Tall Tales: The Nymphs' Symphony (Scott T Beith's Tall Tales Saga Book 1)

by Scott Beith

  The floor was so hot it felt wet like a puddle. I got up as quick as I could, only to look up and dive away from falling beams that broke and smashed into the floor, opening up the roof to the cold air outside. I began covering my head with my hands as tiles and other small roof matter loosely started crashing against me as I tried to re-rise, but my eyes were stuck staring at the portal that had become unstable and was dwindling.

  And as crazy as it sounds, I was actually glad for the most part that Anara put the prisoner’s welfare before Arlo and mine. That we had done our duty and at least ensured one survivor was coming home to tell the tale of what was happening. One hero that could tell Akoni and work out a solution to save both worlds from the chaos about to reign down upon each of them.

  I helplessly watched as Camilla caught and dragged Arlo above the roof and into the sky, breaking free from her grip high up only to free fall without a net to catch him. I stuck out my hands, trying to build something that could stifle his fall, but horrifically nothing would form under the heat. I was powerless, and forced to watch him hit the ground and break through the floor board slats upon his collapse.

  I limped over to him, only to put my arms around him once more. We were surrounded by flames, and I feared that this was simply our end. I was coughing profusely while he was to delirious to do the same.

  Out of pure strife and determination to survive, somehow I managed to duck the swipe of a sword and roll away from the lethal clutches of the fiery queen – although after two or three more crawling rolls, I couldn’t escape her and just gave up.

  The fiery queen could block the debris with her wings like an umbrella and had no fear of fire, nor a lack of air like me, who was gasping for breath. My eyes closed as I saw the thrust of both her swords coming towards me.

  My eyes only reopening some manner of time just after to see the face of Pilly up on the stage, pulling back her bow as invisible arrows flung from its line. The young woman shooting arrow after arrow as she barrel rolled downstage towards us, piercing holes in the wings of an attacking queen.

  “Get out of here!” Pilly screamed to me, and just like that I could move again, pulling myself along cracked heated floorboards as I scampered towards my unconscious prince.

  Close to the embers of a fallen beam in flames, I tried to pull him free from the crevice he had made on his collision with the ground. But all I did was succeed in burning my hand. “WAKE UP!” I yelled, slapping his cheeks, trying to wake him, finding nothing else I could do but put the back of his hand beside the log just like mine, the instant heat forcing him to wake with a sharp scream of pain.

  “Come on!” I begged, grabbing the same hand as I tried to tug him along with me.

  The two of us unable to see anything other than our target up on stage: the portal squishing thin and yet rising high. I leaned against Arlo as he struggled to stand, trying to reach and roll up over the elevated platform that was the top theatre level stage. Together fighting to reach a near non-existent portal back home.

  We both gripped either side of Midas’s gold throne chair as we stood up against a short resisting push of gravity, only to overcome it as we dropped down and tumbled through the tiny black diminishing wormhole in joint collapse.

  38

  Cataclysm

  With eyes firmly closed, I could of slept forever, I was so lost I was unable to recall just how hard we both slammed against the hard crumbling earth. Unlike our entrance into the shadow world, the fall through the black and blue vortex portal felt instantaneous. Unlike all the bruises and cuts that took their sweet time to be brought up and made present.

  To me, however, the forest road’s loose stone gravel felt as soft and smooth as sand while I laid face down, with my arms resting against my head protectively as I dreamed that the prince and I were merely just sun-baking together underneath a heavenly orange beach sunset. The pleasure of feeling a fake fresh ocean breeze pleasantly swaying our hair while our back and legs tanned blissfully in the slowly descending twilight. All while overhearing the sounds of young children playing in the sands right along that coastline, realistic enough to hear their lifelike phantom footsteps as they ran and splashed in and out of a high-rising dusk tide.

