by Greg Curtis
Flying itself required a lot of strength and endurance. When he arrived at his destination, and hopefully his crash landing hadn’t been too painful, he would need to eat a substantial meal and then sleep for at least twelve hours. Flying was a luxury he couldn’t often afford to engage in, yet still it was a joy.
As he ascended ever higher into the night sky, feeling the power of his wings as he pushed the air beneath him with every beat and watched the ground becoming ever smaller and further away, he could not ignore the sheer exhilaration and pleasure it gave him. The sense of freedom as he left not just the ground and his beloved forest behind him, but also his cares and fears. He resolved as he had done many times before, to do this more often. But he knew he wouldn’t.
The same was true when he took the form of a giant wolf; the speed with which he could run, the way the trees simply seemed to flash by, the incredible power he felt within his body - they too were likewise a pleasure, but one that he didn’t enjoy often enough.
Twenty minutes later, having reached the maximum height of his flying ability and seeing the entire Haellor Forest laid out far below him as one single patch of dark green in a sea of other greens and browns, he set his path for the setting sun far away and the western ranges where he hoped an ancient wizard lay sleeping. He still wasn’t sure he wanted to go there, especially if an ancient was at rest where he believed, but he knew he had no choice. If the undead were walking again and the bone serpent had risen then the entire world was in deep trouble. All of it, elves, humans, dwarves and dark elves too. It was the sort of duty no one could put aside, and he couldn’t afford to fail. And as dangerous as it was he had a chance, better than most. The Sky Father and the Earth Mother had made him what he was for a reason; a dark elf and a powerful wizard both, and now was the time to prove that they had not made a mistake.
It would be a long journey he knew. A full night and day flying even as a roc which could cover the leagues the way no man could walk. With his thirty plus foot wing span and his body spread slim and wide he would glide rather then fly, and ten to fifteen leagues in an hour was a not unreasonable speed for him. That was one of the reasons he’d chosen the roc as his favoured flying form. An oversized eagle or a hawk would both be faster flyers and more dangerous creatures, but they couldn’t maintain that speed for hour after hour, and none of them could reach the same height. As a roc he flew above them all, and only the fabled thunderbirds, phoenix and dragons could have matched him. Thankfully they very rarely entered the lands of the mortals, choosing instead to spend their time among the mighty peaks of the central ranges and the northern alps leaving him with a safe path to fly.
Of course it was always possible that some of them had made the western ranges their home. The ranges were after all, an impressive series of mountains in their own right, and free from the interference of mortals, which meant that no one would ever have gone to check. But that was just another danger to add to his list, and he would deal with it if and when it arose. Besides, as a roc he had outstanding vision and as a wizard he could sense such powerfully magical creatures. He should be able to spot such creatures and avoid them long before any of them decided he would make a tasty snack. Hopefully.
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The balcony was even stronger than it looked when Alan first saw it, and it had looked strong. Actually it looked to be formed as a part of the mountain itself, an outcropping magically shaped into the form of a hundred yard wide balcony large enough to hold an army, complete with stone pickets and rails shaped into an ornate fence. It was earth magic that had formed it, not particularly difficult to do other than for its scale, but the care that had gone into shaping each balustrade until they looked carved, not to mention the gargoyle faces which had been shaped into the rail spoke of a lot of time and effort. It wasn’t an illusion of craftsmanship.
He was lucky it was so strong as he once again discovered the other reason he didn’t like flying; the landing. And instead of a nice graceful settling on the cold stone such as a true bird would perform, he managed another nightmarish mishmash of drunken dance steps as each of his legs slid out from under him in turn, before smashing down face first into the stone and sliding almost to the far end of the terrace. He wasn’t hurt, a few bumps and bruises maybe, and as he got up and dusted himself off as best he could he was really just grateful there was no one there to see him. Especially not an ancient wizard. The bruises he could handle.
Time and again it surprised him that he couldn’t master the landing. He practised so hard, he studied the birds as they did so perfectly that which he constantly messed up, and he even consulted the few dryads he knew who could shape shift as to their techniques. None of it helped. It was simply that his thoughts weren’t truly those of a bird, and where they simply did without thought what was truly a simple task, he started allowing for height and wind and speed, and braced himself as a man when he no longer had knees or feet or even arms to balance with, and lost it all. It was the difference between catching a ball, and explaining to someone every single action involved in catching a ball. But knowing what was wrong didn’t help him make it right.
Still, as he looked back out over the rail and down at the leagues and leagues of the seven mountain ranges arranged all around them like students before a teacher, he quickly forget about his latest slip up. Instead he let his thoughts wander to his surroundings. He realised that whoever had crafted the balcony had spent many hours simply relaxing here and enjoying the view. It was magnificent.
