by Greg Curtis
The world had turned to hell. The stone floor underneath him was bucking and fighting like a wild stallion and the rest of the prison was screaming its rage. Meanwhile he was hurting. Something in his shoulder had broken when he'd hit the stone. And the floor was busy pummelling him some more. Shaking him up and down. Tenderising him like a steak for the frying pan. And there was dust everywhere – the stone from the prison was disintegrating all around him.
Fylarne screamed in fear and pain as he realised that the dungeon was collapsing. Falling apart around him. And it didn't even matter to him that he knew such a thing was impossible. That dungeons couldn't possibly collapse or fall down. How could they? They were already in the ground! But the only thing that mattered was that he could see cracks appearing in the concrete walls and in the roof above him. Cracks that kept growing. And soon small pieces of concrete were falling.
“Ladies, Gentlemen bless me!” The dungeon was coming down around him. Some of it was going to come down on top of him!
The fear somehow leant him a little strength. Enough to fight the pain in his shoulder and the shock of his thoughts. Enough to tell him what to do. He had to find shelter. But in his cell there was only one possible place to find it and he couldn't get out of it. The bars were in the way. So no sooner had he realised his situation then he started crawling under his cot. It wouldn't protect him from much – it was only a wooden frame with some leather stretched across it and a straw mattress on top of it – but it was all he had. It was all any of them had, and he yelled at the other prisoners to do the same. Before he remembered that they were the next thing to living statues. They would just stand there and let the prison fall on top of them. There was nothing he could do for them. But still he yelled at them to get under their cots and hoped that some of them would hear him.
Lightning and thunder crashed over head and fire filled the cracks in the ceiling as larger pieces of masonry began to tumble all around him. And all the while he could do nothing but lie there under the cot and whisper prayers to the gods and goddesses to save him. And wonder why they would ever bother with a miserable creature like him. But he still kept praying while the war raged overhead.
It was a war, he eventually realised as more and more of the concrete ceiling came down. It had to be. He didn't know who was fighting who, but he knew that there was a battle raging somewhere out there. And he was caught in the middle of it. Not that that understanding helped him at all. He was still in pain and still likely to die along with the other prisoners.
But somehow he didn't die. He lay there as pieces of concrete fell all around him while the battle raged. Some of them were massive chunks of concrete. And some of them smashed down on the cot sheltering him. But luckily the largest pieces missed him and the cot held the smaller ones or at least stopped them from crushing him. Still it couldn't stop everything and every so often he was pummelled by something hard enough to make him cry out.
Then part of the outer wall fell down and he was able to see something of what was happening outside. But only to wonder if he had lost his mind. There was a giant out there, flying through the sky, kept aloft by massive gossamer wings as he launched blasts of some green fury at someone beyond Fylarne's sight.
It was at that point that Fylarne began laughing hysterically. Because nothing in what he could see made any sense. And it made even less when a giant green ogre abruptly leapt thirty or forty feet into the air with a club in her hand, and brought it smashing down on the giant's side.
Both of them vanished from his view after that, while the blue sky filled with black smoke and orange fire. But no matter what he couldn't get that image out of his head. Nor any of the others that followed as more flying figures with giant gossamer wings fluttered overhead and battled with the others.
The sprites had finally had their dream come true, he eventually thought between bouts of insane laughter. Their wings had grown and they had become lords of the sky as they'd always dreamed. Except that it wasn't them who'd received the gift. He'd seen a giant fly. A sylph too. And even a troll. But not a single sprite. Somehow their dream had gone wrong. Somehow it had been given to others instead.
But as the cot slowly failed above him and the leather base started bearing down on his battered body, he realised it didn't matter. He was in pain and more than that, slowly being buried alive by the remains of the gaol. He could see the rubble building up beside the bed, slowly stealing away his view of the outside. That was what mattered. Not that there was anything he could do about it. He was going to die. Maybe that was as it should be.
Fylarne pushed at the rubble that settled around him as best he could, trying to clear enough of it that he could still see a little of the blue sky as the weight on top of him pressed down ever harder. And all the while the battle grew wilder and the very world cried out in agony. It was being tortured.
He was being tortured. Especially when he heard the leather base of his cot give way and knew the crushing weight landing on top of him. The mattress helped. It stopped the sharp edges of the rocks from digging into him. But it couldn't hold back the sheer weight of the rocks covering him. Neither could anything else.
Soon it was becoming harder and harder to breathe as the weight of all the rubble on top of him pressed him down into what remained of the stone floor. And the pain was unbearable as his broken shoulder was pressed flat. He would have screamed if he'd had the strength. But he didn't. All he could do was gasp for air, try to hang on and hope that this would all end.