  It was the same beautiful reoccurring daydream I had been having throughout my week-long journey each time I had to close my eyes and try to help myself fall asleep during the stressful and more sleepless times of the long week. It was the eventual outcome I had hoped and been secretly yearning for ever since my canoe ride at Lorelei Lake with my prince, even if it was a rather far-fetched fantasy that never seemed to be anything other than a short lived tease to help quench the insomnia that came with living on the edge, and fearing for my life every moment of every day that long week.

  But with such a pleasant dream always growing stronger, it took me forever that time around to be able to open my eyes and replace that gentle ocean breeze with the strong gale force hurricane that seemed to be striking the dark burnt woods we surrounded. My eyes peering out to oversee a blackened forest glowing in flaring cinders as flesh-eating gnats and bugs of all nightmarish kinds flew out from the trees in escape from the wind and fire that seemed to be fighting for supremacy.

  In my peaceful delirium, I had replaced a gale force wind with thoughts of a gentle ocean breeze, as the warmth of the sun with a spreading bushfire track that led all the way up the mountain as it cleared the path towards the castle while we were left sleeping in the ashes of its aftermath.

  If I’m honest, I could have lived in my dream forever, almost as if the smoke was trying to submit me to shut my eyes and allow the false bliss to return me to the world I’d rather choose to be living in. I was just so exhausted and it was so compelling, even the cold relentless wild winds of night followed by a pelting rain that bucketed across my back were failing to tear me back towards the true and proper reality I was drifting away from.

  Happy thoughts were like subconscious bubbling shields that were protecting me from pain while I laid dormant in the trenches of some side forest road laneway, breathing in and spitting out trickles of storm water building up into puddles around me. Possibly accounting for the thirteenth time in three short consecutive days since all the turmoil began that I had found myself down in the trenches.

  On my second glance towards true reality, I chose to move my arms and look down and see if my legs were still attached to my body, a small fear that maybe I had lost them once the portal began shrinking in size. I was thrilled to see them below me and know my limbs hadn’t been chopped off and left separate to my body, somewhere out in the empty void between two co-existing realities.

  In addition, I saw the white frilly ends of my tattered and drenched summer dress, but no raincoat to protect me from the monsoon of pelting hail and rain that was starting to come down from the dark thunderous skies as a result of the bushfires. An ironic sight, seeing as our land suddenly did not feel a great deal different from the forsaken wilderness of the dark and deprived hell-world we had managed to escape from.

  With what little energy I could muster, I eventually pulled myself from those growing roadside puddles, shivering against the blasting cold wind between two trees reducing in fire, allowing the cold and fresh green forest air to refill my smoke-inhaled lungs.

  As far as I could tell, we were somewhere near the beginning on the King’s Trail, close to the castle but quite low to the forest hills, and hence unable to see much but one of its high cliff side walls.

  Once I was upright, the gale winds were pulling at my clothes, trying to unearth me like a kite into the sky.

  I had no choice but to lower myself back down, grab hold of my prince who laid on the floor still like a log.

  “Wake up, Arlo,” I said to him, tugging at my prince’s left arm as he seemed to be lost in his own dreams.

  He opened his eyes, his first glance was straight to me and the sky above, his head wobbling as he tried to fix a stare and surmise where he was. He then began to coug
h profusely upon his abrupt wake as he rose upright enough to drop back and sit level to me, clinging to each other against the winds, while leaning on each other together for support.

  “Did we fail?” he mumbled, finally able to inhale his breath and speak coherently enough to ask, his hand holding my wrist as he rotated it after spotting a rather large and nasty laceration running down the top of my arm while I started to dress a rather serious leg wound upon his own partially blistered burnt left leg.

  “Can you walk?” I asked, ignoring his question, unsure of how well my torn coat would do as a bandage.

  “I think so,” he responded.

