by Brad Clark
Ilasha stopped sobbing and looked up. “Who is that?” she asked softly.
“It is the dragon.”
“It is in pain,” she said.
“What? How can you know that?”
“Do you not hear her voice?” Ilasha asked. “It is full of pain.”
Ilasha pushed herself up to her feet and started to walk past Marik.
“What are you doing?”
“It is speaking to me. It asked me to come outside.”
“What?” Marik asked. “I did not hear it.”
“I can speak to whoever I want,” the dragon said. “Come outside. I will not harm you. At least not now.”
Ilasha started to move again, but Marik grabbed her arm. “I do not trust it.”
“I do,” she replied and continued walking. Reluctantly, Marik released her arm and followed her through the doorway and outside.
The brightness of the morning blinded Ilasha, and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. Sitting on her haunches, directly in front of them, was the dragon. Her one good golden eye looked them up and down.
“What is your name?” Ilasha asked.
“It is an evil beast. It has no name!” Marik shouted. He placed a crossbow bolt into the crossbow, but he didn’t pull back on the lever to cock the weapon.
“Myllia,” the dragon replied. “I am Myllia.”
“I am Ilasha. This is Sir Marik. You are hurt.”
Her legs were shredded, and she could not put her full weight on them.
“I will heal,” Myllia said. She leaned forward, her nostrils flaring.
“Easy!” Marik said, slowly pulling back on the weapon’s lever to cock it so that it was ready to be fired.
“If I wanted to kill you, I would have already,” Myllia replied. She inched forward and painfully lifted herself up to her feet. Her snout moved closed to Ilasha, and she sniffed. “I feel the power of the Web of Magic around you.”
Myllia’s snout moved towards Marik, who tensed up, but kept the crossbow pointed at the ground. “I sense something very faint about you, too. The Ark of Life has touched you both. Ilasha, you most of all.”
Ilasha blinked and shook her head slowly. “I do not know what you mean. I don’t know what that is.”
“We do not have the Ark of Life or any piece of it,” Marik said.
“It is all about you. Did you wear the necklace?”
Marik laughed. “Necklace? Out here in the middle of the mountains you think we would adorn ourselves with jewelry?”
“The Ark of Life is not jewelry nor is it adornment that is worn for ceremony. It is a weapon in one person's hand or a shield in another.”
“We know of no necklace,” Ilasha said. “We have nothing like that.”
Myllia leaned forward once again and sniffed. “It is in you. All around you. It is the Ark of Life that has made you what you are.”
“It must be the pool,” Marik said, turning to look at Ilasha. “It healed me, and it made you young.”
“Pool?” Myllia asked.
“It is a hot spring up in the mountains,” Ilasha replied. “It has healed many people. Marik. Even his friend Brace many years ago. It is magic.”
“And it has made you young?” Myllia asked, pulling back away from them. “It is the Ark of Life. I can feel its presence. You have found it.”
“The pool?” Ilasha asked. “The pool is the Ark of Life?”
Marik said, “The Ark of Life is two pieces. The Deceiver has one. The other is a necklace. The Ark of Life is not the pool, it is in the pool. The necklace is in the pool.”
“What do we do with it?” Ilasha asked.
Marik did not reply as his mind spun through their circumstances. The one weapon that they could use to help defeat the Deceiver had been right within their reach. He looked eastward, towards Ilasha’s village. His eyes glanced at the dragon, and he wondered whether the power of the Ark of Life could kill the flying beast that stood right in front of him.
Ilasha said, “No one else knows it’s there. Can we not leave it?”
“It is unprotected,” Myllia replied. “Eventually the goblins that are invading these mountains will find it, and they will feel the power of the web in the water, and they will know what it is. It is no longer safe. You must take it and get it as far away from here as you can.”
“Can we not hide it in a better place?”
“As long as the Deceiver is hunting for it, he will find it. The world is a big place. Take it far away. That creature that I killed, he called himself Gregarious, and he is only one of many of the Deceiver's generals. He will send more, especially after he discovers that Gregarious was killed. And he will not just send one at a time. He will send many like him. Even I would not be able to stand up against them. I could barely defeat this one.”
Marik broke his eastward stare and said, “The Ark of Life can be used against them.”
“No!” Myllia shouted out with a sharp growl.
Marik flinched, and Ilasha took a step back.
“It can never be used, especially by Humans.”
“But if we have the power?” Marik asked.
“That is why you can’t use it! You Humans will never learn. It is the power that you cannot control that you want to control. And it will control you. Now go, before I change my mind and decide to feast on you.”
Marik did not move, he simply looked at the large beast and the golden eye that was only a few feet from him.
“Go!” Myllia said with even more force. She bared her teeth, and a growl came from deep inside her. “I am giving you this one chance to live. Take the Ark of Life and hide it far away, across the seas, if you must.”
“Marik?” Ilasha said as he saw his hands start to lift the crossbow.
“I cannot let her live,” Marik said. “Not after knowing how many people she has murdered.”
“Your twig cannot hurt me,” Myllia said, her tail starting to swish behind her.
“It hurt you once.”
