by Thomas Adams
“Until then, I will continue to learn and prepare for the coming war with the Emorie. That is my number one concern, defend the people of Vesfalruk. When the time comes I will fight and I will not stop fighting until the Emoire or the Dokköndi have ripped the life from by body. That is all I can pledge. I hope it is sufficient.” Brandt stood tall and proud but he was not prideful.
Hemming saw this. He had thirty years of experience judging character in his subordinates and superiors. He felt the boy spoke honestly. He also realized that it was a very effective argument the lad put forth. Judge him on his merit and not on his claim. That was good. That was the foundation of leadership. He had the bearing and appearance of a king that was for sure. He very well could be the ancient lost son of Brandt. Hemming wished he could speak to this Aravin though.
Brandt drew his father sword and Hemming and the jarl both looked at him. The jarl stood. Drawing steel in a conclave or meeting was a serious matter. But, Brandt carefully grasped the pointed tip of the long blade and swung the grip towards Hemming. He said, “And here is another proof, my father’s sword, SwordBreaker. It might help you decide.”
Hemming looked over the worn ancient unadorned blade slowly. It was a plain utilitarian tool, an instrument of death. It was a true warrior’s weapon. Henning grasped the sword and immediately felt it was different. It was unlike any other blade he’d ever held. It was light and yet he instantly knew its’ strength was likely immeasurable. It would not break. Its will was as heavy and forceful as an avalanche down the side of a tall mountain. He suddenly felt the urge to put the blade down. Some nagging feeling in his gut told him it was not right, it made him want to discard it, to give it back to the boy. He did so.
Hemming felt better as soon as the blade was back in the boy’s hands. He realized the sword was old and it was powerful. It surely was Brandt the Founder’s sword. Many legends said Brandt’s sword was a Nordbrandr and it was enchanted. How did this make him feel about the boy? He wasn’t sure. A magical blade was no small matter. Magic was rare. It was highly discouraged in Vesfalruk but the wealthy and powerful still sought such baubles. It certainly raised his opinion of the boy.
To walk in and make the claim for the throne with the list of attributes he currently had was something. To draw forth SwordBreaker in front of all the assembled jarls and war captains would be a very powerful statement indeed. Few could or would argue against that. Hemming looked at Gustave and saw something in his face. It appeared to be relief. Gustave was convinced. The boy had made a believer of old Gustave. That was very telling Hemming thought.
***
Brandt stood on the north wall of the High Fort gazing at the hills and mountains. The hills of the Wilds rolled northwards to the foot of the peaks beyond, they climbed ever higher, like steps, until they merged with the snowcapped peak. This was his new favorite thinking place. He spent a few minutes here each day looking towards Radnja and thinking about the future. A future he increasingly hoped included Yfiria. He tried to sort out what this future path would be. He knew that beyond those far-off mountains and north four hundred skots was Helvig, capital of Radnja and Yfiria’s home. She was probably there now with her family, by the sea. Last sennight he looked through an old book he’d found in the archives. It was about Radnja and had a map that showed Helvig. There was also an illustration of the city and a chapter that described the city and its history.
He’d read that the prince and princess and their family lived in the ancient familial coastal fortress above Helvig. The city was built into a steep incline in a gap in a sheer cliff along the coast. In the book it was said to be a beautiful city. The large harbor was protected by a seawall. Two large tower forts flanked the opening in the seawall and controlled access to the harbor. The area level with the water was taken up with wharves, warehouses and businesses catering to the seafaring mercantile enterprises.
Due to the steep incline the city was built on, flat land was at a premium. They had to make their own level spaces for roads and markets and building. So, the city was built on ledges carved from the steep slopes of rock. Frequently houses and shops were stacked almost on top of each other. The author had written that from the sea, at a distance, the city had the appearance of being a giant staircase.
Higher up were markets, inns, shops and taverns, higher yet still were small houses and multifamily homes. At the top were the mansions of the wealthy. Crowning the higher northern summit, on a wing of rock jutting out from the cleft, was the palace. A fort and wall enclosed the city from the top of the cleft and guarded access from the land side at the top. It sounded like a wonderful place to Brandt. He wished he could visit her home with her. He imagined Yfiria showing him all the sights and landmarks.
Brotjnar interrupted his daydreams with a sullen snort. ‘You are sorely besotted with that slip o lass. You wonder if you love the girl but all you do is daydream about her. In my expert opinion that is love. I agree with your Master in this, we should be practicing not staring at the hills and mooning over a pretty black haired girl. There will be time enough for that when you are king and too old and feeble to even swing a sword.’
Brandt replied “Mayhap you are right. I will have to defer to your expertise. Bye the bye, I have been meaning to ask you something. When I fight with you it seems my awareness of my surroundings and of my foes is much greater than afore.”
He wondered out loud, “I can even sense, to some degree, their next move or predict the specific cut or thrust they will use. I can sometimes see the weakness in their forms, attack or defense.”
‘Don’t let it go to your head boy. It is not all you. It is part of my skill and power that are transferred to you when you use me. But, it is a slippery thing. Beware.’
“What do you mean?”
