by Dante King
Suffice to say, I kept my hand tightly gripped to my staff, ready to cast a spell if things turned south.
Eventually, we wound our way down to the very bottom of the inverted pyramid. We found ourselves standing within the encompassing glow of the enormous, towering block of building-sized crystal. The King turned to us, though he addressed me directly.
“I would be honored,” he said, in that slow, powerful voice of his, that conjured images of falling mountains and moving glaciers in my mind, “if you and your companions would accompany down to my palace. There’s much we might speak about, you and I.”
Well, I was a curious man, and it wasn’t as if we had many other options. Plus, I doubted that many humans had ever got a glimpse of the inner sanctum of the Gemstone Elementals home—not with the way that they greeted uninvited guests.
“Your Highness,” I said, “I think I can speak for all of us when I say that I’d like nothing better than checking out your digs and maybe having a sit down for a little bit.”
The King gave me a slight smile, and his teeth flashed like polished glass in his mouth.
“Very good,” he said.
He turned back to face one sheer, smooth section of crystalline wall and placed his great, sparkling hands on it. It was a gentle touch, a caress almost. He ran his hands over the wall of shimmering rock, spoke a few gravely words in a language that sounded less like a dialect and more the sounds of rock cracking and diamonds forging. He pressed his forehead to the glimmering stone. After a few seconds, the King stepped back. From the very core of the enormous crystal, a ripple expanded outward. Then, with a crack and shattering crescendo, part of the wall that he had been chatting to fell away—like an iceberg shearing of an ice-shelf—and a doorway was revealed. Through it, I could make out a wide spiral staircase leading downward.
“Follow me,” the King said, and he stepped over the threshold and started off down the stairs.
It was very cool in the crystal passage. Once we were inside and making our way down the luxuriously carved, semi-transparent stairs I heard a bizarre noise, which I could only describe as a shattering in reverse. Behind us, the doorway had sealed seamlessly shut. Down and down we went, in a long, sweeping series of spirals that seemed to take us through the pure crystal until eventually we emerged from a large fissure. There was no fancy magical door here, just a crack big enough for a couple of Gemstone Elementals to pass through abreast. Clearly, the incantation that sealed the crystal door above had proved more than enough for eons.
If we had thought that the upper part of the Elementals underground town had been impressive, the level below was truly jaw dropping. There came a point when your awe-bucket filled and then started to overflow, and your mind just couldn’t take in anymore wonder. I was fast approaching this level.
I was the first to step out through the fissure after the King. What I saw quite literally stopped me in my tracks. That had never happened to me before—I mean, I had heard of the expression before, but I had never actually been arrested mid-stride by the sight of something.
Enwyn walked into the back of me and said, “Hey, what do you think you’re do— Oh…”
We were standing at the top of a hilltop of sorts—a huge humped dome of smooth obsidian that led down to a cavern that was so vast the far wall was shrouded in dark shadow. Across the planes that stretched from where we stood atop the hillock in the center of this massive circular cavern, were farms. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.
“Welcome,” the King said, pride etching his words, “to the very heart of the Gemstone Elemental’s kingdom. I am pleased to welcome you here. You are the first humans to see this sight since the culmination of the Void Wars. May I formally introduce myself,” the giant glittering being said bowing at the waist, “I am the Prophet King.”
I held out my hand, without thinking, and said, “How’s it ha— How’s it going?” in a slightly stupefied voice, my eyes still on the patchwork of fields spreading out from us, trying to figure out exactly what it was I was looking at.
The Prophet King took my hand and shook it, and I was surprised to feel that his touch was gentle and quite smooth. It was like being given a handshake by someone wearing a glove made up of tiny pearls.
“A pleasure to meet you, son of the Twin Spirits,” he said in an overly formal tone that I found a little uncomfortable. I didn’t like to stand on ceremony if it could be helped.
“Justin,” I said. “You can call me Justin.”
“Very good, Justin.”
“We can save all the ‘son of the Twin Spirits’ for when I know exactly what the hell you’re talking about. Speaking of which, that conversation strikes me as the sort of chat in which it’s going to be advantageous for me to have a drink in my hand.”
The Prophet King chuckled; a sound like a particularly friendly avalanche just starting off down a ski slope. “Very good,” he said. “It was my intention that we should make our way to my palace. It is not far, only a little way across the farming flats there. Can you see it?”
I followed where his shining finger was pointing and saw, not too far away, a great confection of shimmering crystal and towering rock. It was quite the pad and I said as much.
“Pad?” he asked, a questioning gleam coming into his eye.
“A very, ah, excellent-looking home,” I clarified.
The Prophet King nodded. “Thank you. Once we are there, we shall take our ease, eat and drink and—”
“Make merry?” I chimed in.
“What I had in mind was some talk,” the leader of the Elementals said, “and to show you something that I think you will find interesting. After, I’m sure, there will be time for you to make merry.”
“Well, all right,” I said. “Lead the way.”
The Prophet King did so, and I followed just behind. As we started off down the hillside, Enwyn came up and flicked me on the shoulder.
