by Scott Beith
“She’s right,” Ebony then declared, surprisingly the first to come to my defence.
Ariss looked about and saw from everyone’s face that he was alone. “My wife believed in these stupid statues – enough to stand right beside one when the gnolls took her from me… She thought it would save her,” he said, trying to sway everyone’s minds. “These jewels serve us more than they ever would here,” he continued, speaking a little louder this time with a maddening aggravation beginning to vex his voice.
Radament, who was usually quick to calm his comrade’s aggressive attitude, was being unusually quiet. He was holding his lantern tightly and staring into the darkness, seeming not to hear the conversation.
“You’ve never been married, Ariss,” Arlo retorted, contesting the whole premise of the sand king’s argument.
“What?… Yes I was,” he fumbled, failing to persuade anyone with his lies.
“So what was her name?” I asked, backing up the prince.
“She… Well, she… Dammit!” He shook his head as he surrendered his argument “Well I still don’t believe in them,” he muttered under his breath.
“Whether you believe in them or not doesn’t matter,” the prince stated. “The villagers here do believe, so those gems stay here where they’ve left them,” Arlo said with strong and admirable fortification. It was the first admirable act I’d ever seen him perform. To actually take control of a situation in a way a good leader would. “Just give them back,” he ordered, reaching his hand out for them, fearlessly confronting the sand king.
Ariss angrily removed the jewels from his pocket, annoyed with his sudden loss of authority. A former king who never had need to obey anyone now having to, at great insult, relinquish his treasure. “They were for the kingdom,” he bantered as the prince placed the jewels back in the shrine.
“Their taxes already pay the kingdom,” Arlo defiantly stated as he pulled a flint rock from beside the statue and prepared to reignite the candles.
Radament slapped the flint from Arlo’s hand before he could spark the wicks alight. The rock dropping hard enough to make a small splash into one of the countless puddles around us as Radament waved his hands like a fly flapping its wings, trying to signal something. Everyone, but me, ducking as they knew instantly what it meant.
I opened my mouth to ask what was going on when Radament yanked me down beside him. He pointed into the distance, over towards a small swamp-saffron pond in the jungle’s darkness.
It took me a moment to look past the reeds and see what he was actually pointing at. I rubbed my eyes in shaded disbelief. There was a smallish critter in a shallow pond a short distance from us, completely covered under a black leathery shroud, raised up on its two hind legs, picking at the oozing sap from the swamp plantations with its enormous fanged teeth.
It looked feral, just like it had been described in the stories told to me. It was small, though, being the size of a gnome or an imp. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel like it would be aggressive. It moved like a child as it playfully picked at the bright berries along the yellow and green reeds of the shallow swampland pond. Hardly looking like the fierce and savage scavenger I’d imagined.
“It’s just a child,” Radament whispered softly.
“It hasn’t seen us yet,” Arlo whispered back as we all huddled together.
“Well, we should walk away before it does see us,” I said.
“Or we could creep past it,” Ebony suggested.
“No,” Ariss said firmly. “It’s too risky. If it’s here, then others must be close by.”
“But we were given orders to run under any circumstance of trouble,” I nervously reminded him.
“It’s hardly trouble,” Arlo countered.
Honestly, it was like déjà vu, as we were having the exact same conversation we had had when we’d first entered this place.
We waited patiently for Ariss to make up his mind. “It’s just as risky in any direction we walk, and the eclipse would sooner end forward than going back now,” he explained. “We should quietly trap it and then continue,” he decided.
“No!” I revolted, reluctant to attack a creature who hadn’t even seen us yet.
Ariss grabbed my shoulders. “They are pack hunters, you silly broad. If we do not bind it down, it will see us and cry to the others for help.” The anger in Ariss’s voice scaring me into my own shy acceptance.
“Our spiders could web it in no time, Kya. It’s what they’re best at,” Radament reassured me while looking back and forth between the creature and me, too afraid to let it move away from his sight. “They won’t harm it, I swear,” he added, evaluating the worried expression I still had on my face.
