Legend of Ecta Mastrino Box Set 2

by BJ Hanlon

  “I doubt the gods have anything to do with it. If they did, they’re the biggest of blotards.”

  Edin hoped she was alive, wished it, and also that there was some way to talk to her, some way to find her and make sure she was okay. What if she was alive but couldn’t move or couldn’t talk? What if she couldn’t think anymore and that was the reason? If so, would she still be his Arianne?

  “I think I need to go to sleep,” Edin said. “We start in the mountains tomorrow.” Edin left over half of the bitter ale on the table and pushed away from it. The chair scraped and rumbled the floor as he pushed out.

  “Edin, the elves, they are real right?”

  Edin nodded.

  “And we are going to find them?” Berka said. “I mean, we’re not on a wild goose chase for your girl.”

  Edin looked up at his friend. He felt numb by it, numb by the questions. He was always getting questioned by everyone, heck even himself. They were going to the valley. They were going to find the she-elf and her tribe. He didn’t answer. Edin smiled and turned toward the stairs.

  He found a room as far from Grent and Dephina as possible and had to bury his head under an itchy straw-filled pillow in order not to hear them.

  They left the next morning, Berka a bit hungover. Grent and Dephina were dragging as well.

  Before they set off, Grent started to test Edin on his skills with the sword. They sparred and went for a long time. Ten or twenty or thirty minutes.

  With Grent, it felt like it had when he’d first set off on this long journey. When death was behind and in front of them, as it was now. There were too many things still unresolved. He’d lost friends, family, and a love.

  Then as now, the future was a dark shadow before him. A giant thunderstorm ready to kick up the land with tornados and earthquakes and it was getting worse.

  Somehow, the giant thunderstorm in his mind felt like a breeze. There was so much to do and he still felt the weight coming down on him. That of the dematians, the wyrms, and who knew what other beasts of old were still to come out. Edin thought of the giant in Olangia, he thought of the old stories of dragons and wyverns, giant spiders, great sea beasts and serpents.

  The land was being consumed by the swamps and forests of old. What did the swamps bring with them? How did he stop it? could he stop it?

  Maybe the elves knew a way to fix the world. Maybe they had old magic and that was why the prophecy told Edin to find them. Or maybe not.

  Edin looked at the road as it wound through a few foothills to the slowly rising Crady Mountains. There were short and tall peaks, some with sheer shelves and steep grades. Others seemed climbable with hands, at least till the snow-covered pinnacles.

  Some were taller than Erastio’s Keep. A fall from that height would be long and fatal. A fall he’d imagined one morning after battling humans in the dark entrance to a mountain keep.

  He remembered Arianne knocking him onto his butt when he looked over the edge. He hadn’t told her that he was contemplating jumping in order to save her.

  Arianne had told him that they stay and fight or they leave together. She must’ve known he’d do something in order to keep her safe. Somehow, even then she thought he was a good person. Edin didn’t know why.

  But now, as Edin stared up at the mountains, he saw a gust and crystal-like flakes floating down in a wave of snow. He wondered if he could do what was needed for the world. Could he keep the people safe? Could he do it without her by his side?

  The dirt road rose with the soft incline as they began their ascent into the mountains. To the right and behind him, the lands began to drop away. As far as he knew, the pass wasn’t too much higher than sea level. A few hundred feet maybe. But Edin shivered regardless.

  “You okay?” It was Dephina and she was riding in front of him and looking back. “We didn’t keep you up all night, did we?”

  “All night,” Edin shook his head, “it wasn’t any longer than a breath on a dandelion puff ball.”

  “A bit longer,” Dephina said.

  “Grent must’ve taken some meadowcat to numb himself.”

  “I heard that,” Grent shouted from ahead. They all laughed, even Grent and for a moment, Edin felt a smile.

  As the Mireshka turned back, it faded.

  A short time later, Grent stopped and the group pulled up on the road next to him.

  Edin started, “What is—” Then he saw it.

