Forgotten Ruin: An Epic Military Fantasy Thriller

by Jason Anspach

  But Sergeant Thor wasn’t there. He was hacking and coughing as he dodged to the side, and the wight’s crusty sword came down on the floor of the ancient crypt, striking old stone and causing sparks to fly.

  Thor exploited the missed attack by hacking at one of the thing’s arms, just jackhammering the tomahawk into the undead thing. Three quick chops and he was through the leathery mummified flesh and into the brittle bone beneath. One more and he was through that too, and the long-dead limb flopped to the floor of the burial tomb.

  Off-balance, the wight tried to raise the heavy chunk of steel that was its sword off the floor and went stumbling away, gasping curses and promises I could barely translate from what to my ears was a hybridized Arabic as the blur of sudden gunfire echoed all around me.

  “Thief!”

  “Interloper!”

  “You will find only death here!”

  I was getting off the floor and Kurtz was in front of me, hacking at the wight as it went down, its remaining bony limbs impossibly flailing. Sergeant Thor wasn’t seeing that more of the things were coming from out of the paintings of antique scenes along the wall. Secret doors were opening up all around us.

  I had my rifle up and shouted “Engaging!” to clear one coming in at Sergeant Thor’s blind side.

  Best shooting I ever did.

  Hunters’ Fellowship?

  Chief Rapp School of Good Marksmanship and Trick SF shooting?

  Don’t know. But I drilled that thing quick, aiming and sending fire right through the skull. I watched as one of my five-five-six rounds exploded out through the old war helm and brittle dry bone at the back of the wight’s skull.

  To my right I heard the deafening roar of Sergeant Kurtz slam-firing his Rampage, clearing off the newcomers, shredding ancient bone and armor with the concussive buckshot spray of the mini twelve-gauge. Later, after the battle, the wights on that side were plain ruined. He’d burned an entire mag putting down three and then gone to work with the Rampage when things started to get out of hand.

  I don’t know. Maybe… fifteen seconds. Probably thirty from when we fired the door with the breaching charge.

  Ten ruined corpses around us. Ten at least.

  The fight was over and the ruined messes of wights’ corpses lay scattered across the ornate antechamber.

  The funnel.

  And then the other side of it…

  The Hunters’ Fellowship revealed everything within the room, even in the low light.

  From inside the beautiful golden sarcophagi came the gleam of twinkling gems. Some of the weapons on the floor shimmered with an almost blue moonlight.

  I heard Autumn’s voice telling us in our heads, “There are mighty weapons of renown here.” And we could tell from the Fellowship that she was indicating the softly glowing weapons on the floor.

  But it was the scenes painted along the wall in dried paints mixed long ago that fascinated me. Like hieroglyphs and cave paintings. Telling me a story about the Ruin.

  Telling us a story of what had happened to an SF detachment that had shown up way too early.

  And became warlords in the long ago of the Ruin.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  I would think often about what I saw on those walls within the subterranean chamber. The ochre and cerulean paint daubed there, depicting events from over eight thousand years ago when the Ilner walked the Ruin.

  When an SF ODA— Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team—had arrived much too early to the party, and much too late at the same time. And what had become of them.

  The rest of the team was busy securing the objective and getting us ready for the next breach. Kennedy and Soprano and one of the snipers got interested in what was in the bottoms of the fantastic golden sarcophagi. There was wealth untold just within this first room. Gems and tribal jewelry worked in silver and gold. The off-base pawn shops we weren’t supposed to hawk our gear at would’ve paid top dollar for this stuff. Any Ranger would have been Charlie Potatoes that weekend. There were sacks full of coins stamped with the image of that same tribal-looking SF skull and crossed arrows.

  The Lost Boys entered the room—Kurtz didn’t want them involved in any fighting, so they were our perpetual tail. They stood, mouths agape, as they took in the treasure. But they made no move to touch any of it. That to me felt like a warning, but it was soon too late to voice the concern.