  “Then no we haven’t,” I stated, getting up first in order to help pull him back to his feet in test. Both of us ever so slowly being able to distinguish the trees and mountainside shrubbery from select areas of the King’s Trail road that we had been marooned upon. The loss of sparkling leaves in the trees helping to improve the sight of our castle and home, just one large hillside ahead. Much of it vaguely cloaked under the veil of night, with before it, only the sight of spotted fires and sounds of blasting horns to shed an ample sense of direction for us to chase. Ahead was a burning forest and battlefield siege already filled with shouting violence and blazing destruction as we stared towards a hillside under heavy attack.

  There were creatures climbing the cliffs as ballistae and firework road flares were launched down from the Capital to the mainland greatly below. So it would seem the vast majority of hillside and bushland had been burnt and obliterated by our own kind while looking for a hasty need to intensify the light. It didn’t take long for the forest to fall to ruins, as the battle seemed more like a war we were having with the gods themselves. There were bolts of lightning being sent down from the thundering clouds, igniting trees until the torrential midnight downpour was able to subdue them.

  Thoughts of divine intervention were going to do little to slow the march of Midas’s evil militia as they ran on all four legs like beasts, bolting up the mountainside and diving over the mainland gap, clawing a grip onto the cliffs that led upwards towards the castle’s high walls. Many of them charging onto the bark bridge while guards protected the villages during their exodus through the low mainland gates and into the spider caverns.

  It would be impossible to describe all that we saw in each single moment of time, the crafts involving Midas always tended to be that way. Among other things, huge gold monstrosities were being unleashed at his command – desert scorpions and jungle dragons were taken out from their cages as men under hoods with similar scales laced in gold began to ride them. Mercenaries and pirates riding gold beetles all swarmed through the primitive defences along the bark bridge.

  Midas had far less men and women in his ranks, but those soldiers were hardly men and women. They were stronger and more savage than we had ever seen before. Some gnolls could rip up burnt trees right from their roots and throw them at the cliff’s walls like a rock to a window.

  The earth was shattering and quaking to the rumbles of their punches and slashes towards the iron gates of the bark bridge and cave side entrance.

  It had to have only been a couple of minutes between us following the gnolls through the gateway, but I guess that was all that was needed for two worlds to cataclysmically collide and for things to get out of control.

  Before Arlo and I had a chance to look toward each other and move, both of us could hear the sound of the gnolls breaking open the spiky iron gates of the bark bridge, followed by the sight of it being thrown down silently into the gorge and river greatly below.

  Followed by triumphant howls and war cries of the gnolls, like a flood, the vast majority of the army entered into the under-city tunnels of the spiders’ lair.

  “We’re too late!” said the prince in defeat, both of us too exhausted to run, and too far away to achieve anything in the time it would take to get to the castle. We were mere observers to our beloved homeland being invaded and destroyed.

  Akoni’s mounted firework cannons, arcane candles and road-flares were being deployed by all of the town’s guard, as to the mountainside assault, the beasts flying over the castle in attack were being semi-successfully suppressed, with only direct hits against those vicious nocturnal animals and gnoll wall climbers being bright and powerful enough to penetrate the leather shrouds and send the creatures back towards their own hell-world.

  Like a giant night light in the sky, Helios was manning the old northern lighthouse like a turret, his skin drying and aging as he gave everything he had to stop those invaders from getting to his citizens’ inside the walls.

  All while the Sunspire remained inactive. The crystal in our tallest southern tower had become the single most important asset of the night – the sole cause of all the death and destruction as both worlds appeared willing to die to possess it.

  I was yet to respond to my prince. I felt I had to keep my eyes glued on what was unfolding, powerless to intervene while entire squadrons of gnolls were vaporised and vanished under one successful barrel of fireworks hit and exploded upon the bark bridge from above. Dozens of the crazy king’s men instantly vaporised as many fell down into the waters along with the bridges crumbling collapse.

  Our kingdom had no types of flying creatures to rival those in the sky. Nothing effective at preventing natural locust swarms from our own wilderness from wreaking havoc as they swooped towards the castle, light blinding them but unable to send them away as many of these opportunistic scavengers saw their opportunity to feast on nymphs and gnolls alike.

