didn’t make sense.
Why on earth should I take the word of an eighteen inch arsonist over that of a man who had treated me with nothing but kindness and had, in many ways, been the only adult who had ever been totally honest with me, opening my eyes to the lies of the world around me? For all I knew everything that had just come out of the dragnor’s mouth could have been part of an elaborate web of deceit aimed at staying his potential execution in the hope that he may yet find a means of escape.
“YOU’RE LYING!” I yelled in a voice that boomed around the forest, stopping the fairy’s party in its tracks. Suddenly I was aware of a thousand tiny pairs of eyes, all fixed on me - a realisation that did nothing to calm my mood.
“YOU’RE A LIAR,” I boomed at the cowering dragnor once more. “A bully and a liar! Aurelius would never be friends with people like that!”
“I didn’t say he was,” begged the miniscule demon. “I only know what I saw.”
“And what exactly did you see?” The calm voice of the king came from behind us, instantly draining the heat out of the situation as he seemed to hold a strange ability for doing. It was easy to tell, even for a stranger like me, that he was a good king, and that the respect for him that emanated from each of his subjects so vibrantly, was earned through action as opposed to being commanded through fear.
The king listened intently as I repeated Grahndel’s tale to him, a tale which the irritating little beast frequently punctuated with unnecessary expansions and corrections.
When we had finished the king sat silently for a moment, contemplating what he had heard. Then, finally, he said;
“There seems to me to be a simple solution to the problem of ascertaining the truth of this matter. Charlie, if you have Grahndel show you the way to the caves and help you to locate a place where the two of you are able to observe them without fear of detection, you will quickly discover whether or not they truly are inhabited by The Professor’s forces. If you find that Grahndel has spoken the truth on this matter, it would seem reasonable to assume that he has done the same throughout his story.”
I had to admit that the plan made good sense and, seeing as how I was never going to find Baskerville sitting around here anyway, I decided that I would go along with it. Grahndel, however, was less convinced.
“Are you crazy?” he demanded. “Not a chance! There’s no way I’m going back there!”
“I’m afraid this is not a request, Mr Grahndel. In case you have forgotten, you remain a prisoner of the Ramooly fairy tribe, and as such the decision over what you do and do not do no longer lies with yourself, but with me, and I say that you will accompany this brave young man to the caves and do whatever he asks of you along the way, for our very future may depend on him.”
This last remark had particularly grasped my attention. I was once again forced to ask myself what an eight-year-old human, protector or otherwise, was supposed to do in the face of the army of darkness that had apparently descended upo
n the forest. Before I was able to voice such thoughts however, the king continued with his speech...
“And just in case you were harbouring any thoughts of escape, you shall also be in the company of Brutas, our village’s head bodyguard. He’ll keep you in line.”
Brutas, who had, until that moment, been standing behind the king doing his best to look mean, appeared horrified at the suggestion that he might also be sent out of the protection of the village and into the clutches of the Tundrala. His already oversized eyes widened to three times their usual size and he could be visibly seen to be gulping for air.
“I don’t know that that would be such a good idea, your worship,” he said after a few seconds, his voice trembling. “What if the village were attacked? Without me here to organise our forces it would be a disaster, and we can’t be too careful with the presence of so many of The Professor’s men here in the forest.”
“An excellent observation, Brutas. That’s why I put you in charge, you always think of the village before yourself” agreed the king, without the slightest trace of irony. I thought to myself how strange it was, the way in which the wisdom of experience so often combined with the naivety of old age within the elderly. “Could you perhaps recommend an appropriate replacement to travel in your stead?”
As the cowardly warrior turned to select a member of the royal bodyguard that represented the village’s finest, bravest soldiers he found that all were just as cowardly as he, and had run off into the undergrowth to hide at the very suggestion of danger.
“Well,” said the king on noticing his army’s sudden absence, “it looks like you may have to go after all, Brutas.”
“But, my lord, I...”
“I will go.”
Brutas’s cowardly exacerbations were silenced by a voice from behind him. It was a strong voice, a confident voice, the voice of a true warrior. It was the voice of Princess Ophelia.
“Ophelia, my love, it is very brave of you to make such an offer, but I cannot allow it. You the last surviving heir to the throne, if anything were to happen to you there would be nobody to rule after I have passed.”
“But grandfather, you are always telling me that a good leader must have strong character, and that character can only be built through experiencing life’s trials and surviving - how am I to truly experience life if I am to be constantly shielded from it?”
“Well...”
“And in any case,” she continued before her grandfather’s elderly mind had time to process her argument and arrive at a suitable new excuse for her to remain with him, “you don’t seem to have any other options, given that we need Brutas to guard the village.” She spoke this last sentence in a sarcastic tone which betrayed her disapproval, while simultaneously shooting Brutas a look which made it clear that she had seen through his cowardice. A look he did his best not to see.
“Very well, my child, you may go,” sighed the king. “Brutas, hand her your sword.”
“But sir, this sword was given to me by my father before he died, it is the made from the sharpest and strongest metal, it is the best weapon our village has.”
“And that is precisely why Ophelia must have it, for it may well be that she herself will one day become the best weapon this village has, but that can only happen if she survives this journey.”
