Soul Forge

by Richard Stephens

  When Olmar spoke again in a harsh whisper, Thorr nearly leapt from his boots. “The tracks, they was strange. Different sized feet, some ending in claws. I didnae wish to leave the lads to their fate, but I couldnae have ye walking into a trap.”

  “Clawed tracks?”

  “Aye.”

  Thorr rubbed his bearded chin. He sensed that his giant helmsman itched to get back to the cliff. “Take Sadyra and a couple others on ahead. Wait for us at the top.”

  Olmar snapped a crisp salute. “Aye, cap’n.” He spun around, about to leave.

  Thorr stopped him. “You must be tired. Let me send someone else.”

  The helmsman stopped, shoulders tensing. He spun his massive head about. “Not on your life, cap’n.”

  Without waiting for an argument, Olmar lumbered away.

  The company joined Olmar, Sadyra, and the two other sailors that had accompanied them, on the brink of the windswept cliff. The land fell away to a dizzying depth. A canyon scarred the land as far as they could see in both directions. In the centre of the gorge flowed a milky white river.

  Thorr sensed the darkness wasn’t far off so he ordered camp to be set up, well away from the yawning abyss.

  Shortly after darkness fell, the voices began. Softly at first—mistaken by most as the wind. The gentle murmurings grew perceptibly, like a muffled whisper rising into a chorus.

  Having been told what the voices said, the catchphrase was obvious. “’Ware the Sentinel. ‘Ware the Sentinel. ‘Ware the Sentinel.” It repeated itself, over and over again, in ghostlike whispers. Not in any particular cadence, but regularly enough that the quest wasn’t able to sleep well. Search as they might, with the aid of torches and Blindsight’s innate nocturnal vision, they were unable to locate the source. It was as if the cliffs, themselves, lamented their presence.

  To a person, the men and women of the quest were geared up and ready to go as soon as the light switched on, ready to face whatever awaited them at the bottom of the gorge.

  Thorr stood at the trailhead leading into the defile. He addressed Thetis, Alhena, Rook, Silurian, and the ever-present Pollard and Avarick who were rarely more than a sword’s reach from Silurian. “Mayhap we’ve found the mystic river.” His gaze took in the peculiar coloured waterway. Beyond its far banks, the land rose straight up again.

  Thetis shook her head. “As I told you before, that’s not the river we seek.”

  All eyes turned on her.

  “That putrid river is known as the Marrow Wash. Deadly to any who touch its diseased waters. It will eat your flesh and dissolve your bones in moments, so stay clear. Take heart, though. It’s the byproduct of the river we seek. Should we live long enough, we shall find the Soul Forge at its source.”

  Take heart? After that statement? Thorr frowned and studied the white river. “It’s acidic?”

  “Very. The Marrow Wash gets its colour, and name, from the discarded corpses fed into the Forge.”

  Everyone involuntarily took a step back from the cliff’s edge.

  Thorr stared at the mysterious woman. Odd that she knew these details. He needed to have a more complete, private conversation with her.

  Thetis added, “Follow the Marrow Wash upstream and we locate the river we seek.”

  Before anyone said anything further, Silurian separated himself from the gathering and stepped onto the thin trail ledge.

  Avarick, his crossbow loaded, and Pollard, double sword in hand, followed closely upon his heels.

  Thorr ordered the company to follow Silurian’s lead.

  Soon, the entire quest was stretched out along the precarious trail, unsure of what they were descending into.

  Twisted hulks of dead trees clung to crevices along the cliff face. After circumventing an outcropping of windswept sandstone, the trail widened into a series of short steps, carved into harder rock underneath. Where the stairs were blown clear of the drifting sand, runes and primitive pictures of unknown beasts were etched into the bedrock steps. Though they hadn’t seen anything yet that bespoke of intelligent life in the Under Realm, the primitive engravings testified otherwise.

  It took until midday for the lead members to step from the last stair into the river basin of sand blown rock. The company milled about the base of the thousand-step stairway, trying not to gag on the suffocating smell of rot.