But when the end came, it wasn't the end of the battle. It wasn't even the end of his consciousness. It was the end of the light. The last of his sight was taken away as the rubble covered up the remaining blue sky.
He was left in darkness. Buried alive. Entombed. Hurting. And without hope. Because he knew even as he struggled to draw enough air into his lungs, that he was never going to be able to find and free his loved ones. Somehow that hurt even more than everything else.
And perhaps it hurt most of all because at some point it came to him what was happening. Why everything had gone wrong with the leaders' plan. It was so obvious! Now! He could literally feel it. The stone was actually being forced in to his open wounds, telling him everything he needed to know. The gods weren't subtle. When they wanted you to know something, they made it clear!
If only he'd realised it sooner. He could have stopped them. He could have saved them! But instead he was going to die. There was simply no word for the bitter chill that gripped his heart as he realised that.
What a terrible way to die.
Chapter Forty Two
Where had these gossamer winged nightmares come from? For some reason that question kept rattling around in his brain as Chy fought to destroy them – before they destroyed him and everyone else.
They were everywhere, and they were powerful. And they were wearing the clothes of the damned prisoners. Because they were the prisoners, he guessed.
That made sense. But how could they have wings? Or magic? Most of them weren't spell casters of any sort. But as a tree branch came out of nowhere to swat him away like a fly, he forgot about those things. All he had time to think about as he shielded his face with his arms, was that things were going to hurt.
And then they did. He hit the ground arms first, but still managed to smash his nose into something before something else dug its way into his side. The protective great coat protected him a little, but not enough and the pain was excruciating. He cried out, unable to help himself.
Still the nearness of death and the terror that something was behind him about to hit him again, helped him to throw it off and get to his shaking feet. And then through blurred vision and endless curses at himself for having been crazed enough to come to town and see what was happening when he'd seen the distant chaos, he started searching for the tree that had hit him. But he couldn't find it. He could however see one of the gossamer winged nightmares – a dryad he thought – take a blast of something blindingly brig
ht and tumble out of the sky trailing smoke. He didn't see the winged dryad land.
But there were plenty more of them. Two hundred more of them he guessed. These were the prisoners. Transformed somehow. But how? Only ten had been supposed to be tested.
He didn't have time to wonder about that as a boulder came flying his way, only to hurl himself to one side as the damned thing hit the ground just beyond where he'd been. And then to scream with fury as the pain in his side burst into life again. By Alder that damned wound hurt!
Still he crawled to his feet again, and then smashed one of the winged nightmares with another blast of sound. He'd discovered that the powerful punch of noise could hurt them in a way that not much else could. It shattered their gossamer wings.
He watched as an elf of some sort began tumbling to the ground and knew a moment of satisfaction even as he tasted blood. His nose, he assumed, unless he'd damaged something else. After that he kept blasting every gossamer winged nightmare as they came close enough and did his best to put everything else out of his mind.
It was easiest that way. Not to look at the bodies lying all across the streets of Stonely and wonder how many of them belonged to his friends. Not to see the town burning once again. And most especially not to wonder if they were going to win. Just fight. That was all there was.
So that was what he did, knocking as many of the flying monsters out of the sky as he could and hoping his friends on the ground could finish them off. All while trying to avoid the walking trees that seemed to have unexpectedly made Stonely their home.
He took more blows as he fought and he was infinitely glad of the protective value of the great coat. But even so it wasn't perfect, and he wasn't in the best of health. Especially after a dwarf with broken wings dragging along the ground behind him, managed to swat him with a war hammer.
That really hurt! If the bastard had hit him directly instead of just grazing him, he knew his bones would have been crushed into a paste. Luckily a fireball took the dwarf and his war hammer away and a giant green figure hoisted him off the ground saving him the trouble of trying to stand up by himself.
“Boy, you look bad!” Nga Roth yelled at him as her pet dragon streaked around them, burning everything in sight.
“Thanks!” he croaked at her.
“Don't mention it!” And with that she was gone, leaping surely thirty feet into the air to bring her walking staff crashing down on the head of a winged titan, knocking him senseless and sending him to the ground in a tangle of gossamer.
That had been a shock, discovering that the ogres could do that. And the first time he had seen it, four hundred pounds of grossly obese ogre leaping through the sky like nothing he had ever seen, Chy had been left stunned. Now, even when that green warrior was a middle aged woman with a walking stick and a liking for tea and garish clothes, it barely registered.
He kept fighting. It was his only hope of survival.
In time the battle seemed to die down a little, but not because he and the others were winning. Simply because it was spreading out, covering all of the town. But whatever the reason it gave him a chance to think. Even to examine his injuries and worry about the damage to his side. He hadn't had time to pay it any attention until then, but now that he could, he realised it was bad. He was bleeding as something had torn a hole in him. And though he cast a little healing magic into it in the faint hope that it would help, he knew it wasn't enough. Just as he knew that there were a great many more people carrying even more terrible wounds. Those that weren't dead.
