The Dark
Season
Saga
Yehya H. Safwat
PART ONE
The Final Harvest
Copyright
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© 2016, Yehya H. Safwat
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The World of Talor
Refer to the Chronicles for a brief on the history of Talor directly translated from the leaflets of the Erante.
Dedication
To my daughters ... the sun and moon of The Dark Season
Table of Contents
PART ONE
The Final Harvest
The World of Talor
BOOK ONE
Prelude
Chapter One
An Ancient Echo
Chapter Two
The Legacy of Mergal
Chapter Three
The Quest
Chapter Four
In the Land of the Dargos
Chapter Five
In the Shadow of the King
BOOK TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Lorken’s gift
Chapter Three
A Faint Whisper
Chapter Four
Into the Light
Chapter Five
The Last Cry
The world’s final cry
Epilogue
Chronicles & Facts…
Appendix
Acknowledgments
“I lived forever, many times, and I remember them all.”
─The Song of Shadows
BOOK ONE
Prelude
The blizzard is roaring.
“Nimtha …”
A gentle female voice whispers in Nimtha’s head, pulling him out of a bottomless pit of exhaustion. Silver fumes swirl lazily around his dark humanoid form as he lies injured in a bunker-like building. Shuddering from the extreme cold radiating off the building’s stone floor, Nimtha barely manages to raise his head. He struggles to keep his gray eyes open as he looks around, searching for the source of the whisper.
“Where are you?” He asks, his voice faint.
He sees a hazy image of delicate hands cupping his face, and his gaze meets that of ghastly eyes which are slowly drawing away from him. When he realizes it is only a vision in his head, he puts on a broken smile and thinks, I remember those brown eyes .
Nimtha’s eyes roam about the hexagonal shelter –rays of pale white light beam in through the opened door and narrow windows. Around him, debris and dust mix with a thin layer of frost. Covered with the same cruel rime, countless burnt bodies of different races are scattered in the place. Some are human, some are otherworldly, and some like him; are a bit of both. They have piled up in the middle of the spacious building in one big, charred heap, where the battle ended. Only the howling of the historic storm outside lingers on, relentlessly battering the walls of the building and shaking its very foundation.
Nimtha grabs a huge pearl floating in the air and radiating clear daylight. He pulls it closer to him as if trying to get some warmth from the heatless orb. Looking around him for anything to cover his wounded shoulder with, he sees a small, tattered curtain covering a narrow window. He yanks it down, then carefully removes the soiled rag covering his right upper half. He replaces the rag with the curtain hoping for better protection for the bare bones of his wounded shoulder. Slumping back into the corner on the floor, he is overcome by another surge of pain.
His barely-stifled moans stop when he senses movement somewhere in a darker corner across the bunker. Mustering a long-lost awareness of his surroundings, he tries to penetrate the shrouding, but his waning eyesight doesn’t help.
“Strange,” sounds a husky voice from the dark.
Nimtha flinches at the sound realizing that it isn’t in his head like the vision of the face – something is here with him.
“Who is there?” he says.
For a long moment, Nimtha scans the place with renewed alertness.
Then the windy voice echoes again. “You keep returning. Why aren’t you giving up?”
Nimtha recalls the warm female voice which visited his dreams over the past few days, a voice that kept him from giving in to his fatigue. Whenever his body tried to let go, he heard her call.
“There is nothing I want more than to give up. But I am not able to. She won’t let me go.” Then he asks again, “Who’s inquiring? Show yourself.”
A faint sound of some wings flapping issues from the darkness.
“You are not meant to see me. This conversation shouldn’t even be happening at all. When I came, you should have been long gone like your friends here. Yet here you are, alive and speaking to me, against all odds, against my... expectations.” The unnatural voice replies from across the spacious room. “But you can call me The Asker.”
Atop the heap of corpses, not ten yards from Nimtha, a human in shining plate armor engraved with a horse head stands erect. In his hand, he holds a titanic blade with everlasting dim glow and details of angelic runes. A demon lord faces him, a hulking figure of burnt flesh and a faceless head. A pair of huge bat wings, one of which is broken, sprouts out of his back. The holy warrior’s weapon still emits a low humming sound as it pierces through the chest of the demon. Only the dark lord’s eyes are still intact, emitting black swirling vapors. They still show the agonizing shock from that final strike. Yet the paladin seems to be pushing the blade even deeper, despite the fact that they are both long gone after finishing off each other.
Amid all these corpses, and these haunting figures, the Asker is the most frightening thing in the room.
“Why are you here then, Asker?”
Wings flutter again. “I came to find answers.”
With restless eyes, Nimtha follows the movement of the entity, as it changes location. “I don’t think that I have any answers for you. I don’t even have answers to my own questions.”