  One of the snipers picked up a gem and died thirty seconds later, just falling over and going into sudden shock, his body convulsing for no discernible reason. Kurtz had no idea what was wrong with him but frantically worked to save the guy by hitting him with an anti-chemical agent injector to see if that would do anything. It didn’t, and after a moment the man’s body ceased its shaking and twitching.

  It was Autumn who diagnosed the fatality.

  “Poison,” she whispered. “He has… been poisoned.”

  She was kneeling down, searching the treasure the sniper had been pulling out from the bottom of that sarcophagus. Using her small curved dagger, she separated one gem from the rest. It was the most vibrantly beautiful emerald I’d ever seen.

  “This one has… a curse… on it,” she informed me.

  I looked over at the dead sniper on the floor. He had turned purple. Dead from an inability to consume oxygen. But not just through the lungs. All at once. Almost everywhere. As though his entire cellular structure had suddenly decided oxygen was poison. Every cell had been strangled. Individually.

  “Maybe from the plague,” said Tanner. “Saw stuff like that on YouTube before they shut it down. Could be something left over from the nano-plague.”

  “Leave all of it alone and let’s get ready to move,” said Kurtz angrily. “Sergeant Thor… your section good with leaving him until we’re mission complete? Then we come back down here later to retrieve. I’ll do it myself.”

  Thor, standing wide-legged near the body like some weightlifter priest getting ready to pronounce the Mass of Rifle Blessing and Mass Gains, slung rifle hanging straight down across his massive chest and rig, large hands clasped over the deadly weapon, nodded that that would do for now.

  The dead would be addressed. But they would be addressed later. After the killing and payback had been done.

  I took in as much of the crypt wall frescoes as I could before it was time to move. Because what I was looking at was like looking at some future history of us. Of what the detachment could become.

  If we made all the wrong choices.

  Tanner agreed.

  “We’re lookin’ at us, Talk,” he murmured in the busy silence of objective-securing. Tanner. The guy who’d only come along for the ride because he thought it was a pretty solid way to ditch both ex-strippers and beat the inevitable Article 15 coming from that DUI last month and ten thousand years ago. Now he was waxing all philosophic at the dark art we were unraveling along the walls of a tomb.

  It was clear that the dead in this chamber, the now dead again, the almost skeletal warriors PFC Kennedy had called wights, were servants of the Ilner. The pictures told their story.

  Kings who’d ruled a seacoast to the frozen north.

  Log houses like the hulls of ships against pack ice and jagged mountains.

  Trade in grains with the south. Trade with dark-faced men wearing lion skins who carried shining spears. As though the men were actually lions who walked like men.

  That could be a problem, I thought. If we’re all out of bullets.

  Then the Ilner came and made slaves of the Ice Kings. There was war and fire written on the walls. Battles that must’ve been huge, on the order of the old Civil War. The lower half of the wall was littered in stick-figure corpses done to death by the Ilner and their strange grim-faced warriors. And the host of warriors that answered their banner and call.

  Study close enough and you began to see there were
twelve recurring figures in all these scenes of conquest and violence. Twelve Ilner.

  A Special Forces Alpha Detachment is made up of twelve guys. Tanner hipped me to that as we studied the drawings that were somewhere between Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Bronze Age cave paintings. Meanwhile, Kurtz kept up the hustle to get ready to crack the next door and keep moving. It was a simple door made of rotting wood that led deeper into the tomb. Whether we liked it or not, that was the only way to go.

  Brumm was already on that door. Guarding it until we decided to give it a go.

  There was a map on one section of the wall. A crude map of the world as they knew it then. The twelve recurring figures, the Ilner, had conquered far and wide throughout much of northern Europe eight thousand years ago before the Dragon Elves rose to power. Wars against some kind of ice men of the north. Wars against the orcs and trolls of the south. Orcs and trolls like savage pagans who worshipped an eight-armed god that otherwise looked like them. A battle in jagged mountains against huge slavering trolls with giant fangs.

