Soren Goodwynd rushed through, brandishing two swords which began to flash as sporadic branches of lightning snapped and swelled as they wrapped and crawled up the blades. He sprinted towards Scammander’s limp body, half buried in rubble and soaked in rain. The bard stopped in front of Scammander’s corpse as the rain fell onto the stones below. There was a loud blast as Goodwynd winced, turning his head away as he went tumbling back across the wet stones. Scammander popped up and dug something out of his robes. Squinting, I could see it was a tiny, thick book with the giant arrow buried in it. It was Brythferth’s thesis on scholastic density. Scammander chucked the book at Soren and disappeared into the tower next to me. Soren Goodwynd rose up a moment later and rushed in below.
I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. The terrifying hourglass blade disappeared, and I sank down to my knees, exhausted, sick, and dizzy from all the death and mayhem.
This is how they killed Brock Highkeep. They made him tired.
I turned my head and spit and groaned. But I couldn’t get up.
Your anger is a gift.
Say it. “My anger is a gift,” I murmured with my eyes closed.
“My anger is a gift,” I said opening my eyes.
“My anger is a gift,” I growled and thrust myself up.
“My anger is a weapon they can never take from my hand,” I said volcanicly, charging through the locked door.
I was going to kill a hero.
I entered the bottom of the tower, expecting to climb hundreds of stairs in the solemn, cool darkness, but it was so bright I threw my hands over my eyes and stumbled backwards out into the rainy night. I blinked a couple times and walked back in. White light poured over me and I slowly lowered my hands as my eyes adjusted to the vibrant, pulsing mist.
I stood in awe.
Thousands of women and children were pressed along the walls, all wrapped in thin luminous strands, which covered them like layers and layers of thick glowing spider webs. The women were on the right and their children on the left, so that the wild and swollen eyes of mothers looked into the shining eyes of the children. Small stone slabs jutted out of the wall, curling up all the way to the top.
It was completely silent as I put my sandal on the first stone slab.
I heard each nervous breath as I passed by the captive women, slowly ascending the old stone stairs surrounded by the throbbing white light. Quick, frightened breaths shot out of nostrils and brushed across my ears along with deep, anxious sighs as I continued to ascend the light-splashed tower. As I neared the top I could hear Scammander taunting the hero.
“How will you sing of this day Soren? For surely it is worth remembering. Even now the world trembles at the remarkable deeds done this evening. What instruments will you play when you recount how so many perished? How high will you raise your voice? How many days will it take you to sing of this hour? How many weeks will you need the theatre? Will you win tripods for your verses? What instruments will you use to mock the screams? can you make them sound pleasant, as they do to my ears?”
Scammander fell silent for a moment and narrowed his eyes. “Those are the questions you should have asked me you ill-measured theaterocratic maggot. You play the kithar and steal hearts. I wield magic and steal lives. This is not a song you fool, you are alone on a rooftop with the world’s most devastating wizard. I promise you this: no one will remember a single verse you wrote, but everyone will remember how you died.”
Scammander was exceptionally vicious when he wanted to be. Even with no magic.
I slowly climbed the last step, and stood next to Scammander. Soren looked at Scammander, then back at me, never rising out of his fighting stance.
“You two have done terrible things this night,” he said softly.
“Do you know how awful your death is going to be?” I said thinking of the storehouse of magical weapons in the sky.
“It won’t be from any weapon you wield, reckless minotaur!” Soren screamed and charged forward.
That’s when I started swinging.
Weapons flashed into my hands from bolts of lightning, crashing into Soren’s face and dissolving in great sprays of metallic mist. Soren laughed as each blow bounced off of him. Again and again I swung hard as weapons rushed through my mind then flashed into my hands. Great war hammers, long swords, short swords, and battle axes shot into both of my hands as I swung in a relentless fury. They shattered in dust and swept out into the night as huge clouds. He laughed and laughed as tears streamed off his face. I kept swinging even after no weapons came to my flying fists, which also bounced off him in vain blows.
Then I started shaking him.
His golden helmet flew off his shoulders, along with a small harp hanging from his belt. I kept shaking him and screaming. His body snapped and flapped and flailed, buckling and popping as his golden armor flew off into the night until there was only the man left. At first his face sagged as his skull slipped out. Then arm bones bulged and stretched the skin as they slid out and bounced off my body. I kept shaking until all that was left was a loose sack of skin, which I tossed over the wall.
Scammander’s voice boomed down into the tower stairwell. “In older times I would have dragged you all by the hair to slavery to serve in my wide halls. But I have no rich fields to till, no fat clusters to dance on, no vineyards to stroll in. Nor do I want any from this earth, which only deserves to end, and end miserably. My heart beats in agony: I want you all to die before your children, and yet I want you to see your filthy womb-spawn cast off these walls.”
All the women began to shriek and wail, but they could not writhe.
Scammander narrowed his eyes as he looked out into the darkness. “Beg for your lives, but I won’t listen.”
Suddenly all was solemnly silent again.