Brutas begrudgingly placed the sword in Ophelia’s hands. In addition to this she was handed a strange looking, bejewelled satchel by the king. “Here, you will need this, but use its contents wisely,” he warned. “And please be careful.”
“I will,” she promised.
The old man kissed his granddaughter’s head and, with tears brimming in his eyes, told her how proud he was of her. Then, turning to me he added, “Charlie, a great burden hangs upon your young shoulders now. You are not only the protector of this forest, but also of the royal legacy, I trust that you will have the courage and the conviction to guard both with your life.”
I nodded that I would, although inside my stomach churned at the thought of such a burden. My parents had only recently argued over whether I was responsible enough to walk the dog by myself and now it seemed that millions of lives were dependant on my success in a role that had been senselessly bestowed on me, a role I had no clue as to how to fulfil.
As our unlikely threesome left the village in search of trouble, I couldn’t help but wonder how fate had come to change my life so radically in such a short space of time. And whether it had made a mistake in doing so. I said nothing of this as we left the village, cheered on by hundreds of expectant fairies, and tried to portray an air of confidence whilst privately praying that the dragnor had been mistaken in his observations.
Chapter 15
We had been walking for so long that the sky was starting to lighten as the night began its drawn-out but inevitable submission to the coming dawn. Due to my vastly superior size, I was, unsurprisingly, a good deal faster than my two companions and as a result it had been decided that each of them should travel about my person in order that we achieved maximum possible momentum toward our common destination – Ophelia sitting in the breast pocket of my shirt, while Grahndel looked out over my shoulder from his position in my backpack.
I had spent the majority of our journey silently pondering why I had agreed to come on such a trip, and how on earth I had convinced myself that deliberately seeking out danger in such a manner might help me to locate my missing dog. My two fellow travellers had, however, been far from silent – in fact they had bickered mercilessly from the first moment and, having been deprived of sleep for longer than at any previous point in my young life, I was beginning to lose my patience.
“I don’t care whether you’re royalty or ragamuffin, in my opinion a girl’s place is at home where she can be looked after, not out in the big wide forest where who knows what could happen to her, and certainly not on important and dangerous missions like this one,” Grahdel asserted, knowing full well his words would only serve to agrivate the princess. “Having females on the frontline makes warfare more dangerous for everybody, every dragnor knows that.”
“Well I’m no dragnor,” Ophelia snapped. “And I’m glad of that fact too if you’re anything to go by. How can you suggest that women don’t have the stomach for war when you yourself do everything in your power to shy away from any situation where there is the slightest chance that some harm may come to you? You’re only here now because you’re a prisoner. My prisoner.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous. I could have escaped a thousand times by now if I’d wanted to. I only remain because my warrior’s instinct will not allow me to shy away from conflict. I have no doubt our enemies shall quake in their boots when they hear that ‘The Destroyer’ has arrived, for they shall understand how one comes by such a name.”
“Er, let me guess, you picked it yourself because you thought people would be less likely to want to fight ‘Grahndel the Destroyer’ than ‘Grahndel the Surrenderer’?” retorted the tiny fairy. “I’m not scared of you; you may have my whole village fooled, but I see you for the coward you are, and so does Charlie, don’t you Charlie?”
I gave no answer, merely trying to ignore her whining.
“My dear girl, what you fail to understand is that more sophisticated warriors, such as Charles and myself, appreciate that a truly skilled fighter must always be aware of when the better option is to flee and regroup, isn’t that so, Charles?”
“JUST SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!” I yelled. “I’m sick and tired of your bickering. To be honest, I don’t particularly care what you two think about anything. I don’t even really care whether Captain Blackheart is or isn’t here. All I really care about is finding my Carpet Dragon... I mean Sabre-toothed Fletchling... I mean dog.”
My outburst was followed by silence, the kind of silence that comes from a mixture of shock and embarrassment, like when your teacher tells you off for talking and makes you look
like an idiot in front of the whole class and you get really angry because, even though you just want to smack them one for embarrassing you, deep down you know that they’re right and really the one who has embarrassed you is you.
It was Ophelia who was the first to speak again.
“I’m sorry about you’re carpet dragon,” she said. “I know you must be very worried about him. I know how worried I was when my parents first went missing, I was worried I’d never see them again.”
“Thank you for your concern,” I replied, feeling somewhat guilty that I had taken my emotions at having lost a pet for a few hours upon somebody who had lost their parents for much longer. “How long have your parents been gone for?”
“I was just a child when it happened” she replied in a dejected voice, before quickly adding; “Oh, but I’m sure we’ll find your carpet dragon much more quickly!”
“I hope so,” I said. “So what happened to your parents, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“It was many, many moons ago - our village was not what it is now. It was not built upon stilts back then, but based upon the very floor of the forest. It was a much larger, and more developed community than the one you saw today. There were countless different craftsmen and entertainers and dozens of large, and beautifully crafted buildings where people could meet to eat, or to drink, or to dance. There was even a palace.
“Then, one day, there was a great flood and everything we had built was destroyed. At first we had ignored the rain, merely sheltering from it inside our homes, lighting fires and telling stories to keep out the cold; after all, we fairies have always lived in this forest, so it was not as though rain was a stranger to us. But this rain was different. It fell more violently than any other rain had ever done and it was relentless in its attack. It just kept coming.
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