by BJ Hanlon
Edin crouched next to a rock as Berka moved. He’d always been better at stalking through the forest and leaving as little of a trace as possible. Edin followed him with his eyes, glancing back toward the thicket and the unseen animal.
Edin waited. His mind wandered as nothing but birds, wind, and trees rustling sounded around. He was beginning to think Berka got lost. Nearly a half hour later, Edin was starting to feel cramps rise in his legs. He struck at his thighs and tried rubbing them.
Suddenly, there was a loud cry that echoed through the valley and the thwack of a sword on wood. A bleating scream from some animal, the goat hopefully, sounded and he caught the glimpse of the thing hopping out toward him.
Edin summoned an ethereal knife and tried to stand. His right leg did. His left, did not. Edin tried to compensate for that and threw as the leg refused to answer. The knife flew over the animal’s neck a few inches.
Then the beast cut to its right and bounded straight at a mountain. Edin summoned another ethereal knife and whipped it at the hindquarters.
The goat, the same type of crazy mountain goat that leapt from the mountain, leapt past the attack with the grace of a dancer and bounded up the cliff with astonishing speed. It moved from one rock to the other, stopping and going back on itself so fast he didn’t even know where to throw. He meekly tried one more attack.
The ethereal blade missed like he knew it would.
Edin dropped to the ground. His stomach growling and his thighs burning. He drank from the waterskin, rinsed of all the nasty mintweed thank the gods, and heard the fury and frustration from Berka as he clattered through the thicket.
“How did you miss you blasted fool? All you needed to do was get him. He was right there you blotard.” The insults went on and on for a bit but Edin ignored them.
He leaned his head against the rock that he’d crouched behind for so long. “My leg cramped,” was all he said and Berka shut up. His friend looked at him incredulously.
“Cramped?” He scoffed. “Your leg cramped?”
Edin nodded. “You took too long.”
“Don’t blame this on me. Don’t you dare,” Berka reached down and grabbed Edin by the collar. “This is all your fault, everything, the crillio, your mother, Kes, my family.” There were tears in his eyes.
Edin slapped Berka’s hands away and his friend released. “Your family?” Edin asked.
Berka just shook his head. He turned toward the thicket and began walking. “I suppose we’ll starve to death out here.” He shrugged his hunched shoulders. “At least we can make an effort to do what we said we would. At least let’s try to find the damned elves.”
Edin pulled his pack over his shoulder and started after him. It took about ten minutes to finally have the cramp disappear, but he was still weak. The lack of food was huge and growing on his mind. His stomach groaned. It was monotonous and continuous.
They marched through and more evergreens began to appear through the rough terrain.
It wasn’t lush, that didn’t feel like the right word, but there was life. Animals were around, rodents mostly and snakes which Edin stayed away from. He remembered the wyrm’s evil gaze and shivered.
Berka wasn’t as picky. He spotted a snake and snatched it with a look of near lust. Then he skinned it, cooked it and they shared it.
There was little meat, but it helped, slightly.
The valley cut through two mountains toward a third. The path then began to rise to a high escarpment that ran north and south and nearly cut them off. It looked like a terrible climb.
Edin guessed they were south of the Suset Valley. It was the only thing that made sense, so they followed the escarpment north, hoping to find some sort of path up.
Edin hoped there’d be an easier one with maybe an inn on the side of the road and inside a barbequer like Delber.
Just the thought made Edin’s mouth water and his belly go crazy.
Near the northernmost mountain, they found it. Though it wasn’t a trail as much as a long tube-like crater with dried roots, broken stones, and hard soil packed in the ground. It looked almost like a child’s slide and went to the top of the ridge.
There was no barbequer there.
The path was steep and slippery and it took until late in the evening before they finally reached the top and found themselves above an evergreen blanket that stretched for a few hundred yards to the center mountain. In the darkness, he didn’t know which way to go once they reached it, but that didn’t matter right now.
“Keep going?” Edin asked.
“Probably. I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to get up if we stop,” Berka said, his voice was drained and drawling. They kept on.
They headed toward the mountain, the center of the three peaks he’d seen before, or he thought it was. Their feet barely left the stone as they moved. Even the smallest of obstructions, a quarter inch break in the rocks, could cause Edin to stumble. All he could do to stay upright was to drink water and continue on.
He felt like his body would eat itself soon. He found himself seeing flashes in the trees. They weren’t so much lights from things, but lights that outlined the darkness. At first he thought it was some storm far off, lightning in the clouds, but as they continued, he was certain they were only in his head.
Berka stumbled in front of him and slouched to his knees, his head hung over his slumped shoulders like a monk about to begin prayer. Edin stopped next to him and touched his shoulder. “Come on,” he said but Berka was dazed.
His eyes were open but they seemed distant, like some music only he could hear had taken over his mind and began to control his world.
Edin shook him. “Berks…” he hissed, the light flashing around them again.
They were in a small clearing and he could see the bare northeastern slope of the mountain. On it, he saw the outline of something. Something that for a moment, looked like a dematian.
Edin swallowed and then the flash came again and the thing was gone. Or maybe transformed into a weird rock.