  Thorr, Silurian, and his two shadows broke away from the crowd, following the lost scouts’ footprints to the river’s edge—the slow-moving water, a thick, white sludge.

  “Smells like a dead body,” Thorr said, scrunching his face. He located a small stick and hurled it into the middle of the Marrow Wash. The stick impacted the river’s surface with a ‘thlop’ but instead of floating away, it hissed and crackled—slowly absorbed by the white ooze.

  Ithnan had been sent ahead to scout upstream. He came back to stand beside the captain and watched the river devour the stick. “Captain. You need to see this,” was all he said before charging off.

  Thorr caught up to Ithnan. He knelt on one knee, examining something on the ground. There were three sets of footprints now, two human—the third more sinister.

  “And look at these.” Ithnan pointed toward the cliffs. In the areas where sand had drifted over the bedrock, many more strange footprints led toward the river, matching those Olmar had found. “They join the trail we follow.”

  Thorr stopped to examine the new footprints. Some resembled bird tracks, while others appeared as pawprints. Perhaps the most surprising ones were those akin to human footprints. Who in their right mind would choose to live here? To confuse matters further, most pairs of prints didn’t seem to match each other.

  “Do they lead anywhere?”

  Longsight’s shout echoed from farther up the canyon, interrupting their conversation, “Captain. Over here.” The man’s distant form waved frantically.

  Swords slid free of their sheaths.

  Approaching Longsight’s position, Silurian’s eyes grew wide. “No.”

  The scouts moved aside, revealing a large body on the ground. The creature resembled a large crocodile with four back legs, its body maimed almost beyond recognition. Small pools of blood were evident around its mangled body.

  Silurian sheathed his sword and knelt beside the creature’s head. Rook came up behind him and dropped to a knee, shaking his head.

  “Seafarer. You poor thing,” Silurian whispered to the unmoving creature. He nearly jumped into the Marrow Wash when Seafarer opened a blood-filled, unseeing eye.

  Horrified at the gurgling rasp from Seafarer’s throat as the creature tried to speak, Silurian bent close, tears dripping down his cheeks, but no sound escaped Seafarer’s lips.

  “Seafarer. It’s me, Silurian. Rook and I are with you.”

  Seafarer emitted a burbling cough.

  “Seafarer. It’s Rook. Who did this to you?”

  Just when Silurian thought their reptilian friend had succumbed to his injuries, Seafarer rasped, “The Sentinel, but that is not your biggest concern...”

  Silurian glanced at Rook with alarm.

  Seafarer spat up a wad of blood. A spasm trembled the great creature’s body. He clenched his eyes tight. As the spasm eased, Seafarer struggled to speak, “I came to warn you…You are in grave danger…” Another spasm took hold of him. When he spoke again, his words were so faint, Silurian almost bumped Rook’s forehead with his own as he leaned closer. “Do not…trust…th…” And then he was gone.

  Silurian frowned. The shock of Seafarer’s death sent his thoughts spinning. “Do not trust who?”

  Rook shrugged and stepped away, obviously in shock himself.

  More disturbing to the rest of the quest were the dismembered bodies of their missing scouts, lying in their own gore, a little farther up the riverbank.

  Pollard and Avarick ran to inspect the sailor’s remains. At once, they turned, bristling their weapons toward the cliffs.

  “You won’t find whoever, or more likely, whatever is respon
sible over there.” Ithaman crouched low and examined the ground near the sailors’ remains. “See this?”

  A large set of tracks led away from the gory scene. They didn’t originate from the cliffs. They came from, and led back into, the Marrow Wash.

  Misshapen

  Under the glow of a great fire, along the banks of the oozing Marrow Wash, Silurian placed the last rock atop a makeshift cairn they had built for Seafarer and the slain sailors.

  Captain Thorr gave a brief eulogy on behalf of his men, and Alhena, after only meeting Seafarer once, spoke eloquently about the reptilian creature that no one, other than Rook and Silurian, had ever heard of before. Except perhaps for Thetis, but as was her usual wont, she remained unfazed by the current events.