  Much death. Much fire.

  But despite all this, they, the Ilner, carved out their own kingdom in the Bronze Age of the Early Ruin after all we had once known had gone the way of the dodo.

  We followed the drawings around the wall, seeing where the Ice Kings, as the wights had once been in life, were defeated and sacrificed in battle to an almost Egyptian lizard that walked upright like a man.

  I wondered if this was the Saur old Vandahar had told of. Saura. Foul. Evil. Contemptible.

  “Talker!” It was Kurtz hissing at me. Getting everyone organized. “If there ain’t a floor plan on that wall, then it ain’t important.”

  Starting in the northwestern corner of the room, by the time I was halfway down the second wall of the fresco, the twelve Ilner not-men had gone from being what clearly looked like US Army personnel in contemporary gear similar to what we were wearing to sacrificing their enemies to the dark lizard pharaoh. Being rewarded with strange powers and weapons. Being treated like gods to the peoples they had put in chains and made slaves of.

  There was time enough before Kurtz declared “guns up” for me to chance a glance at the third wall. Shadowy there. Or at least that’s what I thought at first. But no, the paints and pigments there were darker in tone. And what I saw along that section of the wall was death, destruction, and what looked like hell on Earth. Or the Ruin, as it was now known.

  The twelve gods presided over that wall like grim death watching a mad harvest of corpses and destruction. The story on that wall was not good.

  We’re lookin’ at us, Tanner had said. Was that prophetic? A guess? Or just the wisdom of a grunt who’d been there, seen that, and gotten the scar to learn from it?

  Wisdom can be acquired regardless of rank.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  “That was a tomb of slave kings,” said Autumn as we moved swiftly along the next passage once Kurtz’s team had cleared it of IEDs.

  “How do you know?” I asked. We were talking about the room we’d just left. Where the wights had been done to death again. Undead zero, Rangers two.

  “There were old… Dragon Elves Mist Markings in the room. You cannot read or… even see those kind of markings.”

  She pointed to her eyes. Indicating that somehow they were adapted in ways ours were not, to be able to see these “Mist Markings.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  She looked around trying to find the right words in Grau Sprache. Nothing fit, and so we slipped back into Shadow Cant, seeing as none of her people were around.

  “The language of ghosts,” she said simply. “It is everywhere… here.”

  Ahead, the team was getting ready to breach the next room at the end of the long hall. We were deep in the rock of the crag. It was silent and heavy down here under the earth. And best not to think about how much rock was on top of you.

  There were more petroglyphs down here along the hall, but even with the Hunters’ Fellowship in effect, it was way too dark to study them. I was just getting bizarre fragments that made no sense. But they tantalized me all the same. What can I say? I’m an information junkie. Add that to the coffee and the achievement thing I’ve got going and I’m actually a real mess. Thankfully, most of my addictions are positive. I quit smoking. Mostly.

  The next door ahead was a simple door. But the hall was too narrow for a four-man breach. Instead Kurtz went in behind Brumm, guns up and following the SAW.

  Almost instantly, short controlled bursts, hallmarks of Brumm’s mastery of his weapon, began to bark out aggressively. Kurtz was calling out targets as the rest of the team moved in, and then the shooting started in earnest. Coming online to support Brumm’s attack against the unseen foes.

  Writing this all down, I sometimes have a hard time remembering what I was actually there for, and what I experienced via the Hunters’ Fellowship. Like, I was right there when Kurtz and Brumm prepped to strangle an orc and knife him at the same time… except I actually wasn’t. It’s equally hard to recall perfectly what was spoken aloud, and what was communicated via the meld. We could hear each other’s thoughts, see events others saw, but it’s not easy to do much of that while focusing on your own personal tasks. That was going to take practice.

  And then there was Kurtz, who was too Ranger to use anything other than tried and trained protocols.