“Ouch,” I said, though it didn’t really hurt.
“Make merry?” she asked, a smile playing across her face.
I grinned and shrugged. “Kurt Vonnegut’s one of my favorite authors, what can I say?”
We walked down the obsidian hill and found ourselves on a road that stretched, flat and smooth as a ruler, in the general direction of the Prophet King’s ludicrously opulent-looking residence.
Is it actually that fancy here though? I wondered. Maybe building your house out of diamond is like building in brick in the world above, or wood?
These speculations were mercifully cut short because it was not long before we started passing the fields that I had seen from the top of the hill. They were neatly laid out paddocks, as uniform as any farm that I had ever seen, but it contained vegetation and animals which I had never laid eyes on. There were fields of neatly ordered rows of some sort of blooming moss, which popped up from the ground like cucumbers. There was another field where rounded rocks had been spaced every two-feet or so, and on them a thick, dark crimson lichen was being carefully cultivated by the Gemstone Elemental farmhands.
We passed a stone-fenced paddock in which forty or so lumbering pale gray beasts grazed contentedly on vivid yellow moss. My initial comparison was that they were the subterranean version of cattle on Earth, although they looked absolutely nothing like our cows. For one, they had no visible eyes and a snout that looked like a shortened, wider version of an elephant’s trunk. They snuffled their way through the paddock, obviously using this big old schnozzle to sniff out the choicest pieces of moss, which they would then mow over with their mouths. Their legs were short and stumpy with the sort of feet that you’d expect of something that spends all day walking over sharp, crushed rocks to have.
“You eat these things?” I asked the Prophet King. They had the look of something that would go quite nicely inside a burger bun with a slice of cheese, some ketchup and mayo and, if you were feeling very naughty, a pickle or two.
He nodded and carried on, leading us past a few more paddo
cks, which held another kind of beast. These odd creatures that sat somewhere between worms and snakes—if there were worms or snakes that were about fifteen-feet long and as wide around the middle as a banana boat. They moved fluidly over the lumpy, hard ground. Every now and again they would bury their sharp noses into the ground and root around, before coming up champing on something or other.
“They are basilisks,” the Prophet King said, before I could ask the question. “The Gemstone Elementals have trained, bred, and ridden them for thousands of years. We use them to hunt the Cockatrice.”
This sounded promising, but I thought it best to wait until all parties were a bit chummier with one another before we started asking the king for favors.
When we reached the Palace of the Prophet, as the Prophet King informed us it was called, we were led through a series of decadent hallways filled with sculptures of Prophet Kings gone by. Paintings hung the walls, as well as older tapestries, which must have depicted times throughout the Gemstone Elemental’s history. There were paintings of battles, of families, of Elementals of all sorts—Gemstone, Flame, Storm, Frost, Stone, and Wind—standing side by side in natural and staged positions. There was even an enormous painting that illustrated a Gemstone Elemental charge, the riders whisked along on the back of the basilisks that we had seen outside in the fields. The basilisk-borne soldiers waved clubs and stone axes above their heads.
Ethereal light cast across the diamond walls, so that my eyes were bewildered and the whole palace complex took on a dream-like quality. The Prophet King, being made of the same sort of transparent rock as his grand abode, flitted in and out of my vision as I gazed about. It was not the sort of place that you’d want to walk through after ingesting a hallucinogen, or if you were seasick.
We paused outside a set of enormous frosted doors, and the Prophet King dismissed his retinue of six guards. You could tell that they were well-trained lads, because not one of them gave the four of us a sideward glance and said something like, “Do you really think that’s a good idea, boss?” or “Your Majesty, are you quite sure?” They turned on their impeccably polished heels and tramped off down the corridor, leaving me and the three ladies alone with the Prophet King.
The Prophet King nudged the giant doors, and they glided silently open.
“Inside is my throne room,” the King said. “It is this room which I was most interested in showing you, Justin.”
“Well, I’m on the edge of my seat, your Majesty,” I said. I was doing my best to be polite, but all this enigmatic posturing was sort of starting to wear on my nerves.
The Prophet King walked inside, and the four of us followed. We walked into the middle of a perfectly circular room, its ceiling lost in a blaze of white light high above. The Prophet King took me by the shoulder and turned me until I was facing a couple of paintings—life-sized, each canvas about seven feet high, one depicting a woman and the other a man.
“Do you recognize these two humans?” the Prophet King rumbled.
The man was wearing a dashing yet understated get-up of all sable—breeches tucked into silver-buckled boots, shirt topped with a waistcoat, and a thigh length coat over it all. The woman was dressed in similar garb, though her breeches were slightly baggier, reminding me of Sinbad the Sailor, and the deep purple of sky at dusk. They looked very impressive, very...capable, but when I tried to concentrate on their faces, I found that my eyes could not focus.
“What the…” I breathed. I’d seen the people depicted in the paintings before, but I couldn’t remember where. It felt like something was blocking my recognition of their faces, along with the memory of where I’d seen them—including whether I’d seen them in real life or in a different painting.