  There was more destruction. The small road toward the mountain pass was littered with debris. Torn and ripped cloth and canvas, shredded belonging, broken down carts, smashed travel trunks, purses with coin twinkling in the morning sun. One crate about ten yards away must’ve been thrown from the broken cart. It was sitting in the grass just off the road with a smashed corner. Coming out of it was what looked like green, moldy meat with bugs buzzing.

  “Let’s go,” Grent said. “At least no one died here.”

  But Grent spoke too soon.

  After another twenty yards they saw them. The first was a little girl, probably no more than ten and wearing what looked like a night gown. Near her stretched out hand was a stuffed animal. A bear maybe or a crillio, Edin couldn’t tell. Her mother, or at least who Edin guessed was her mother, was lying next to her. Both were motionless and pale. The mother had one arm across the child’s chest like she was blocking her from something. The other was on her own stomach. Both hands were saturated in dried blood.

  “Monsters,” Dephina said.

  “We should bury them,” Berka said.

  “We cannot,” Grent said.

  There were flies around the bodies, but with them being upwind of it, they didn’t smell it. Edin guessed they would smell it when they passed the bodies.

  “Dematians are still around,” Edin said and he knew he was right. Maybe they were watching the group right now, maybe they could only smell them. Edin wasn’t sure.

  “It won’t take a lot of time,” Dephina whined, her voice that of a wife pleading her case.

  “What if there are others? Will we stop for them too?”

  “Maybe,” Dephina said.

  “How many more will die if we stop for everyone? How long will it take? What about the soldiers on the front lines? What of the families fleeing these demons? If our haste saves one life, it is more important than dead bodies.”

  “Grent,” Dephina said, her voice grew firm. “We’re burying the mother and child together.” Edin couldn’t see her face but he could imagine an angry glare that she shot his way. Something that would ruffle even the hardest of men.

  Grent sighed and dismounted. “Come on lads, let’s do this.” He pulled his sword and headed over to the bodies.

  “Are you going to cut them up first?” Berka asked. “That’s barbaric.”

  “You don’t want to dig with your hands do you?” Grent shoved his sword into the ground a few inches, twisted, and pulled up. He started doing it over and over. Edin pulled his blade and started as well and a few moments later, Berka’s greatsword was stabbing into the ground.

  Sweat was pouring down his forehead and dripping onto the dirt. It was already soggy from the rain the last few days though the mother and the daughter were dry.

  Of course, they tried to escape after the rains and the dematians caught them. He was using the sword like a shovel now, flipping mounds of dirt out of the pit that was now almost a foot and a half deep.

  Edin glanced back at the bodies. The girl didn’t look bloody except where the hand was; then there were the feet. There was something wrong about them as well.

  He stopped and glanced at Dephina. She was picking her fingernails with one of her eluvrian steel long knives. Ironically, it was the same thing Grent had been doing the other night. When she’d yelled at him.

  “What are you doing Edin?” Grent asked.

  He walked toward the bodies, it was only a few feet away, but his strides somehow felt smaller. There was something on the air too. Something that felt almost like a rain was c
oming.

  Edin bent down and picked up the woman’s arm and put it across her own body as if she’d been grabbing at her chest wound with both hands. The back of that hand was a lot less saturated with blood.

  “Dephina,” Edin said and he heard her drop from the horse with the little rattle of the stirrups. “Check her chest. Is there a wound?”

  He didn’t want to pull up a young girl’s shirt even if she was dead. It felt icky. He looked away when Dephina did. He looked toward the south and the still open fields and hills. Somewhere down there were the wild jungles.

  “There’s no wound,” Dephina said.

  Edin looked back and bent down, together, they flipped the girl to her front. In her back was the wound. Three deep, dark red claw marks. And beneath, in the dirt were there should’ve been blood, there was none.

  Edin looked up at Dephina then they both looked toward Grent and Berka who both seemed confused.

  “The feet too. No mud on the shoes.”