‘Wielding me with an abject superiority, abandonment of accountability or morals and pride will only lead you to ruin and destruction. Such is the path of conceit, bravado and leads to darkness. I know because that was the path I took and look at me now.
‘An enemy should always be treated with respect. Always approach every fight with all your skill and attention. Focus on that and not how you are enabled by wielding an enchanted blade. Do not let your pride rule your head and your heart. This is the best advice I can give you young prince.’
Chapter 22
The Vision
During the winter of 1723, in the Second Age, Brandt III and his queen, Ellony, were ambushed and killed as they travelled to Kimera for the start of their summer court. They typically wintered outside of Kimera at the Rodull clan castle in Dun Craven. The ambush was instigated by a party of rebellious and traitorous Jarls led by clan Rikvarr. As Brandt III lay dying in the melting snow and mud he cursed his throne. He vowed he would be the last king to sit the throne until the line of Brandt I was restored to the throne. He said that only when the sun rose in the King’s Hall at midnight on the Celebration of Vidar would the Sword of Knowledge be freed and the curse lifted. Brandt III and Ellony were childless.
Such a curse was a powerful deterrent to subsequent pretenders trying to mount the throne. Only a handful tried and all, within a sennight, perished under mysterious circumstances. Strange wasting sicknesses, heart failures and even suicides were noted as the cause of death of these pretenders. Their demises were all attributed to Brandt III’s curse and no one had tried to claim and sit the throne of Vesfal in over fifty years.
However, to stop the bloodshed and chaos of these attempted reigns the Council of Jarls enacted an election process in which a king could be elected. No one ever tried to rise to the throne in this manner. So, to allow some semblance of balance and stability the Council of Jarls was forced to instigate a process in which a chancellor with limited powers could be elected. The chancellor would act in the King’s stead and oversee the administrative duties needed to run Vesfal.
Nickus, Chronicler of The King’s Court in Abstention
***
Yfiria had never seen thi
s particular castle before. As a princess she was pretty familiar with castles and fortresses. As the heir to her father she’d a fairly comprehensive education that included military tactics and strategies as well as briefings on the main fortifications and installations in Ellorhim. But this one eluded her knowledge.
In her seerings, it was not unusual to see places and things she’d never actually been too, seen in her studies or in pictures. In the depths of the seering, as she gazed at the old dilapidated castle, it was dark and the sky was partially overcast. The moon shone through the clouds in sporadic fits. The fortification was very old and in a sad state of repair. Much of the masonry was crumbling. Vines and moss covered some of the walls and towers. This fortress was high in a mountain pass somewhere. From a vantage point above, in the vision, she could see the castle in the pass below and the surrounding snow tipped peaks.
It was a large fortress and it was set in a draw at the crest of a narrow pass. The draw that the fortress was nestled in sloped sharply upwards towards the towering peak of a snow capped mountain. The outer bailey of the fortress protruded out into the pass and dominated the road. It consisted of a large gatehouse flanked by two massive towers. The walls were anchored at each end of the cleft in the sheer side of a mountain. An old uneven and fragmented road sloped down from the gatehouse in one direction. In the other direction, the road continued for a few hundred yards, but terminated in a massive pile of immense rock. Some boulders were larger than houses. Smaller boulders and rocks filled in the general jumble of stone. The pass in that direction was completely blocked.
The inner bailey was slightly higher in elevation than the outer bailey and was protected by another sturdy tall wall with one large tower and a small but stout gatehouse. Beyond the second wall a small courtyard opened up and contained the huge square keep. The hall was significant but the attached keep tower rose one hundred feet into the dark night sky. It was a massive keep designed to withstand a long bitter siege.
The whole place appeared abandoned. There were no lights in any of the windows and no torches on the towers or battlements. Nothing stirred in the pass or old fortress but the cold wind blasting around the crags. However, from seemingly far off, she could hear muted banging and deep rumblings. The sounds seemed to come from the dark gaping doorway of the massive keep.
She pushed towards the black entrance of the keep. Her vision sped up and distorted as she pressed on and then into the building, past the large rubble strewn main hall. She followed the noises down. Down deep she went, she saw a pit black, unfathomably deep with stairs twisting down. She followed them until they ended in a chamber with an opening. She went out of the chamber into roughhewn tunnels and beheld a sight she had never expected to see. There were large underground galleries and armories and store rooms. Excavations and mines went even deeper into the cold black roots of the mountain. There, deep under the heart of the mountain, workers and soldiers and leaders all moved about with purpose, driven by some dark intent. They were trolls.
Massive, seven, eight and even ten feet tall and heavily muscled. Their weight was at least twice that of a man. They were broad and their legs slightly bowed. Their large powerful hands oft reached below their knees. Their skin was gray, dun or charcoal in color and their eyes a luminous green or yellow. Their faces were wider than humans’ and their features were a bit compacted or compressed and coarser than humans but they were still very similar to humans, other than their size, coloring and obviously their strength.
They didn’t have fangs or tusks or scales although their skin did look very thick. She was surprised by their appearance. It was not ghastly or frightful. They were not ugly or hideous. They could be giants or perhaps descended from giants. She knew no one alive, with the exception of a few Druids, had ever seen a real troll. As a matter of fact, no one had seen one in hundreds of years. They were not what she was expecting, they weren’t monsters at all.