The group nodded in agreeance while I reluctantly persisted with my argument. “I don’t like this plan, guys. We don’t need to provoke them when we’re in their land,” I muttered cowardly to Ariss as he attempted to creep towards his colossal ant.
He turned back sharply and shoved me ever so slightly. “This is our land, not theirs,” he weakly snarled. “And let’s get one thing straight. I am only here because you couldn’t do this yourself,” he then scolded me, raising his voice as much as he could afford without the gnoll in the nearby distance overhearing. “Please just trust my council as commander and obey what I say before your loud mouth gets us killed!”
I nodded in scared approval, adhering his instructions as he pointed for me to hop back on Vallah while Radament removed his spider’s harness. The spider stealthily vanishing into the trees overhead. I saw only a blur as it dropped onto the poor gnoll and proceeded to spray and spin it with webs, encasing the creature in a cocoon in mere milliseconds.
Watching with horror as the spider then proceeded to tether and pull the gnoll up into the tree along with it. The webbed cocoon making it up to the first branch before it snapped and dropped. A dark image lunged out from another tree in order to catch it while our startled spider scampered away in retreat.
A large gnoll tending to its trapped infant, puddles splashing muck all about as eyes from everywhere started glancing towards us.
My mind went blank as a shivering terror fell over me. All about the swamp pools, gnolls were emerging by the dozen. Spawning and spewing out of the crevices they’d been hiding in as they swarmed us from out of the swamps. Others dropping from the tree canopy, the noise of a hundred rustling leaves echoing before they began landing directly into our sight.
We didn’t have a moment to hesitate – nor did we take one. Radament jumped onto his unharnessed spider as it ran towards us. Ariss’s ant taking a few vaulting leaps as it launched into flight.
For the rest of us, the gnolls had charged at us from all angles, leaving us with no choice but to go straight up. We swayed from left to right as our spiders climbed up the trees and then continued to flee through the canopy. I ducked and dodged branches as Vallah leapfrogged us through the tree line, following the others in blind escape.
The gnolls reappeared, digging their huge claws into the trees as they swung after us. We were hopelessly outmatched, cut off in all directions. Left leaping over branches as gnolls climbed and dropped from under and above. Some would fall but it was of no consequence to them. They were everywhere!
There was no means of escape. No source of sunlight to save us before the gnolls grabbed and dragged us down with them. But we continued to flee anyway. I looked over my shoulder. Radament was falling behind, clubbing angry gnolls with his lantern-stick as they leapt at him, while he desperately clung to his spider with his only free hand. Having little to hold on to, still unwilling to drop his great stick and barrel of which he awkwardly cradled and carried together in his left hand.
I watched in horror as a gnoll slashed its claws from behind him, catching his foot and forcing him into a clumsy fumble off his ride. Dropping his keg as he clung to a branch with just the one hand.
“He’s down! He’s down!” I shouted to the others ahead of me as Radament lost his grip and dropped throug
h the high tree line canopy, falling towards the wetland swamps beneath our feet. His spider continuing to flee without him.
Lord Ariss swooping past my head, skyrocketing down to save his comrade. The other spiders quickly following in pursuit, abseiling down on their long silk lines. My chest becoming lighter as my stomach became more weightless. I clutched the harness tighter than I’d ever held anything before, just trying to prevent falling head first towards the swampy ground we were heading down into.
Helplessly watching Radament and Ariss already battling below in the very centre of this rummaged harvesting field. The sickening peril of witnessing countless four-legged beasts lunging at them one by one.
The gnolls clawed at the sand king’s arms, which reactively fractured and dispersed huge gusts of sand from his pores. It looked as if his skin dried up and broke into billions of smaller pieces once touched. He smoked from left to right, sliding across the trenched floor in an indescribable kind of fashion, with sand dispensing off his body, blinding everything around him in one concentric whirlwind. He looked like a living sandstorm: an element of nature blowing one way before tornadoing in another. The gnolls rushing into this clouded storm in one fearless mass, and then simply vanishing, never to be seen again.