Some of them he saw, were being carried away for treatment. Now that the battle was spreading out and there was a little time, things like that were possible. But naturally they didn't have a hospital or anything like that. Just a street and a couple of casters tending to the fallen. In time, when he was close to falling down, he limped his way over to join them. He even unbuttoned his coat and opened it so they could see the injury. Then he just stood there and waited.
“You decided to attack a fence?” A wood elf asked him, a moment before he reached into the wound with hands covered in blood, pushed a little magic of some sort into it and then pulled out a piece of timber.
“Don't know,” Chy answered him. By then he was almost too tired to think. To remember which injury had come from where. But not too tired to be grateful for the healing warmth that suddenly burned inside him. Or the mug of something hot that someone unexpectedly handed him.
Where had that come from he wondered? But there was no one around to ask by the time he thought to look around. Just the wounded and the healers moving swiftly among them. So he collapsed to the ground and started sipping while the battle continued in the distance.
“It's the enchantment,” someone whispered at him as he sat there. He had to repeat himself a couple of times before Chy managed to pay attention.
“Fylarne?” He recognised the copper elf lying in the ground looking battered and broken, even though he was completely covered in dust.
“It's the enchantment, taking hold.”
“I know. It's spreading,” Chy agreed. That much he understood. “The disease is spreading,” though he couldn't understand how it could spread so fast.
“No. It's not. It's inside them.” Fylarne coughed a little and then did some choking. He looked to be in a bad way. “It always was.”
“It's a disease,” Chy shrugged. He couldn't see what was so important about it. But for some reason it seemed to matter to the former guardian. He was struggling to speak even as he continued coughing and choking.
“No. It's a piece of the actual enchantment. A bit of enchanted stone. A grain of sand inside them. That's why it won't go away!” Fylarne spat out some blood onto the street. “Get that grain out of them!”
With that the elf gave up his attempt to speak and closed his eyes as his head rolled to one side. He had said what he needed to say. The only problem was that as a healer rushed to Fylarne's side to tend to him, Chy couldn't understand what he was saying. A grain of enchanted sand inside someone? That didn't seem right.
And yet they were looking for an enchantment. They'd examined the former slaves from head to foot. They'd found nothing. They'd worked out that it had to be some sort of ancient disease that worked as an enchantment. And they'd searched some more. They'd even tried to fight the disease with another disease. That had obviously been a catastrophic failure. But whatever had happened, it hadn't revealed the enchantment let alone allowed the victims to fight it off.
Now a grain of enchanted sand? It didn't seem likely to him. It sounded like the talk of witlings. But why not?!
Chy drained his tea and then stood up and walked a little unsteadily to the nearest of the fallen gossamer winged bodies. Then he raised his hand over the corpse and summoned the stone within it. All the stone. It was a simple magic. Something he had learned to do the very first time he had sat on the golem throne.
An instant later there was a sparkling grain of sand floating in the air just beneath his hand.
He stared at it, surprised. Because he really hadn't expected to find a grain of sand within a body. On one perhaps, but he had summoned this from within the body of the slave. And as he stared at it, little wheels inside his brain began turning. Things began clicking into place.
They'd been looking for an enchantment. Something with runes and markings and an inherent logic. Then they'd been looking for an enchanted disease of some sort. But the one thing they hadn't been looking for was a piece of an enchantment. And there was a principle in magic that something that was a part of a whole was in fact connected to that whole.
So the people, the sprites' prisoners, walked into this temple that they assumed was somewhere in N'Diel and somehow a tiny grain of the enchanted temple entered their bodies, and they walked out as witless slaves. Connected always to the temple and the enchantment. Physically connected no matter where they were or how long it had been. And because they were always connected, freeing them for a few hours did nothin
g no matter how many times they did it. The original enchantment reclaimed them in time. As long as this piece of the original was inside them, it would reclaim them.
Chy destroyed the little grain of sand and walked on, heading for the next body and then repeating the cast. And once again he found the victim with a grain of sand buried somewhere within his flesh.
“Piss!” He muttered at no one. They had an answer. It was time to test it out.
He walked on towards the nearest part of the battle, slowly, and when he reached it, sent his cast into the nearest of the gossamer winged slaves. A heartbeat after that the grain of sand was in his hands and he destroyed it.
The effect was immediate as the gossamer winged sylph screamed and unexpectedly fell out of the sky. He tumbled to the ground and hit it hard, and then he just lay there.
That was enough for Chy and he quickly did the same to the other three of the sylph's companions and then watched as they too cried out and plummeted to the street. And just like that this part of the battle was ended.