Edin collapsed next to Berka. They were in the open with no fire and no shelter. He began dragging Berka back under the cover of the evergreens.
They were two lost kids in the middle of a rekindled war from millennium past.
Edin dropped when they were covered. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds around them. The blowing of the wind, the crumbling of rocks, and a distant sound of water from far off. The most prominent was his stomach, though he worked hard to forget that. Edin pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. He rested his head on his kneecaps and tried to keep awake in case of attack.
It didn’t work. During the night he let the dreams take over. Arianne and he were in a paradise. They sat on the edge of a large veranda overlooking a sandy beach and soft white-capped waves as they came in. He glanced over and saw her doing needlepoint and humming a tune that reminded him of an old tale of woe. He couldn’t find the words, but he thought one of the verses hidden in that melody went something like:
Felt such sorrow as I’ll ever know
Touched the ground burning with snow
My eyes they tear with memory
A life so fleeting I fail to see
That may have been it, but dream-Edin wasn’t sure. The tune could’ve’ been nothing like that.
Edin put a hand on her soft wrist. She looked at him, a smile gracing her lips like the joy of a child. She beamed, so happy, so beautiful, the sunshine filtered through her blond hair and made her almost ethereal, a goddess.
“I thought you hated needlepoint?”
She shrugged but said nothing. A cry came from the beach. A woman’s cry and then a child’s.
Edin looked away toward the beach and saw it was gone. It wasn’t a beach anymore. It was a wide mountainous valley and far ahead, he saw someone. They were just at the edge of sight, the edge of the shadows of the mountains. Edin started after the person and knew it was Arianne. She’d disappeared from besi
de him.
He ran after her, he sprinted, but the land rose as if a terestio was changing it. The rocks grew looser at every step and his feet began to slip. He climbed higher and higher. Edin watched as Arianne crested the rise and disappeared, the sounds of her and the child crying were gone.
“Arianne,” he cried out. “I’m coming.” Why was she running from him? Where was she going?
Then he heard movement below. Edin looked back and saw what she’d been running from. And not just her, but he should’ve been fleeing also.
The valley he’d been in was now swarming with dematians. The black demons were racing toward them and in their midst, he spotted stone giants, wyrms slithering on the ground, and others flying through the air. But at the center, surrounded by the largest dematians Edin had ever seen, was the monster from the tunnel.
Edin turned back and started climbing again. A giant thunderwyrm, possibly the same one he’d slain in the Battle of the Northlands, landed at the top of the stony mountain before him. On its back was the dematian king. Even kings heeded their gods, Edin thought.
The king raised a hand and Edin saw the staff. Inside it was the red stone. The Rage Stone.
It spoke in its chattering tone and lowered the staff toward Edin. It was going to shoot something out toward him. Like his ball of lightning in near Carrow.
Edin dropped to the ground and pressed his body into the stone as he clamped his eyes closed. The brightest red and yellow light flowed around him like he was staring directly at the sun. He screamed as he began to feel warm, then hot, then like he was on fire. He was going to die.
The pain erupted, he felt his skin starting to singe, then it blistered a moment later. It popped. He felt every pain, every pustule popping like bubbles below a waterfall.
Then the pain was gone. Everything seemed to disappear. Edin looked. He was still on the mountainside. Below him, the horde was gone. Above him the king disappeared. The land somehow wasn’t as crumbly either. That was a plus.
He stood and was able to walk up the rest of the slope now. It took barely a minute before he reached the peak and stood above the landscape.
Before him, the land dropped into a greenish yellow fog. Edin swallowed. The mist was thick and absolute and there was no movement, at least at first.
Then he saw something. A giant black appendage. At first he thought it a vine of some sort but then saw it sway and move and lash out at something unseen above the fog. The smell hit him, putrid odor like rancid eggs and fish that’d been covered with rotten vegetables. A meal fit for a draugr.
Another lashed out, this time very close. It leapt from the fog like a flying fish from a pond.
Edin barely had a moment to think. It slapped him in the stomach causing him to double over. Then, it dropped and wrapped around his leg. It squeezed. The pressure was immense like he’d put his foot in a vice that kept tightening. It burned and he felt the bone cracking and being crushed as he was being pulled forward and down and into that deadly fog. The swamps of old.
Edin tried to reach back and grab hold of something. His hands didn’t work. He tried to summon a culrian to shield him, then a knife to slash the tentacle.
But he had no talent. He was bare, as if everything had been taken from him. He saw something coming at him from the mist. And he felt a gust of humid air blow up on him like a volcano exhaling. The intensity of the draugr stench grew sevenfold and he nearly fainted. A giant gaping black opening came toward him. In it were giant teeth dripping with yellow spittle.
“Edin, get up,” a quiet but hurried voice said. It took barely a moment for the dream world to disappear and the real one to come back. And in that new one, he saw Berka standing before him, his sword drawn. “There’s something near.”
It was early morning with a yellow glare rising to the east.
The ground shook and Edin got to his feet. Rocks began to rumble and roll across the ground as if they were tumbleweeds caught in a windstorm.
Edin looked the way they were heading but saw nothing. Then he spun toward the clearing behind them. Berka was looking that way too.