Naturally they wanted their balcony to be perfect. Of course that was before the surrounding mountains had been devastated in the wizard wars. Now three of those peaks had lost their magnificent crowns and a fourth had been completely shattered. A testament to the unbelievable power of those he was seeking to awaken, and their terrible warlike nature. Not for the first time, he knew a feeling of dread.
“Is even this a trap?” He’d developed a bad habit of talking to himself over the years, a victim of isolation, whether self-imposed or forced upon him by others, but still the question was appropriate. As he stood upon the vast balcony, his taloned feet not even scratching the perfectly smooth stone and surveyed its welcoming appearance after such a long and hard flight, he remembered anew that people weren’t welcome here. There were bound to be traps ahead, especially in the cavern itself; why not on the balcony itself?
Worried, he searched it thoroughly using all his senses, including the sharpened ones of the Roc shape, and also his wizard sight, but he could find nothing. Ahead, inside the cavern and through the massive ornate pillars that framed its entrance, he could feel immense magic coiled and compressed in upon itself so densely that it was ready to explode, but not where he had landed, not on the balcony. Still it took him a goodly while to relax enough to change back into his human form.
Eventually though, he was once again standing on his own two legs and having recovered from the worst of the dizziness from the change, he dressed himself, slung his carry bag over his shoulder and cautiously approached the stone pillars framing the cavern entrance.
The stone pillars were immense. It was only as he got closer that he realized just how large they actually were, as their size had seemed diminished by the distance. Each was surely five times as tall as his cottage, and the gap between them wide enough to let at least three or four mammoths walk side by side between them. Or a dragon as he suddenly realized, and these pillars had been built at a time when the dragons had been the truest rulers of the world, not mortal man, and he knew they had a flair for the dramatic. Perhaps this wasn’t the resting place of an ancient wizard after all. Perhaps it was a dragon’s lair. That was a worrying thought.
Dragons were no enemies of mankind; in fact there were tales of them acting as friends, granting wisdom and even protection from time to time, but they were still such immense, powerful beings, and mortals of all races stood as little more than ants against them. They also had a sense of humour according to the bards’
tales, that was somewhat less than innocent, and the price of crossing a dragon, even innocently, could be his life. If this was a lair then it was best not to wake its owner.
Still, as he finally stood before the pillars and the immense entrance leading into darkness, he could feel nothing of the ancient dragons, though he had felt their presence as he’d flown here. He’d felt them watching him from the distant peaks, their immense wise and powerful golden eyes upon him much of the way, vaguely curious, but not really interested. They’d known him as a wizard rather than a roc, of that he was sure as they could not be fooled by a mere shape change, but a mere wizard wasn’t enough to tempt them from their rest, and at this altitude it was always winter, the season of sleep. They would no more wish to wake from their precious slumber for him than he would for a buzzing fly.
On some level he suspected that they’d even known his intent in coming to this place, though he couldn’t truly be certain. They’d perhaps even been bothered by it, or rather, not by him or his mission, but the reason for it. In the end they could well have to fight the undead as well as the mortal races, and they weren’t in a hurry to do that. But he’d stayed well clear of them and they’d returned the favour by dismissing him as unimportant.
Which was good as he had a job to do.
“To know and to dream.” Alan read the inscription off the nearer pillar with surprise. The writing was truly ancient, perhaps a very early form of elvish as many scholars claimed, and yet the words were known by every spellcaster who’d ever undertaken training in the magical arts.
To know and to dream were the first principles of all magic, because before a wizard could use his gifts he had to know everything about them, everything about the world and what he could control through them. And then what he couldn’t know, what he couldn’t even guess at, he had to be able to dream. Knowledge both factual and fanciful was a wizard’s truest talent. Of course then he had to use them, and there on the other pillar he could see the next part of the saying.
“To use and to dare.” Because a wizard had to be able to use his talents and his knowledge just to be true to his calling, and to be great he had to dare to use them even when he doubted he could, even when he feared the outcome. Many spellcasters found the talent in themselves, and they used it for small things, never really exploring the limits of their gifts. But a great wizard had to constantly use them, to push himself beyond what he thought was possible, to go through tiredness, to break through barriers of pain and fear, even sometimes to go beyond what was sane or imaginable.
Alan was a powerful wizard by the standards of the day, because he had the knowledge and the dreams, he had the will to use them and the courage to go beyond what others would risk. But these ancient wizards would make him look about as powerful as an ant. As testament to that, one of those wizards had built this incredible mountain retreat thousands and thousands of steps above the ground, perched in the clouds and well above the snowline, surrounded by other majestic and inhospitable mountains, and with his or her only neighbours the mighty dragons themselves. That spoke of lofty dreams and powerful daring.
It was incredible. Four, five, six or even more thousands of years ago, the ancient wizards had known the same laws, probably even written the code of the spellcasters, and it still survived to this day. And yet as he studied it with a feeling of awe, he realized there was one thing missing, the third and final part, and that - while it could also be a reason for their relative power compared to modern wizards - frightened him.