“Your life has been most intriguing, Shadow Pilgrim, and it seems that your end is not different. Tell me,” says the Asker.
Slowly, Nimtha’s lassitude wins over his dread. He leans his head on the stone-reinforced wall and turns to peer through the window, listening to the raging storm outside.
“What do you want to hear?”
“Is this how you pictured it would end?”
"I don't know. Maybe I did. Maybe I saw it coming and fooled myself into believing otherwise” Nimtha answers.
"Would you rather quit right now?"
"Do I have that luxury?" Nimtha scoffs bitterly. "If I did, then I shouldn’t have chosen to follow this road in the first place. A hefty price was paid to get here and it would be all in vain.”
“This is an interesting point, especially from someone like you. If anyone had the means to survive on, it would be you. Untied, unbound to anything, I wonder why you are still here. The last thing I expected was to see you – one who have all the keys to all the worlds – meet your end in this forsaken p
lace. One whose role was to watch in silence as mere men squabble over vanities. I ask of the reason that kept you committed to the world of men throughout your journey, not just in here.” Comes the voice of the Asker. “So tell me. How has it come to this?”
Nimtha shifts his gaze and sees a pair of translucent eyes glittering eerily in the dark. “Will it make a difference if I tell you?” he asks.
“Maybe it will make a difference if your story survives. Maybe someone is listening.” Responds the entity. “Do you have anything better to do right now?
Nimtha recalls the female face and smiles bitterly. A steady beating draws his attention to the shady far side of the bunker. Thinking of an answer to the Asker’s question, he watches as a soulless humanoid figure digs tirelessly through the floor with no concern for anything but the hole it is making.
Nimtha smirks and admits, "Actually I don't."
He turns away to peer back through the window, listening as the storm blares outside. In the distance, deep in the blizzard, Nimtha sees colossal gray clouds racing in his direction. He shuts his eyes and tries to shake the images of the horrors he saw in the core of the storm.
“It won’t be long before the storm reaches you. You’d better hurry.”
Nimtha hears wings flapping again, and opens his eyes. The Asker is on the move and settles in another dark spot, waiting. Nimtha gathers his thoughts and begins.
“When our journey started, there was no hope. Just a broken world that had used up all of its chances. Hope meant nothing to me at that point. But, as with everything in existence, hope found its way, and we found ourselves locked in a relentless pursuit to make a difference. At some point along the road, I genuinely came to believe that we could remedy our mistakes. I hoped that she, my child, would have a chance. I believed that the world I brought her into was about to become a safer, much better place.
“Could I have been more naïve? If fathers took a thorough look at the world they lived in, none of us would be here, yet here we are. What were we thinking, bringing our children into this wretched world? How would their world be any different from ours? I think the very reason for existence and continuation is… hope.”
The unnerving eyes hover somewhere in a shady corner of the place and shimmer brighter. Too tired to regain apprehension of it, Nimtha carries on.
“They say that we, the Genn of Verda, are hard to kill or capture, and when worlds fall, we are the last to go. They are right about that. The millennia I have existed through and the countless times I have danced with death have proved this belief beyond doubt. So here I am, alone, at the end of everything, thinking only of her, my only child. Again, it was all mere hope.”
Nimtha’s narration stops as a torn up piece of paper flies out of a shady corner and settles on the floor. He struggles to reach it with minimum movement and barely manages to grab it with his fingertips. Drawing it closer to the light, he gazes at its two-word content. On the shredded remains of the blood-tainted scroll, the words “No more” are barely legible.
“Do you remember?” says the windy voice.
Nimtha leans back against the wall, and a deep sigh escapes him – yes, he does remember. He remembers the choices.
He says, “Whether we have done all that we could or not, this is where we find out the result of our actions, and our choices. Now, Casmodath, The Storm of Dar, has befallen our world. Soon, not even these bunkers can protect me from its wrath and from the retribution of my enemies.”
Nimtha turns to the eyes shining in the dark and asks, “You want to know the story behind the journey? So be it. Like you said, who knows? Maybe she is listening.”
His features contort with pain as he struggles to sit upright. “It began with a battle; the greatest battle that ever happened. I will tell you about the words that started it, the song that lived through it, and the cry that brought it to this end.”
“I’ll speak of those who fought it, like the one standing in front of me. Despite his frozen body, he still shines with fierce anger. His radiant hands are shining with the blessing of Ardul, hauling Ardumir, his faithful blade, deep in the avatar of Aesgar, the Lord of Despair. A typical form of conflict, but I assure you it is nothing close to typical –a conflict that crossed lines never reached before.”