  Dephina pulled her other knife and they began scanning the horizon, the hills, the inn that was just barely still in view, and a small cottage near the eastern slope of a large blueish, purple mountain.

  “What is it?” Berka asked.

  “They were put here,” Edin said. He saw no ruts in the ground from dragging and although the dirt road was only a bit damp, it wasn’t dry enough to not leave signs.

  Edin saw no marks of dematian claws or indentations beneath the bodies. “It’s been what, two days since those rains?”

  “Up north yes,” Grent said, he was scanning about too and so was Berka. “This looks

  “They were put here recently. Maybe even yesterday. I did see clouds ahead during the afternoon.” Edin felt they were being watched. He felt like there was a tickling of a storm on the horizon though the clouds were few and the sun was poking out. “They’re watching us.”

  “Who is?”

  “The dematians,” Edin said. He didn’t know from where or how many, but he knew that.

  Dephina looked skeptical. “Come on, this could just be bandits. They killed a family, robbed them, and then left them for good honest folk like us to come by and bury them. Then they try to rob those people.”

  “But there was the ring yesterday,” Edin said. “And I’m guessing if we searched either the trunk or this lady’s body, we’d find some sort of valuables.”

  “We should get going,” Grent said. “This was a bad idea.”

  “The bodies still need to be buried,” Dephina said. “If these beasts are smart enough to set up a trap, they’re smart enough to stay away.” She spun her knives in her hand deftly and issued a throaty growl that gave Edin the chills.

  “Then stop picking your nails,” Grent grumbled back.

  “Have you ever fought dematians?” Edin asked. Grent and Dephina didn’t respond. “It isn’t like fighting men. They’re wild and different ones have different tactics.”

  “He’s right, some are brawler-like, they come at you with their claws and teeth and try to rip you apart. Other’s uses weapons and fight like any warrior you’d fight against,” Berka added.

  “And others form into ranks and fight as a unit. They’re not just stupid demons.”

  “I see,” Dephina paused. “Then hurry up and bury them. We don’t have much time.”

  It took another half an hour to bury the two. The men were covered in dirt when finished while Dephina looked like she’d recently bathed and had her clothes laundered.

  They got back onto the road and didn’t pass any other human bodies. Though they did pass horses ripped from hind to shoulder, cows torn open like they’d been smashed on blunt rocks, and dogs. Many dogs, some thin, nearly emaciated, others thick and round. There were needle-like teeth marks in all the animals.

  Edin thought about the dire wolf somewhere out there. Where was Bliz? Was he still alive on the other side of the mountains? Edin certainly hoped so. Dire wolves were said to be the smartest of dogs, and the most vicious.

  “Are we going through their feeding ground?” Berka asked as they passed a donkey with half of its rump gnawed off.

  Edin looked away from the donkey and back out over the plains and hills but saw nothing.

  Grent turned around. “We ride quickly to the pass now. We’ll be able to fight a greater number if they’re confined to a narrow space.” He kicked the horse and whipped the reins. His horse began galloping and then they all were.

  The horses were sweating and panting after about ten minutes of a full-on gallop. But the distance they’d traveled was nearly two miles and when they slowed, they were only a hundred or so yards away from two stone pillars guarding the side of the road.

  Jont’s Pass, read one while on the other there was smaller writing that may have been added after the first. Be warned: To attempt this pass in fall or winter will be certain death. In spring and summer you may die. There was a name scratched out beneath the carving.

  “Well it’s spring… ish,” Grent said.

  “I’d say it is still winter,” Dephina said.

  Edin looked up at the pass and the mountains. There were windblown mounds of snow piled up on the road and against the rising rocks and the slumbering trees that grew on the south side of the nearest mountain.

  It was early afternoon, but it seemed that the moment they passed the pillars, the temperature of the air dropped ten degrees like night had fallen.

  “Eyes up,” Grent said. “I don’t like the low ground.”