Radament lit his lantern and ignited the head of his flail with a bright burning flame. He swung it wildly, whacking gnolls as they jumped towards him. He drank some of his wine and spat it towards the lantern, breathing flames that pushed back the gnolls. I then watched in fascination as he jumped on top of his heavy barrel and began rolling around on it like a lumberjack riding a waterlog, while courageously hitting gnolls with his lantern flail as he moved backwards then forwards.
Once he’d cleared those nearest to him, Radament spun his barrel towards the huge crowd near Ariss. He dropped down on top of his barrel, sitting with his legs on either side of it, gripping the strong gold frames of its base before whacking the back end of the barrel with his burning lantern. The alcohol inside combusted in an instant, jetting out of the barrel’s one tiny exit hole and rocketing Radament into the cluster of gnolls, smashing through them. Radament abandoning the soaring barrel as it schismed uncontrollably like a pinball bouncing from tree to tree.
The alcohol from the barrel had dispersed into the air. Even at this height, I could feel its vapours seeping into my own lungs, hazing my focus and judgment, and making my head spin as Vallah continued her slow vertical drop to the ground. The gnolls most impacted by the liquid’s full effects deliriously started slipping and tripping over each other as they attempted to attack Radament.
“Lightweights,” Radament laughed and mocked to them, boisterously taunting them as he leaped about, unhindered by his own hazy and debilitating concoction.
Arlo was the first of us juniors to reach the ground, the most enthusiastic to jump off his spider and punch a gnoll square in its pouncing chest, with a force no dimmer than the very power Radament’s rocket barrel unleashed on all of his scattering adversaries. He then proceeded to pull out his sword all valiantly like, although tripping as he did it, affected by the same alcoholic mist as everyone else, quickly trying to shake away the grogginess before charging off to spark his own feud with the predators coming in from the left front.
I was nothing but astounded at how calm everyone was with our situation. How sadistic and callous in nature they must have been in order to get a thrill from what was absolute fear and pandemonium for me.
Arlo’s spider was just as blood hungry as he was, chasing a gnoll as it retreated. Arlo’s long steel claymore sword swinging at nothing but air as the gnolls ran from the very sight of him. Pursuing the chase, Arlo’s sword only gathered more momentum from each revolution it was swung, becoming a dizzying whirlpool cutting through the air as it tried to suck everything towards it.
At first Arlo looked like a berserker without any sense of control, but before you knew it, he was near levitating through this spiral motion. The weight and drag of each swing becoming so full and heavy it seemed to ignite the next cycle as Arlo battled to maintain his balance in the twisting frenzy, lifting up the tiny ankle high stream like a vacuum, a suction force trying to drag gnolls into it as they scattered away from the prince.
Water drops had been flung into the air around my prince, with the droplets above him beginning to float, ceasing to obey gravity. The droplets sat there frozen in mid-air, creating a water sphere around him that dropped like a bucket of water when he finally stopped his intense spin.
I reached the ground in the dead middle of the conflict. My adrenaline had long run out from being over exerted, simply replaced by a sick feeling in my heart and chest. Fortunately, however, I was still on Vallah and we sat both still and safe in the very epicentre of this flattened battle ring as a protective circle of fighters surrounded us, confining us into a protective zone.
Unless absolutely necessary, I was uninterested in joining the conflict, afraid I might do more harm than good.
I always feared the eclipse for one particular reason – the same reason I had never become a warrior – shadows require the dusk. During full daylight and pitch blackness there are simply no shadows for me to use, other than faint glimmers of firelight here and there. My shadows could do little more than divert attention away from me.
So I sat staggered, hearing the grunts, groans and the clang of sharp steel hitting thick carapace and claws while on top of my skittish spider-ling. I tried to look in all directions to keep track of the incoming danger, but everything was moving so fast. All I could tell was that there seemed to be hundreds of gnolls.