In the middle of the bunker, atop the charred heap of bodies, stand the paladin and the demon, erect and motionless, frozen in the aftermath of their long and terrible fight.
Nimtha glances through the window, continuing with his tale. “Let me tell you about the one who stands roaring in the face of the wind outside this bunker, the only man that can withstand that cold bare-chested. He stands out there with unparalleled courage yelling in the face of the storm to back off, in a last desperate attempt to save us all. You can even see the winds cowering back at his thunderous voice and his bastion of will. But then with an equal rage, the storm roars, pushing forward. It lifts him away and slams him into the sky-high glacial wall of the miles-wide crater surrounding the frozen city we are in. He stands up and keeps on going, not knowing that his body has already failed him. Now, only his wild soul, carried by the will of Tyrus, the Lord of Wrath, keeps him moving.
“Let me tell you about those countless human and inhuman bodies outside, the sword that put them down, and the one who wielded it like no other swordsman ever had. Surrounded by their dead scores, only his frozen face is still unscathed. That face, which, along with his body, carries marks and drawings of the ten thousand battles he fought and never lost to a man. His lifeless eyes are fixed on the dark gray skies with a peace he never knew in life, as if saying: Talor, now I fall.”
Nimtha looks again at the bloodied paper in his hands and gazes at the two words.
“Tell me about your choices, Nimtha.”
Nimtha turns to the eerie eyes and the daunting voice issues one more time, “Maybe then, we will know what binds you to this world.”
Chapter One
An Ancient Echo
Nimtha speaks on...
The story began in the shattered ruins of Henya. What happened that week is carved deep into the memories of all Talorians. I haven't learned of these events through rumors and tell-tales. I was part of it. What I am about to tell you is the one true version of what happened in Henya.
The Date was 3 rd of Tovil , 2122 SC
A lonely bonfire shed whispers of light on broken walls and leveled buildings. A scouting group of soldiers silently encircled the flame, making a shelter out of the broken wall of a ruined tower. The crackling of burnt wood and the ghastly howling of chilly winds were the only sounds caressing their ears. Dust devils danced around them as they shivered in the dark.
One of the soldiers hesitantly opened a discussion with a fellow scout about something trivial. Shortly, the rest of the group joined the talk. Smiles turned to laughs, and it was not long before they started forgetting about the bridge and the passage.
Only their veteran leader, who positioned himself outside the circle, kept a vigilant eye and a keen ear to their surroundings.
The tales … damn the tales , he pondered.
The ancient bridge, Glaw, hung a few hundred feet over the Strait of Abad, nearby. It connected the realm of men to an ill-fated land, and as he scanned the night, the leader saw it in the moonlight. Somewhere along its length, and for no apparent reason, the moonlight dimmed the further he looked across the bridge.
Beyond the other end of the bridge, a colossal wall could be barely seen, some fifty feet high made of stone and steel. Terrifying scars covered the wall, cracks made scarier by the myths haunting the place.
Behind the wall, the leader knew there was a passage. A corridor some half mile wide between two parts of a mountainous series called the Goshean Bracelet. The passage which was shrouded in permanent darkness was called Tel’Abad, or the Dark Mile.
The men he led were well-selected from the bravest soldiers the generals of Sidnia could have found. They needed to be so to take that post near the D
ark Mile. But since the night before, the soldiers had been on their toes. For years, the place had been still and silent as a dull painting, but yesterday it came to life. Every now and then, a sound issued from the direction of the wall across the bridge.
As the sound of the men’s conversation faded in his ears, he stared at the wall. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t avert his eyes. Aghast, he saw the two halves of the mountain morphing into a pair of giant wings and the dark passage in between transforming to the body of a dark vague beast.
He shook the disturbing image from his mind and turned to his men trying with a great effort to adorn a confident smile. But when he opened his mouth to speak, he froze halfway and waved for them to be quiet.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, senses alerted.
As the conversation faded into silence, they turned to him. His eyes were fixed beyond the bridge.
“Hear what?”
“Yes, I heard it,” answered another soldier. “Some rumbling in the passage.” He waved for the other man to be quiet.
Apprehensive, the soldiers turned to follow their leader’s gaze. Their eyes went to the direction of the single most powerful source of their nightmares: Tel’Abad.
Seconds later, they heard the pounding of drums. The sound coming from deep inside the Dark Mile replaced their heartbeats. They stood up and went for their weapons, terror muscling its way into their very being.
At that moment, even the moon shunned the scene and clouds rapidly roofed over the ruins. Only a few stars peered through the clouds, shedding their light below.
With his eyes still fixed on the Goshean Bracelet, the leader slowly said, "Gather your things. Hurry. We need to deliver the news to our homeland. It is happening. "
The Dark Season Saga- the Final Harvest Page 1