I tried again to discern their faces, but every time my gaze slid from the necklines of their attire up to their countenances, my eyes slid out of focus, or my gaze tweaked off, or my attention wandered, as if I had seen something more interesting out of the corner of my eye.
“I can’t—I can’t make out the faces,” I said through gritted teeth.
I looked around at Enwyn, Cecilia, and Janet. All three of my companions seemed to be having the same problem. Enwyn’s eyes were watering as she tried valiantly to make out the faces of the people in the paintings, while Janet had gone cross-eyed.
“Such is the magic of the Avalonian Kingdom,” sneered the Prophet King, shaking his head. “They would hide from you the saviors of all worlds.”
I looked at Janet again. She was no longer looking at the paintings, but at the ground. There was a deep frown creasing her forehead.
“What?” I asked.
Janet looked up at me. There was confusion in those stunning hazel eyes of hers. “It’s just that… I’ve got a feeling that I’ve seen these pictures before, you know?”
“Well, who are they then?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” Janet said, “the names are on the tip of my tongue, but the harder I try to remember what they are, the further they slip from my grasp.”
The Prophet King seemed to be having himself a good old laugh at our expense, chuckling in that deep bass way of his and shaking his head in that vaguely infuriating way that people do when they know something that you don’t.
“What?” I said. “What’s so funny? Who are these people and why can’t we see their faces?”
The Prophet King looked at me. “You know of the Void War, yes?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ve heard mention of it,” I said. “Sounds like it was one giant fuck-off brawl that ended shittily for almost everyone. That about right?”
The Prophet King nodded. “Not the most eloquently worded explanation of it that I have heard, but you have the bare bones of it, yes.”
“Great,” I said, trying to keep my temper in check. “What of it?”
“The reason that none of you are able to see the faces of these two people, and struggle to remember their names—though all of you know them—is because the Arcane Council stop you from doing so.”
“What do you mean?” Enwyn asked.
I wasn’t exactly what you call up-to-date with who exactly the fucking Arcane Council were, but I had the brains to speculate that they were probably something akin to the government in these parts. Naturally, this made me trust them about as much as a screen-door in a submarine.
“After the Void Wars, the Arcane Council banded together,” the Prophet King said. “Using some extremely questionable Creation and Chaos magics, the council strove to erase the two mages that they blamed for the Void Wars from history. They did this by blurring and wiping people’s memories, by making any artifact that depicted either of them slip through peoples’ eyes, minds, and hearts.”
“Sounds a little ethically dicey,” I muttered to the three women next to me.
“The reason that they did this, is so that no one who came after would ever be tempted to take up where these two powerful mages left off,” the Prophet King said.
I nodded, not really sure what this enormous glittering king was driving at.
The Prophet King reached out once more and turned me away from the pictures of the blurred mages, ninety degrees to my right, so that I was now staring up at a throne on a dais. It looked organic, almost, as if clear stalagmites had happened to grow up from the floor into the shape of a chair.
The Prophet King though, was not drawing my attention to the chair. Instead, he pointed to an all-black staff that hung just behind the throne. A dragon’s head was fashioned into its top. The staff was within easy reach of an Elemental, but I would have had to jump to get a hold of it. It glistened as if it was wet, so shiny was the obsidian from which it was carved. I wondered if it had been carved from the obsidian hill on top of which I had stood only an hour or so before.
“Nice staff,” I said.
The Prophet King snorted. “Yes. It is not obsidian, as I’m sure you thought, but made from black diamond—the rarest stone to be found anywhere in our worlds. It was given to me by t
he most powerful Mage of all time.”
He looked at me expectantly.
“You might want to consider putting it on eBay or something then,” I said. “Is it signed?”
The Prophet King’s nonplussed expression could have been pasted into the dictionary to define the word.
“Who gave it to you?” I asked.
“It was Zenidor himself!” the King said. He looked around at the four humans, waiting for some sort of reaction.
I was glad to say that I was not the only one who remained silent. I’d never heard of the bloke.
“I know that I have heard the name before!” Janet said. She sounded infuriated with herself.
“You know, I think I have too,” Cecilia said slowly.
I looked at Enwyn, but she said nothing. It was clear that she was doing some swift and serious thinking.
“Bah!” the King exclaimed. “There you have it. The magic of the council doing its insidious work.”
The Prophet King strode quickly up the steps of the dais and grabbed the staff from where it was hanging in mid-air. Then he came back down and held it in front of my nose.
“Zenidor,” the monarch of the Gemstone Elementals said to me, “gave me this staff. His staff. Your father’s staff, Justin.”
For a moment, it felt like the world was holding its breath.
“My father?” I repeated.
“That is correct,” the Prophet King said.
I shook my head. “I think you must have got your wires crossed somewhere, your Majesty,” I said. “It can’t be my old man’s. I’m from Earth. My parents died in a plane accident before I could even remember them.”
The Prophet King held out the staff to me. “That is not so.”
I snorted in disbelief. “Look, I’m not quite sure how to prove it to you but–”
The King thrust the staff into my chest. “Your blood will out,” he said.
Reaching up, I took the black diamond staff in my hand.