“That will never happen again. You caught me being lazy and proud. Do not count on that ever again. I will always have an eye on you. Even if it is the only one I have. Your courage is commendable, but there is no magic pool to save your life this time. I spare your life now out of pity, and because I cannot retrieve the Ark of Life myself.”
“So you need us.”
“And that is why you live. The only reason why you live. If I were to see you again, I would rip your head off like I did with that abomination.”
“You really hate us that badly?”
Myllia snapped her jaws together and dove her head at him. Inches away from his face, he could feel the heat of her fire. “Yes. I do. It was your kind that brought my species to the brink of extinction. That is unforgivable.”
Marik did not flinch. “Our fight is not over.”
“Marik, our fight is not with her!” Ilasha said, grabbing his arm and trying to pull him away.
“I saw the damage that she did to South Karmon. As much damage as those Ogres that the Deceiver controlled. She destroyed my city. My fight is very much with her.”
“But she killed this creature! And she is letting us live. We are really on the same side! Can we not help one another?”
Myllia let a low rumble come from deep within her belly. “Humanity has no redeeming quality. The world would be a better place without your parasitic hold on the land. There are so many creatures of the Creator that Humans have killed. Some species have been wiped out completely because of their raping of the land. The cities that you build fill streams and lakes with filth. Your fields of food are planted where forests should be. Mountains are torn down to collect stone to build your walls and your castles. If I see a Human, I will kill it. If I see you again, I will kill you. It is only for the sake of the Ark of Life that I will allow you to live. Retrieve it and take it far from here. The farther away it is from the Deceiver, the harder it will be for him to find it.”
Ilasha stepped for
ward. Marik tried to stop her, but she moved too quickly. She walked right up to Myllia and touched the dragon’s face. “You are hurt,” Ilasha said. “The pool can heal you.”
Myllia pulled her snout away. “The pool’s healing powers are magical, coming from the necklace. The power of magic does not affect me. It will not heal me. The cuts will heal on their own, in time.”
“We do not have to be enemies,” Ilasha said softly. “We can be friends.”
Myllia looked down at the female Human for what seemed a long time. “You cannot understand the hatred in my heart. I do not expect you to.”
“You hunt Humans like you say you were hunted. You, then, should know what it feels like to have your species exterminated. Is that what you want to do with Humanity?”
Myllia lifted herself onto her hind legs, unwilling to answer the question. She slowly beat her wings to keep herself standing up. “The Ark of Life. You must keep it safe. Do not follow me, do not try and hunt me anymore. If you do, I will kill you.”
With that, Myllia sprang up into the air, pulling hard on her wings to gain altitude. She flew to the south, just over the tops of the trees. In moments, she was gone.
“We need her on our side,” Ilasha said.
“You heard her. She only wants to kill Humans.”
“She let us live.”
Marik let out a sigh. “Yes, she did. But only for now. We should get back to Mountainscope and retrieve this necklace if it really is at the bottom of that pool.”
“Well, that certainly explains why the water can heal.”
“With the dragon gone, you think the horses will be back?”
Ilasha let out a chuckle. “Wouldn’t that be nice!”
She took his hand and began walking across the grassy field back towards her village.
Chapter Twenty-Three
With his leg bandaged and the bleeding stopped, Hargon walked through the castle corridors as if he knew where he was going. However, he had no idea where he was or where he was heading. The castle was unlike any he had ever been in, which confused him at first. Taran palaces were precisely laid out after painstaking years of design. Their corridors, chambers, halls, and rooms all had meaning in use and location. This castle, however, was a mishmash of design and construction. At first, he thought it must have been simple incompetence, but after he had wandered the empty corridors for some time, he came to realize it was simply a matter of evolution. The farther he went into the castle, the more extravagant the design, which actually surprised him. The inner parts of the castle, most of which were inside the mountain, were clearly older, but their construction was more what he would expect from Taran builders. There were details carved into the stone that a first glance would miss. The lines of the hallways and corridors were straighter. It was as if the newer construction was just slapped on top of the older work.
The builders who had first cut into the mountain were master masons who knew their craft as well as any in the world. It gave him pause to wonder who those masons were, as they probably weren’t Karmon. There was nothing similar that he had seen throughout the kingdom that matched what he saw inside the castle. South Karmon had been an older city, but what he saw of the buildings told him they weren’t constructed with the same detail and precision as the inner castle that he now walked through. Tyre was much newer and was mostly a conglomerate of different types and styles of buildings. As Tyre was surrounded by forests, the buildings were mostly wood and were likely on fire now that they were abandoned. The goblins would surely leave nothing left as they passed through. Fortunately, it was late autumn, and there had been plenty of rain to wet the ground and trees. Hopefully, too much of the forest wouldn't burn away.
His thoughts distracted him as he turned a corner. He glanced back, checking to see if he could find his way back out if necessary. In his mind, he retraced his steps, confident he could make his way back to the courtyard. With his mind refocused, he continued down the corridors, poking his head through each doorway and archway he came across.
All the corridors he traveled were lit by oil lamps, giving him plenty of light to see his way. A few of the lamps had burned out, and it was likely more would soon follow. The lamps were fed by small reservoirs of oil that wouldn’t last much more than a day. If he did get lost and there was no one to refill and relight the lamps, he would surely be lost forever. With that thought, despite the pain in his leg, he increased his pace.