Some troll warriors were dressed in leather and metal scale and some in full plate metal armor. The carried massive swords, axes and hammers. Others wore thick leather and fur garments with straps, belts and bands for carry their tools or other heavy loads. There were no females that she could see. There were hundreds of them. She felt that there were even more below in the deeper caverns and passageways. She was not aware of any large troll populations that still remained in Ellorhim. Common thought was that they were almost extinct. Obviously this knowledge was wrong. Here was proof.
If this was the past it must be during the Great Troll wars. Those wars had almost totally destroyed the trolls and their populations were unrecovered to this day, or so it was assumed. All of the great troll cities and forts were long overrun and destroyed. She realized what she was seeing was a large powerful troll army. There were stores aplenty for siege or an offensive expedition. Their foundries were in full swing making more weapons and armor. Vast underground chambers and passageways could accommodate thousands of trolls.
She pulled back and floated upwards until she was high above the fortress again. It was still dark and cloudy and she could not get a bearing on where the fort was located. There was no way to identify the place that she could think of. She would have to figure it out some other way. She knew the vision was important though. There was some reason or design for it being revealed to her now. She woke, covered in sweat and gasping for breath. She rose and pulled her robe about her body and rushed from her chambers.
She sought out Aravin immediately and found him in the parlor reading an ancient manuscript. A fire crackled merrily in the fireplace and the warmth was inviting. The weather in the Shadow Lands was oft cold and bleak. But the summers were glorious. She approached Aravin and he looked up from his book. The look on her face must have told him something because he closed the scroll and asked, “What did you see?”
She quickly recounted the vision. He simply said, “Explain the castle in detail. Where was it? What did it look like?”
She told him what the fortress looked like, the size and shape, number of gates and towers and described the mountains around it.
He said, “That was Castle Brod, once the Vesfalruk stronghold on the old North Road that connected to Radnja and Osterider. A massive collapse blocked the pass over three hundred years ago and the fortress was abandoned, the road impassable. But now, according to your vision, Brod is invested with an army of trolls.”
“That is what I saw. The fortress is a ruin. Is it the present and not the past? Why is that important though?” asked Yfiria?
“It is the present if Brod is a ruin. Vesfalruk maintains no garrison on that road now. The road is in bad repair but still leads down, undefended, into Vesfalruk. It passes through the wilds and then south, direct to Kimera. It appears the trolls have found a way through the White Mountains and linked up underground with the works under Brod. They could come down the old North Road and Vesfalruk will be totally surprised and unprepared, a disaster of unknown magnitude.”
Yfiria paled as Aravin went on with his theory, “They can storm Kimera if they have a few thousand trolls. It would take an army of ten thousand krigers to stop that many trolls. But, this stratagem reeks of the Imperium. My guess is the trolls will invade at the precise moment the remaining Vesfalruk forces move to defend Cinder. They will fall on the rear of the defenders and that will allow the Imperium to breach Cinder and move into Vesfalruk with a massive force. It would be the end of Vesfalruk and then the free states and Radnja.”
Yfiria was speechless. How had this totally unexpected and dangerous turn of events happened? Where were the scouts and soldiers that were defending the borders? Then she understood. The Emoire was behind it. The scouts had been captured, turned or killed. Finally she said, “Aravin, we must do something. What can we do? We must warn Vesfalruk and send a force to stop them! Obviously the Emoire have made a pact with the trolls.”
“Of course, something must be done. The question is what? I have recently had a vision. That vision suggests Brandt an
d you must go to Mount Syndros. Coincidently Syndros is easily reached from Castle Brod, by a small pass behind the keep of Brod. It is a two day trek from Brod over the Ten Thousand Stairs into the valley beyond to reach the base of Mount Syndros.”
Yfiria was surprised by this news. She exclaimed, “Syndros, the House of the Gods? Whatever are Brandt and I going to do there and how will we get through all the trolls to reach it?”
“Aye, Mount Syndros is the Ellorhim-bound House of the Gods and that is where they may still descend to Ellorhim. It is there I am sure the gods want Brandt and you to go. They may be able to restore Brand’s memory and knowledge fully. That is my best guess. Nothing else makes sense and, apparently, we are running out of time. We must make plans. We have to try to warn Chancellor Rumborg and Vesfalruk. It will be difficult from Talfur or anywhere in the Shadow Lands. There is much to do.”
***
Gullvayg could sense the dark oppressive presence from a long ways off. It was coming but it was not in the city yet. She had felt this horrific evil presence before. She had encountered it in the Void several times. She knew what it was. A Kûnnabani was coming. That could only mean one thing. She was discovered and her Master, Hraezlan was displeased. There was no other reason to send such a malevolent and powerful creature here now.
After seizing the throne of the Emorie of the Imperium she had done great things. But it had not been enough. She had moved mountains to build up the invasion force and Lutvar had even breached the Void several times and several Dokköndi had crossed over. She commanded a few and they helped her control Crestia, the others had escaped her attempts to control them.