  Edin felt the same. This was not a place to linger. He wondered if in the summer the place felt any different. He doubted it.

  The road began straight for fifty feet before it swung left around the base of a mountain. They passed a copse of trees as the hooves rustled up littered brown leaves from the previous year.

  A large escarpment formed in front of them, it was covered with scraggly trees with hard vines and roots poking from the earth. It looked like a spider had the tree on its back. They couldn’t see beyond it and as they passed the ridge, Edin glanced up, ready to summon an ethereal shield at the first sign of a dematian.

  The little bits of earth made the road soggy and sharp gray stone was protruding like teeth from brown gums. Sprouts of fresh green caressed cracks and open-air gaps that gave the impression the teeth were filled with yesterday’s salad.

  They curved around it as the road ran right up against the tall cliff to the right. To the left, there was a trickling stream ten feet below that followed the road. They continued for hours, following the road up and down and around the first mountain that went on forever.

  The first valley was deep with precarious looking boulders above and the same steep mountain side next to them. The trees began to die out or turn to thinner and smaller trees.

  There were brown sticks that were wedged in the rocks like hairs on a balding man’s head. The thought made him run his hand through his now shaggy hair and check it.

  Only one strand came out.

  Higher, the snow was still piled up, but with the valleys and the road, it seemed for the most part to be clear.

  The road turned slightly south as they came around the southernmost point of a partially formed mountain.

  It had taken almost three hours to get around first one and Edin stared back toward the trailhead as the horse plowed forward. A while ago, he turned around to see the last of the pillars disappear behind the mountain like a sideways blinking eye closing for good.

  As they came around the bend, he saw why it’d be usually closed during the winter.

  A great avalanche covered the road. The snow looked damp and melting but it rose from the muddy dirt road at least fifteen feet high.

  In the snow, he saw bits of trees and rocks and other wreckage from the mountains. Above, he saw the path of destruction, a long-flattened track of crushed trees and stones from a peak that had to be a couple thousand feet tall.

  Grent dismounted and walked up to it. He stuck a hand in the snow and packed it w
ith ease. He threw a solid snowball at the mountain that had allowed their path to be blocked.

  The mountain didn’t seem to care.

  “Is it recent?” Dephina asked.

  It took Edin a moment to figure out what she implied. “You think the dematians caused this?” he asked after he did.

  Edin glanced up the mountain. It was slick and there were spots where it still looked wet despite the sun directly hitting it.

  “I don’t think it was deliberately caused,” Berka said. He was waist deep in the snow and was holding something up. He pulled a bit more and then there was a black clawed hand sticking up in the air like it was waving to him.

  “Is it dead?” Edin asked stepping forward. Grent and Dephina were inching closer as well.

  “Yes,” Berka said.

  “I still cannot believe they exist,” Dephina said. “A part of me really does not want to be here.”

  Edin looked at her. “You could have gone to Delrot with your son?” He looked at Grent. “Both of you. I told you not to come.”

  “We could not let you run off to die alone.” Grent shook his head.

  “And just because I don’t want to be here, doesn’t mean I will not stay. This is for our son. This is to save the world for him and if you say this is what you must do, I believe you,” Dephina added. “We both do.”

  He slowly said, “Thanks.”

  “Um, that’s great,” Berka said still holding the dematian hand. “What do we do? The horses can’t climb over so going forward isn’t an option. I’m guessing this is closed half of the year.”

  “Pull that demon out and burn it,” Edin said. He raised a hand and stepped forward. He didn’t know how many feet or yards down the road the avalanche went for, but from the trail of destruction coming down the mountain, he guessed about a hundred feet. Not too far but it was still deep. “Take the horses and back up behind that rock.” He pointed to a boulder ten yards back.

  Edin didn’t wait, he turned back to the snow drift and felt the water within. It was melting but slowly. The little flakes that were nearest the edge were barely holding onto their shape while deeper beneath it was solid and icy. Edin reached out with his senses.