His tour of the castle told him there was going to be plenty of room for the people of Karmon to hide and possibly live for an extended period of time. Space would not be an issue, nor would water. There were many underground springs that ran through tunnels underneath the mountain. He didn’t venture too far into the tunnels for fear of getting lost. He would have to put together a party of surveyors to lay out the tunnels so they could be properly searched and recorded.
Their biggest problem would be food. They could only scavenge from the forests only for so long before the people got really hungry. There were several buildings in the castle’s courtyard that he had not been in. He hoped that at least one of them held the food supplies that were missing from the village.
As his mind continued to churn through thoughts on how to keep the people alive, he came to an open doorway. The doorframe had been damage and remains of the door were strewn about the floor of the chamber. With some caution, he stood in the doorway, looking around, wondering if there was still someone inside. The luxuriousness of the chamber caught his attention, and he decided that if there were to be any chamber that was suitable for him, this would be it. There was a plush couch and an even plusher chair. Tapestries hung on the walls, and there was a large fur rug spread across the floor. If he were not mistaken, he was sure that it was the fur of a large grizzly bear. Intrigued by the opulent nature of the chamber, he walked inside.
There were a few oil lamps that gave light to the room, but more than half of them had already burned out. It wouldn’t be too long before the room would be in complete darkness. There was another small room off the main chamber, which was likely a private sleeping chamber. He smiled widely as he knew this chamber was going to be the perfect room for himself.
Then he saw the blood. There was lots of it near the back of the room in a single puddle. Some of the blood had splattered on a nearby wall. Tentatively he walked forward, his mind ready to call forth a spell if he noticed any danger. As he got closer, he realized the blood was mostly dried, which allowed him to relax as any danger was likely long gone. There was little chance anyone could survive losing that much blood.
Looking around before he stepped into the small bedroom, he wanted to make sure no one would jump out at him from behind. There were some hiding places, but they were far across the room. If someone happened to be hiding behind the plush chair, he would have plenty of time to toss a fireball in their face.
In the bedroom, he saw a large bed covered with quilts and blankets that were tossed about as if someone had just woken up. With one eye still on the main chamber, he stepped into the bedroom. That was when he saw the black boots. The rest of the body was hidden behind the bed.
Unconsciously, he lit a fireball and held it out in front of him, ready to be tossed. Then he stepped forward and peeked around the bed.
The same man that he had seen atop the wall was laying face up, his throat and upper body torn to shreds. He had not died in this spot, as there was no blood on the floor or nearby wall. Whoever had killed him and picked him up had tossed him into the room so he wouldn’t be seen.
Spinning around, he expected to see the murderer jump from a hiding spot, sword or dagger poised to strike him down. His heart pounded while he waited for someone to show, but no one did. He was all alone.
The shock of the dead king quickly passed, and Hargon stepped over to the body. He wanted to get a closer look at the face, just to be sure. There was no doubt in his mind that it was King Toknon. Hargon’s eyes moved from the face and down the entire length
of his body, wondering how torn up the rest of the body would be. Could he just pick him up on his own and carry him back to the courtyard? The thought sickened him. Plus, there had to be someone that he could get to do that for him.
He was about to step away when he noticed the form of a rectangle under the king’s robe. Carefully he touched it. It was hard and clearly a book. Pushing aside the robes and ignoring the stench that rose from the body, he pulled out the book. With the reek of death nearly overwhelming him, he backed out of the bedroom and sat on the couch, the book resting in his lap.
It was an old, leather bound book with a stiff spine. It was about the thickness of two fingers and had a plain cover. He ran his fingers along the edge while he debated opening it. He had no reason to not open it, so he pulled back the cover to expose the first page.
There was strange writing on that page, written in thick black ink. The letters were large, making it easily readable for someone who knew the language. He scanned the page, his eyes drifting across the words on the page, wondering what they said.
He blinked his eyes and then the words suddenly became understandable. Oddly, he was not surprised, as it was suddenly clear to him what was written on the page. The words were the same words as he spoke when invoking the fireball spell. The moment he finished reading the last word aloud, a fireball appeared in his hand. He dropped the book and let out a soft cry of surprise.
For several heartbeats, he stood staring at the book on the floor, unsure as to whether he should pick it up. His hand itched as if it were craving the touch of the leather. His body seemed to be missing something as if it were famished. Although he hadn’t eaten since morning, he did not feel hungry. Bending down, he picked up the book and the feeling went away. The book felt at home in his hands, as if it belonged to him.
He opened the book again but turned to the next page. At first glance, the words were not recognizable, but after staring at them, he figured them out. Some of the words were the same as the first page, but a few of them were different. As he read the words aloud, he could feel a larger pull on the Web of Magic than what he had experienced with the small fireballs. His heart began to beat harder, and he became very hot as if he were standing in direct sunlight in the middle of summer. A buzzing started in his ears as he followed the words across the page, reading aloud. Two words from the end, he knew what was about to happen, and then he shut the book tight.