Something was there, in the center of the small clearing.
Edin drew his sword but he had no idea what he was looking at and what to do about it. All thought of that creepy nightmare fled him as the form in front of him began to move.
It was made of rocks, hundreds of rocks, some were pebbles others the size of his head. They were forming a circle, a ball of sorts, and they were rolling around and cracking into each other almost like a vortex. The sound became deafening, the clatter of stones sent shivers down his bones as they were locking together. It was almost like the building-log set his mother had given him as a child.
The pieces formed quickly, snapping together. A long piece of at least six rocks, each the size of a melon, jutted out from the left. Then another from the right.
The twisting of the vortex and the snapping of the stones continued. Berka stepped back, Edin followed. Then something leapt out from the bottom, then another.
It was forming into a humanoid-like object. Something he’d never seen. “A giant,” Berka hissed though it didn’t look exactly the same as the one they’d seen on the bridge.
The head popped up, then it seemed to turn toward Edin. The torso continued in that vortex of stone that didn’t form fully.
Suddenly, a bulbous, white glow appeared in the upper middle of the rock head like a cyclops. It looked down at Edin and Berka and took a step toward them. The way he or it or whatever the heck was behind that glow peered at them, made Edin certain it didn’t have kind thoughts.
Edin glanced around. He had no idea how to fight a rock. “Run?” Edin said.
“Sounds good,” Berka said.
They twisted around and sprinted. Hunger, thirst and everything else was gone as the adrenaline pumped through his body. They sprinted through the forest much like the night they nearly died with the crillio, the night he became the Abomination of Yaultan.
Through the trees, almost like a beacon of hope, he spotted the large mountain ahead of them. The valley began to slope up to the left, or down to the right if Edin was being objective, and more forest floor vegetation began to appear.
Behind them, the pounding of the feet, the clattering of the vortex, and the smashing of trees echoed through the mountains.
Then the angled forest floor began to rise on the left a bit more precipitously. Then on the right.
Edin was huffing as they followed a small dry riverbed into the shadows in a rocky ravine. He glanced back and saw the thing, twenty yards or more behind and matching their speed.
It was more than ten feet tall and the one eye glared at him. He wondered if it was going to shoot something at him from that eye like the burning light beam in the nightmare.
The thing rumbled on. One of its legs clipped a stone, but instead of tripping him, the stone latched on and rolled up into the vortex at its gut. The giant seemed to grow larger.
“Blast,” Edin said under his breath and looked forward again.
Berka was leaping over fallen trees and dead branches. There were bones too, many of them. He saw skulls, what looked like a dog skull, a human skull, and others. To the right he saw a black cavern and floating eyes peering out of it. Yellow and vicious eyes but the owner of those eyes didn’t move.
The thundering of the thing behind him was growing closer. Edin could feel a slight tug on the back of his cloak as the ravine continued on a gradual turn almost north. It began to rise also. Very slowly but it was going up. He could barely see anything beyond Berka’s huge body.
His friend was starting to slow. Edin could see the sweat on the back of his bright pink neck. Edin figured they’d ran at least a mile through terrible terrain. Despite that, Edin still had energy.
From above, he heard noises and glanced up to see shadows leaping over the wide gorge. More bones, stones, and debris were on the ground. Other stones and boulders tumbled over the edge.
&n
bsp; They leapt over the corpse of a bird’s half eaten body.
A cliff raptor far from the Great Cliffs.
The gorge continued to rise and suddenly, from ahead he heard Berka holler back, “There’s open air ahead,” though his voice was barely heard over the whistling, stomping, and clacking of the giant behind them. They climbed, Edin’s foot slipped on a loose rock, and he fell but caught himself with only a slight scrape into his palm. Edin pressed on. What could they do?
Then beyond Berka, Edin saw an open gap. The gorge and the world just seemed to be sliced off. Berka appeared for a moment, framed in between the land and the open sky beyond, then his arms began to spin like he was trying to stop his momentum from going forward.
Edin barely had a moment to process this when he ran into Berka’s back. They tilted forward and nearly fell. Edin saw for a brief instant that they were on the pinnacle of another ridge. A very thin ridge and on the other side there was a valley with evergreens, oaks, and a long earthen slope to a lake.
But before that, there was a stony descent, very stony and it was about as rough as a drunken brawl in any one of the pirate towns.
A moment or two later, he realized they were on a rock that apparently wasn’t stable and Edin’s momentum carried them forward. The front of the thing tilted downward as the back rose. Edin grabbed Berka and tried to reverse that momentum.
He fell to his butt as the rock was dislodged and for a moment, it teetered precariously on the edge of the gorge and the rocky slope downward.
Then there was another stamp of the giant stone beast’s foot.
The rocking stopped because now they were sliding on a path toward the lake. The flat stone spun slightly, crashing and running over more things and picking up speed.
Edin screamed as he gripped Berka hard. Now he remembered the terrible fall heading into the Susot Valley. Déjà vu.
Could this be it? Could they have somehow found it?
“Hold on, I’m going to…” Edin felt for his talent and the culrian. They needed a barrier; something that could stop—