“To do right and true.” The final words were nowhere, hunt as he might to find them, and maybe that spoke volumes about why the ancient wizards could do things that no modern wizard could. They didn’t limit themselves with moral values. And if power was their only value, it didn’t bode well for their people.
Then again as he reminded himself, it hadn’t. The ancient wizards had known war in a way that was all but unknown in this new age. Wizards didn’t go to war. They healed, they protected, they served, but in all but a very few, very sad cases, they didn’t go to war. The various guilds of spellcasters, be they dryads, elven, human or dwarf all stood as one on the issue, and their members were forbidden to do harm with their gifts save in self-defence. But then the Great Council itself, formed a thousand and a half years before, had more or less stopped wars by establishing the boundaries for each province, opposed conquest as an attack on one province or state was considered an attack on all, and allowed for peaceful trade. The necromancer, though it had never been his intent, had unified the world and taken away any need for wizards to go to war.
For the ancients though, war had been their very life blood. And with their immense magics they had laid waste to the lands and to each other. They had levelled some mountains and raised others, turned paradises into deserts, destroyed forests, poisoned lakes, smashed great and terrible gashes into the ground which had since become known as canyons, and killed without end.
It wasn’t just each other they had killed either. There were tales of many species of magical creature that had once existed. But after the ancients’ wars, the Pegasus and the unicorn had become known only in legends. Likewise the griffins and the basilisk were nothing more than pictures in some truly old books. So many others it was believed were even less than that. Only the strongest of the magical creatures had survived, such as the dragons, the thunderbirds and the phoenix. Creatures with incredibly strong magic of their own, and the ability to defend themselves and to fly or flee.
Then too, the ancients were all but memories themselves. They had destroyed themselves as they had laid waste to the world around them, and all that remained were a few well hidden and eternally sleeping wizards. Those who had found the deepest, strongest, most remote and most well hidden places to sleep through the millennia. Places their fellow ancients hadn’t been able to find or destroy. But places that the mortals, with many thousands of years to explore, had located, at great risk.
Nigh on fifteen hundred years before, when the undead had started walking for the first time and the entire world had been placed in great peril, three of the ancients had been located, and a dozen of the most powerful wizards who had been sent to find them had perished in the attempt to wake them. Victims of the ancients’ paranoia and their endless traps. But their deaths had not been for nothing, as those three ancients had somehow constructed a magical ward that had returned the undead to their dirt naps, and let the necromancers join them in the afterlife.
Now it was his turn to begin the journey.
He should have rested, have eaten a meal and taken a nap after his gruelling flight and transformation, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel comfortable out there on the balcony, and for some reason, probably fear, he wasn’t tired either. Instead he settled for taking a few bites out of an apple before readying himself for the task ahead.
“Best foot forwards.” Having read the accounts of those who had survived the previous awakenings, Alan knew the traps inside the ancient’s resting place would be complex, subtle and deadly, and he knew that despite his skills, to walk in there himself would probably be to die. But unlike many other wizards, he didn’t have to. He had one talent all but unknown to other wizards; he could call forth elementals.
With a single thought he summoned the innate essences of the earth and stone from the mountain all around them, and then formed them into rock sculptures the shape of men, before calling them down the mountain to him. Naturally they came. Having no will of their own, no true life, but some limited ability to follow simple commands, they would do whatever he asked. And they would keep doing it until they were destroyed and their essence could return to the earth, to be summoned again later. All elementals were the same, fire, air, water and earth, including the more advanced variants of them, and all of them he could command directly.
A dozen of the earth elementals quickly joined him on the balcony, and he immediately had eleven of them form themselves into a wall of giant stone statues between him
self and the cavern entrance. They made a solid barrier, although he was not so foolish as to stand directly in front of the entrance even with them there. The creator only knew what might come out of it and if the tales of the ancients’ magic were true, even the mountain might not survive.
The twelfth elemental, his chosen agent, he quickly carved a message into, using his finger like a magically enhanced chisel, etching the words ‘peace’, ‘awaken’ and ‘help’ into its massive stone chest. It wasn’t much, and he could perhaps have said more, but his knowledge of their ancient tongue was limited, and he could only hope that the ancient would understand his writing if his spells of translation failed.
Last, just before he sent the elemental into what would surely have been its death had it been alive, he affixed a small crystal of the far sight into its forehead. Through it he hoped to be able to see what it saw but from the relative safety of the balcony. Normally he could see and sense through his elementals but only to a point and a distance. Inside an ancient cavern he wasn’t so sure if he would be able to. The crystal would boost those abilities. Of course there were no guarantees. There were spells that could have blocked his far sight, and others that could pass through walls of solid rock to strike at him even outside. But it was the best he could do.