Ebony had no weapons left to use. When she’d landed, she’d thrown her spear and lost it to the dark fog of war. She was grabbing gnolls as they came at her, rolling and flinging them into each other while she pounced and prowled left and right.
She was a brawler like Arlo and Ariss, but it was the berserker in her that I feared most of all. Afraid of what she might do as I watched her begin to erupt and lose control of herself, with the shadow cat in her barging out and bouncing off trees, leaving the defensive confines of our circle, allowing a gnoll to squeeze through her stampeding clutches as it set its eyes directly on me.
Unlike the others, however, it was real careful and slow in its approach. Its face completely concealed behind a cloak – except for two razor sharp fangs and satanic pale white beady eyes protruding from its cape, glaring towards me. The others, too focused on their own problems to notice that one had slipped through. “SOMEONE HELP!” I shrieked towards a deaf and busy audience.
I froze in fear as the gnoll charged at me. The electric rush of nerves flushing through my body, and yet providing me with no useful countermeasures, leaving me motionless on my eight-legged mount. Hoping one of my friends would swoop in to save me, only to tumble backwards, knocked off by Vallah as she responded to this threat.
I landed in the shallow swamp, its freezing water drenching me. In need of breath after falling flat on my back, seeing that Vallah was on just four legs, using her other half to wrap the gnoll up in web.
I staggered back to my feet, winded but trying to shake out my small sword from my stiff left waist holder, watching another evil beast slip past the others and take a couple of steps towards me. Impulsively, my body jolted, only this time into a much more regrettable and foolish action. My hand tossed away the sword – my only defence – in a panic. The unbalanced hilt of my sword smacking that gnoll flat on the nose, making it shake its head angrily at me before focusing back on me. Saliva drooling through its blackened concealed mouth and into the dirt its claws were dug deeply into. I wanted to back away, but there were a dozen other gnolls behind me being blocked by Ariss, who was guarding my flank. I had no choice but to brace myself and prepare for the worst…
It leaped.
I turned in panic, afraid that looking at the lunging creature might increase the chance of it hitting me. I braced for pain and felt something like wind or breath breathe across the back of my ne
ck. I looked back and saw a dark-shaded panther pinning the gnoll down, roaring into its face as this gnoll wrestled free and scampered away. It was Ebony. Her bright yellow eyes glaring towards me savagely, and then she focused her gaze back on the battle, sprinting towards that fray instead.
She reverted back into a nymph as she found and picked up her wooden spear, breaking it on one enemy only to use the blunt broken half like a wooden club on another. She stayed in her nymph form when fighting, but shifted back into that spirited animal whenever she needed extra momentum and speed, cunningly utilising the advantages of both her forms.
Fortunately for everyone, she maintained a sense of cognitive clarity and remained in control of her temper and fury, taming herself from the savage violence I’d been victimised by earlier in the day.
Suddenly, the gnolls began vanishing, no doubt digging or swimming away in a hasty evacuation. Their once limitless army was suddenly isolated to a few small pockets of soldiers still resiliently attacking us.
I finally felt safe.
Our leader returning from the dust with just one lone enemy still inside. Joining him in combat, the prince swung his sword at this last gnoll. Three small paced hits all blocked by the creature’s fierce long claws. Arlo accelerating his swing with each thrusting slice, launching off the ground with an acrobat’s athleticism, gathering more momentum in those aerial strikes, attempting to go through this creatures defences rather than around them.
This strong gnoll eventually was blasted by one final titanic blow. De-shrouding itself. The sword piercing straight through its shattered claws and leathery caped shroud as it split into two equal pieces. All of us staring in disbelief at what we saw, or perhaps I should say ‘what we didn’t see’. Nothing but mist and dark empty air as each side of the shroud floated humbly towards the wet grassy pond floor.
Arlo grabbed one half of the shroud and lifted it with sheer astonishment. “Where did it go?” he asked in a fluster.