  It was absolute carnage, from fairy-like jungle dragons to small hornets with wings as black as night. There were scaly beasts that maintained their stealth right up until the point they passed over the walls and snatched up soldiers from the guard towers. I could see some serpents slithering inside the castle after tackling the wall climb silently, deflecting arrows that merely hit and rippled off both their skin and the thick sandstone walls of which they climbed over.

  Finally I looked back to Arlo in joint horror, staring back at him with a similar disdain over what little we could do. Arlo was rash to count out the gnoll king as a contender who could breach our high walls. And all of this was happening simply because Akoni had refused to banish his princess into a world of permanent night.

  “Kya, speak to me! What can I do?” Arlo asked desperately, staring towards me and then the battle far in front of us, an intense look of grief and shock on his face. His eyes rheumy with held back tears that reflected the very image of the Capital and its surrounding forest burning under siege – the sight of an apocalypse mere moments from its overall completion.

  “I don’t know,” I answered back, just as stumped for ideas as I, too, looked to the hills for something to do.

  I estimated the distance in height and length over towards the castle’s high-rise peak from where we were. I knew I could create wings out of the shadows, but I also knew I simply didn’t have the physical strength to vertically launch off from the ground. In fact, there was only one viable solution to how one of us could get to the spire in time.

  The hardest part of my plan was going to be simply convincing my prince to agree to a plan so insane and suicidal, that it meant my life that was on the line. “How high do you think we are from the Capital?” I hinted.

  He gazed at it. “Too high.”

  “Nah, it’s not that high.” I smirked opportunistically.

  “Don’t toy with me right now,” he stated in breathless frustration. “This is serious, I can’t jump that. We’re just going to have to run it, ok?” he stated hopelessly, beginning to limp as he grabbed my hand and began to try and jog. Stopped abruptly by my own resilience to move.

  “Maybe you could run it, but I won’t be able to keep up,” I replied.

  “Then sit this out,” he said, letting go and taking a deep breath for a long lengthy jolt, despite the deep painful gash up near the top of his gimping worn out and wounded leg.

  “Or you could th
row me,” I stated wildly, knowing full well how crazy this idea was, and how hypocritical I was for suggesting it when I was always the one who contested such idiotic ideas. “I just need a boost is all,” I added.

  “Do you have a death wish?” he spat back. “That’s the dumbest thing I think you’ve ever said.”

  “I learnt from the best,” I sullied back. “Arlo, I can do it,” I quipped in response, my tone and facial expression as serious as I could muster, given the situation. “You can maybe run that distance and leap up that wall in time, but if you give me a boost, I can get up there so much faster than you can,” I announced.

  “If my father spots you… Do you think he’s going to hesitate in burning your wings off and leaving you to fall right out of the sky? There will be no one there to catch you from that fall,” he warned.

  “He won’t see me coming,” I said. “Trust me.”

  The two of us locked stares from the ashes of the dying hinterland. The gravel road vibrating with the rumbling thuds of castle wall fragments crumbling down against ground.

  “You’ll be hunted by both armies,” he reasoned.

  “By the time anyone sees me, I’ll already be over that wall,” I reasoned back, scared stupid but adamant that it was my time to shine. My time to redeem myself and my family name. To be the hero I knew deep down I could be when given the chance.

  And although I could tell he didn’t want to agree, after a fluster of head turns and silent disputes he seemed to be having with himself, finally he nodded his head in a hasty approval of my suggestion.

  He walked up to be directly beside me, linking my arm with his own as he guided a hand across my waist, much like we were preparing to dance. He had a very nervous and worried expression evident on his face, indicating one deep fear he had about my plan that I had cluelessly overlooked: how on earth he was to live with himself if his aim wasn’t proper and his actions led to my death.