I walked back down a few stairs. The cold alabaster mist seemed to wrap even tighter around the captive females. I saw eyes bulge as it slowly spread across gaping mouths and choked them to death. Even more often I heard the snapping of necks, and bodies with long hair slumped forward, like violets heavy with raindrops, still held firm on the stone wall.
I looked up to avoid looking at the other wall, but swallowed hard. The ceiling was covered in children who were wrapped in the glowing strands of light. It dimmed a little as they were all lowered to the edges of the tower.
Scammander looked at me and picked up Soren’s lyre, and began playing it as I flung them off. Some I ushered off the ledge in the palm of my hand. Some I tossed by their temples. Some went screaming, some went quietly, and some seemed to jump on their own accord. Scammander broke each string as I flung the final infants off the wall.
And just as quickly as they had come in, quickly they had gone out.
Scammander dropped the harp and pointed down to a hooded figure, slowly walking towards the screaming Bonheuros. I could barely see its white hands and feet, and if I didn’t know any better, I would have said it was me that was walking towards the furious group of heroes.
Suddenly I heard the disquieting twang of Elskov, the bow which shatters all. The hooded figure exploded in a spray of white dust as the arrow struck it mid-stride.
“Farewell Eidos,” Scammander whispered. “I believe your brother owes me a bounty,” he said with the listlessness of a willow tree.
The rain seemed to be falling harder once again.
“Why, they must have thought it was you down there,” Scammander chuckled aristocratically. The Bonheuroes started shouting and cursing once they realized they had killed Eidos. “No sacred burial dirt for these maggots,” he scowled. “Dead, fleshless spectre’s must wail and wander and gnash their teeth.”
“I want them to gnaw on their own flesh as unskinned ghosts,” I said as the wizard brushed by me.
I stood glaring down at the gathered heroes as the rain washed over me. Scammander shot out into the street and began picking up the pieces and powder of Eidos, pausing carefully to dress himself in individual pieces of Soren’s go
lden armor. A lightning bolt cut across the sky, illuminating Scammander standing amidst the tiny bodies and scattered bones of Soren Goodwynd. Curling his fingers through the eye-socket he thrust the fractured half of Soren’s skull high into the night sky, then spiked it into the pavement, shattering the slimy skull across the road.
The heroes screamed louder and beat furiously against the air between them and Scammander, but could not breach the invisible barrier.
As he turned his back on the wailing heroes, the storm clouds and rain began to speak in desolate nocturnes: “Follow me as the rest of the world: behind me, on your hands and knees.” Scammander smirked and walked away like a strutting lightning bolt as the heroes threw themselves at the invisible barrier once more.
As we were walking out of the city I turned to my companion. “I somehow managed to use magic,” I said barely able to utter the words.
Scammander frowned. “No, the old wizard had an enchantment cast on your hands. All you had to do was imagine the weapon you needed. I was wondering when you were intending to use it.”
“We should burn it to the ground,” I said as we paused outside the human city.
“That’s far too poetic for this hole,” he growled. “In a couple hundred years it will finally be covered in filth and runny ruin.” He sniffed. “What are the lives of men? Leaves already withering.”
“No sooner flourishing than they waste away and die,” I consented.
Tiers of Joy
“How hast thou disturbed
Heav’n’s blessed peace, and into nature brought
Misery, uncreated till the crime
Of thy rebellion?”
Milton
I wasn’t sure exactly when we stopped walking on grass and started walking on glass, only that it had been a long time ago. I looked down at the black glass as my dark reflection looked back at me. When I looked up from the smooth onyx plane I suddenly saw a giant obsidian volcano emerge on the horizon. Scammander pointed to it as we continued our journey.
“One legend says that this obsidian plain and that volcano over there are the result of a cult of necromancers, heretical hierophants, and wizards trying to resurrect a dead god who fell from the sky millennia ago. Another says that when the god fell to our citied earth, the god’s decay turned the area to the cold, slick stone slowly over millennia—”
“Shouldn’t it be a crater then?”
“The story continues, saying that when it first fell there was a great crater but as his godhood swept out of his celestial skin the land chased it to the sky, freezing as it rose. But not all of the godhood escaped—stirring in the bottom is the very essence of godliness, but to mortals it is lethal.”
“And for wizards?”
“Already godly, so it doesn’t help or hurt much,” Scammander said with a familiar grin.
“So there’s a dead god below that thing?”
“And a legendary jail.”
“The one you were thrown into?” The one he had himself purposefully thrown into.
He nodded. “Most call it Villainstay. Part of the jail is carved in the skull, the infamous labyrinth known as the Gloomstone Vaults.”
I looked at Scammander’s staff and the obsidian volcano and the grassless floor of black glass we were striding across and finally realized that his caduceus was made of gloomstone. But I had no idea why we were going back here. “Why are we going back to this legendary jail, when it seems like it was impossible to escape from even once?”
“To free all the villains within,” he said. “That will slow those Bonheuroes down a little.” As though they were making good time crawling on their hands and knees.
I stopped. “Why didn’t you just create a gate out here?”