  “He deserved better than this,” Silurian muttered, after everyone else walked away. He drove his sword into the sand beside the mound. With a heavy heart, he joined the others around the central fire.

  Pollard took it upon himself to stand guard over the Sacred Sword Voil, keeping a wary eye on the malodourous river slogging by.

  With the coming of darkness, so came the voices—drifting down from the heights, whispering, “’Ware the Sentinel.”

  It promised to be another long night.

  Morning dawned cool—the company’s mood, grim. No one slept well, their minds rife with fear of the creature responsible for slaying Seafarer and two seasoned fighters. Most disconcerting, however, was the fact that the creature had slipped back into the acidic waters of the Marrow Wash from whence it came.

  Silurian sat with his arms wrapped about his knees beside his implanted sword, staring vacantly at the mound of rocks before him. He couldn’t escape the anxiety seeping into him. It was happening again. Every time he set out to correct a wrong in his life, people died. Five sailors, Seafarer, Bregens. And then there was the Gritian militia who had set out under High Warlord Archimedes command. The gods only knew if they had survived their ill-fated attempt to bring him in—hopefully they made it back to Gritian before the Kraidic warband had fallen upon the city. There were even the wolves and the trolls. None of them would be dead if not for his actions.

  Alhena’s voice cut through his turmoil of emotions, “Come, my friend. We must flee this place ere we meet the same fate.”

  Silurian hadn’t spent a lot of time in Seafarer’s company over the years, but on the few occasions they had met, he sensed a binding purpose between them. During his darkest years, Seafarer had been one of the few guiding lights instrumental in pulling him away from the brink.

  A pall of vengeance darkened his thoughts. He cringed. That was how it had started before. Helleden’s machinations were drawing him in. Again. But why? Nothing made sense. Reflecting back, it never had. What was it that drove Helleden’s hatred for Zephyr?

  Rage simmered behind his icy stare. He wanted Alhena to leave him alone—hadn’t the wise, old man figured out that being around him was dangerous?

  Ignoring Alhena’s hand, he jumped to his feet and yanked his sword from the earth. Absently wiping the blade on his tattered breeches, he stormed away from the burial cairn. Thinking of Seafarer, he promised himself to live long enough to return to Zephyr one last time. No matter what the consequences were, he vowed to finish this business with Helleden once and for all.

  The company made their way upriver for the remainder of the day, the scenery changing little. The rank waters of the Marrow Wash oozed by on their right, while the sandy cliffs, dotted with ugly tree skeletons, paralleled their left flank. The heights rose ever higher as the dreary afternoon wore on.

  Before darkness fell, Alhena assisted the company to make camp and set into his evening meal, his mind on the tentative plan Captain Thorr had shared with him about catching whoever was responsible for the voices. He looked around the several small cooking fires. He could tell the rest of the quest were anxiously waiting to spring the trap.

  Surprisingly, the voices didn’t wait for darkness. As the quest ate, keeping its concentration on the Marrow Wash, the voices started up. Alhena had to hand it to Thorr’s men and women. On cue, they jumped to their feet and scrambled to present their weapons.

  The voices went quiet.

  With a nod from the captain, Longsight and Blindsight sprinted toward the base of the cliffs and ducked out of sight. The captain quietly ordered the company to put away their weapons and return to their meals.

  The voices came again but this time they were accompanied by a high-pitched squeal that echoed down the canyon.

  Two flailing objects caught Alhena’s attention as they plummeted from a hidden crevice, a dozen feet above the canyon floor, and fell behind the large boulder Longsight hid behind.

  Blindsight appeared above Longsight, clinging to the cliff face. He proceeded to scale back down and disappeared behind the boulder.

  Before anyone had a chance to provide them assistance, the brothers strode toward the camp, each holding aloft a creature half their size, wiggling and squirming, emitting high-pitched screams.

  Stopping within a circle formed by the company, Longsight said to his captive, “Settle yourself, little one. We mean you no harm.”