  Still, I do know that by the time I got there all the mummies were already dead. Apparently 5.56 works great on mummies. And it was Tanner, who had followed Sergeant Thor, who let me know how it went down in there once they breached.

  That I had become the official archivist of the Ranger detachment was clear now. Rangers had been coming up to download on me. Maybe it was just because the sergeant major had basically made me the de facto intel asset. But I think it was much more, or, now that I think about, much simpler, than that. The Rangers wanted a record kept. Their deeds put down. Or maybe it was just something had been hardwired into them living the Scroll Life and going to Ranger School. Something that had been just beaten into them so that they could fight and survive and do it again until everyone who opposed them was good and dead. They wanted a record kept, for the last and final AAR. After-action report. Rangers AAR everything they do, looking for ways to improve. This was no different, but with an added emphasis on recording the “who” part of the 5 W’s—who, what, when, where, and why.

  The Who of who they were was important.

  The KIAs since we’d first arrived were starting to accumulate. And chances were, if things didn’t radically change in our situation, there were going to be a lot more KIAs sooner rather than later. Getting it down, what happened to them, or what they wanted known if the worst should, had assumed a kind of informal importance on our hump south to hit the fortress. It had become my job, and I was cool with that.

  So by now the download of intel, story, and personal account was just standard. They came to me. Told me something interesting and assumed when I was writing it down that night that it was going in the record of us. So there’s a lot here, in this account, you’re not getting. At least not just yet. It’s all in kind of a shorthand notes section at the back of the journal my mom gave me as her kind of sarcastic indictment of my choice to be all I could be and join the military.

  There are lots of stories and they’ll go down in the record when we get someplace safe and I get more paper. Or papyrus. Maybe a clay tablet. Or a cave wall and some charcoal to draw on. Whatever.

  Stuff like the story of Sergeant Kang slitting throats down in the dark beneath Sniper Hill. Which doesn’t belong here in the middle of the tomb. But here it is.

  He was one of the last to come to me and tell me his story of what happened. He’s silent, even for a Ranger. But about three quarters of the way through the journey south, he came over one night and mumbled, “I want to tell you something.”

 
Then he said nothing for a few minutes as we sat there. I could feel him working it out. Getting the story he had to tell just right. The story of what had happened to him, and what he’d done.

  I waited. Because that’s what you do.

  And finally he began. It was a crazy story. He ran into some creatures we had no idea of during the battle. A thing that looked like a brain with tentacles. He could hear it screaming in his mind when he started jackhammering his tanto in where he thought its kidneys should be after he’d crept up on it. Yeah… it was a man with a brain for a head and tentacles coming out its mouth. It wore long wizardly robes. Kang said they were pretty fancy.

  When it died it gave Sergeant Kang a vision. That’s what he called it. A vision. A vision of a fiery plain where there was no love or kindness anymore and probably never had been. Kang said it was a burning, violent, lonely place and he could just feel it in his bones as he observed it in the sudden manifestation he’d been attacked with. He saw all this for just a moment with the thing’s blood all over his gloves.

  Again, Sergeant Kang’s words: he knew it wasn’t part of this world. And he said that there, in that vision place, across a dead sea that had become a volcanic plain where the bleaching skulls of prehistoric giants our world had never known lay baking under a red and dying sun, he said, “It was probably Hell… if there is such a place.”

  I listened. And then later, made notes. Promising I’d get it all down for him. He also told me he had a little sister who had become an actress in Hollywood. “She’s a waitress and all. Hasn’t got her big break yet but she’s gonna. She’s good. She’s pretty too. Not like me.”

  Sergeant Kang is built like the Tasmanian Devil. The Looney Tunes character, not the animal. A squat inverted triangle of muscle and gear you don’t want to meet if you’re OpFor. He will flat out ruin you regardless of his looks. Yeah, he ain’t pretty, but I saw him carry a wounded man through a battle while fighting off nightmare wraith riders on our six.