Scammander laughed. “No one wants to come to this desolate plain of dark crystal.”
“But you could have made one,” I said. “Unless you forgot the spell already.”
“I’m just trying to remember what it’s like to walk,” he sniffed.
I let the issue drop because something dangerous had just come into view.
“What’s with the giant cannon?”
“My advice would be to avoid it,” he said, then stopped.
“We’re stopping?” Now should be the time we—or I—should be shooting at them.
“Of course. They’re talking about me.”
“They can’t see us?”
“They are enveloped in conversation.”
Just a few paces away, sitting at an obsidian desk, were two guards, apparently involved in a very serious discussion about the talents of Scammander and his famous drow teacher, complete with a great deal of hand waving and elevated voices.
“…Scammander is the greatest wizard of all time. He is the first to stare far across the incandescent river of Time. Other wizards could only get glimpses. He is also the only creature alive to ever escape from this dungeon,” a grizzled dwarf was saying.
The human shrugged, unfazed. “Wynthrope’s been around longer, knows more spells, and has completed achievements far beyond Scammander’s abilities. What you keep forgetting, Murther, is that most of his have yet to be translated or even discovered, as everybody knows, he is famously esoteric, and doesn’t believe in a public knowledge. Plus Scammander attended the Academy, Wynthrope never did.”
“Hardly anything is known about the education of dark elves. I’m sure Wynthrope learned something from somebody; besides, Scammander was expelled quite early in his studies, after penning a contumacious dissertation which they locked away in a vault, and they won’t let anyone near it.”
Scammander chuckled and turned his head to me. “I never finished it, you know. They stormed in my chambers one night, lanterns and torches, wild faces and billowing robes, some even with their hoods up. They took the pen right out of my hand, mid-sentence, then snatched away the book.”
“I can’t believe all this occurred over an academic dissertation.” There was a pause.
“I was lacing it with a spell,” he grinned.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“All good books should cast a spell on their reader,” he said, slightly crestfallen.
We resumed listening, but the topic seemed to have changed.
“Do the days seem longer to you?” Murther said, looking up to the sky.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said, adjusting his spectacles and tilting his head.
“That’s because you’re reading that stupid book all the time. Haven’t you finished that gargantuan thing yet? Every time I see you, you’re reading it, no matter what time of day it is.” Murther grumbled something and spat onto the cold metallic earth. “Just flip to the back and see how it ends.”
“I can’t; he had a wizard spellbind it. No matter what page you turn to, you’re always on the page you just finished reading.”
The dwarf looked like he could care less, but since he wasn’t speaking, the other guard decided to. “This is a new kind of fantasy, a kind that turns the machinery of fantasy inside out with admirable aplomb.”
The dwarf looked even more aggravated. “What did you just say?”
“The novel is written with a sly authorial voice and offers no simple answers. It features flawed characters and inventively tweaks the stories that generations have grown up on in order to upend them.”
The important question that wasn’t asked was what kind of idiot reads a book like that.
“What about that other one, right next to it. Who wrote that?”
“Peter Gasp,” the human answered as he slid his glasses back up his nose. “He wrote thrillers that bring you as close to the climax as possible, but then end abruptly with no resolution—the scholars call it an aporia.” He leaned back in his seat. “It’s really terrifying,” he said looking up into the sky. “But we conclusionists think that there are copies of the books, perhaps only one set, where he did write the conclusions or endings. They would be priceless if anyone could ever discover them.” He leaned b
ack in his chair then let it fall back to the smooth blackened ground. “But this massive fantasy book, this is what I’m really interested in these days.”
The dwarf took his helmet off and wiped his face while the human continued speaking.
“I remember the first time I read one I couldn’t sleep for weeks because I had to finish the book. I just had to finish it! That’s why I signed up for the Watch. No one ever comes here so I can read as much as I like. What brought you here?”
“The scenery.”
I had to turn away and stifle a laugh.
The dwarf picked up the thick book and quickly thumbed through it. “This thing must be two-thousand pages!”
“This is the only place in the world where I have time to read something like that,” he said, looking sullen. “You don’t read?”
The dwarf spit, wiped his mouth, and then spit again. “No.” He shook his head and cursed under his breath. “And I can’t believe I wound up with the one human who does.” He let loose a long sigh. “I miss the campaigns.”
“They write about those in fantasy novels,” the human said as a friendly, sincere suggestion.
The dwarf glowered at him.
“Did you ever serve in a campaign?”
The dwarf resigned himself to the gallows and answered. “I used to bounce at a tavern, then I signed up for the local town watchmen. I got in too many brawls, so the constable told me to come out here for a while and cool down.”
The human tried to proselytize the dwarf with renewed vigor. “Oh give them a chance! The characters are psychologically complex, and…and characters that you love die unexpectedly. There are some really great plot twists, and the writing is sharp and self-aware.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose again. “If you give them a chance I think you would really like them.”
“I like fat chicks,” he said, pulling out a black pommeled short sword and admiring it. “Not fat books.” He twisted off the end of the dagger and poured a white line down the desk.
Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse Page 27