  The human looking creature hissed, and chomped on the lanky sailor’s forearm, causing Longsight to throw it to the ground.

  The creature hunkered down, its eyes wild, searching for an escape route.

  The company tightened the circle, their swords drawn and arrows notched.

  Blindsight set his wriggling captive down.

  It joined its companion in the centre of the ring, preparing to bolt. Patchy grey fur covered its exposed body parts—neither creature over three feet tall. Despite the fur, their faces were human in appearance—the taller one more so than the other. Stranger still, were their appendages. The taller creature sported human feet, but its arms ended in shaggy paws. The smaller creature boasted three entirely different appendages—a human left foot and left hand, a right paw to stand on and a right arm that ended in talons.

  Alhena moved toward the frightened creatures but stepped back when the shorter one hissed and feigned an attack. He held his hands in the air. “Fear not, little ones. Can you understand me?”

  The captives didn’t respond but they noticeably calmed down.

  “We are strangers to your land. We search for a place known to us as Soul Forge—”

  The creatures dropped to the ground, cowering.

  “Yes, you know of it. Soul Forge,” Alhena persisted.

  The creatures squealed, searching desperately for an escape route.

  “You understand me. I can see it in your eyes. We seek the power of the river.”

  The creatures’ eyes grew wide, focusing upon his staff.

  “Mustn’t go there,” the taller creature squeaked. “Only death there. No good, Soul Forge. Must not go.”

  Alhena tried to smile. “We appreciate the warning, little friend. Is that where the Sentinel is?”

  The creatures slumped low, fidgeting, searching for a way to break through the wall of men and women.

  Thorr stepped forward. The creatures backed away from him. Realizing they neared the edge of the circle, they skittered back into the centre, keeping the captain directly in front of them.

  “Weapons down,” the captain ordered.

  Thorr crouched. “Yes, that’s right. The Soul Forge. You know where it is, don’t you?”

  The creatures shuddered.

  “We travel with one who needs to harness the river’s power. We’ve been told Soul Forge is the place to do that.”

  The misshapen creatures shook their heads. The taller one said, “You must not. The Stygian Lord will get you. Take you and bend you, yes. Make you like us, or worse.” The rambling creature’s voice rose to a hysterical shriek, “’Ware the Sentinel.”

  On impulse, Alhena looked at the Marrow Wash.

  Thorr persisted, “Who exactly are you, little people? I don’t understand what you mean. Who will make us like you?”

  Th
e misfits studied each other. When the taller one nodded, they responded together, lyrically, their voices squeaky but extraordinarily pretty.

  “Boring into solid stone,

  within these cliffs, we make our home.

  Cast from ships that lost their helm,

  taken as bricks, into this realm.

  To the dungeons were we sent,

  our minds were twisted, our bodies bent.

  Some were trained, and gilded in gleam,

  the likes of us, cast into the stream.

  Considered useless, a waste of time,

  deemed as no good, no body, no mind.

  Discard us did they, left us for dead.

  escape did we, an’ ‘ere have we fled.

  Now we dwell, our ancestry unknown,

  comprising a new race, we call this home.

  Offering refuge to those cast into hell,

  warning brave travellers, ‘Ware the Sentinel.’”

  There was that warning again. Pity welled up in Alhena’s heart. The song’s implications were clear. These were refugees who, like them, had travelled to the Under Realm. Seafarer’s words at the Mountain Pools came back to him—many have made the transition to the Under Realm, but there is a minor detail I should bring to your attention. You may have heard this old saying, ‘Into hell, but never through’ As far as I know, no one has ever come back. He nodded. It was because they were still here.

  Thorr’s voice broke the eerie silence that had settled over the canyon floor, “What exactly is this Sentinel…thing?”

  The taller creature shuddered. “Big. Yes, huge. And bad. Oh yes, mean. Very mean.”

  “But what does it do, this big creature?”

  “What does it do?” the creature sounded incredulous. “It guards the Wash.”

  Alhena interjected, “Can it be defeated?”

  The two captives studied each other again, the smaller creature having to look up at his companion.