I felt like I had just been stung by a wasp. Quickly I tore a piece of my shirt and wrapped it around my wound like a bandana pulling it tight. It could have been worst I thought standing up and feeling a slight bit of nausea. I should have had more to drink this morning, my body was feeling dehydrated and I knew if I pushed myself more I would be on the verge of blacking out. Any kind of rest would be nice.
The inside of the gem began to freeze over more. All around me like faint whispers I heard several voices as if they were crying out in pain. A small group of creatures only a few inches tall and wide were crawling out from another passageway. My sword itself looked like it had been wedged inside the side of the gem though it showed no sign of breaking.
I got myself up and slung my rifle by my hip again ignoring the small creatures that were crawling towards me. I placed my hands on the sword expecting to die. Expecting the daemon to attack again. I knew I had at least one respawn maybe two left.
If it wanted to strike now would have been the perfect time. When I pulled the sword up from the shrine I expected it to be heavier but it was light as a feather. I flung it through the air and brought it down on the small creature slicing it in half. The others scattered.
In front of me that I saw the silhouette of a vibrant blue hooded figure. I felt like I was looking at a ghost. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The figure was holding a sword just like the one I had picked up. It moved towards me coming at me like a samurai. Quickly I blocked and countered slicking the figure in half and watching as it dissolved into broken pieces of ice.
Another figure soon appeared behind me and to my side. Two of them now came at me with the same force as the one before. I felt like my body ache as I bent around swinging the sword with my arm and twisting my wrist. I removed the head of the second figure and then fell forward placing the sword into the belly of the third as he stood over me with both hands on his weapon raised high into the air. Both figures dissolved.
I couldn't figure out what was happening? Ghosts? Monsters? Holograms? Was this the work of another mage? Then I saw three more figures. They were coming out of the walls. The daemon stood in the darkness behind them. Staring me down. It looked like it was smiling. It was watching me, testing me, tiring me out. I had the sword, my rifle, my mana was recharging. Of course my powers were useless here. It seemed this creature was resistant to ice. It was time to run.
I looked for the tunnel in which I had come but couldn't discern which of the holes in the gem I had crawled out of. Anyone should work I thought running towards the closest one. The shadows chased me. The closer I came to them the more I realized they all looked exactly the same. Hooded cloaked figures with human bodies but no face. They were featureless. Puppets being controlled by the daemon or perhaps by the troll king himself. When I looked around I saw an army. Hundreds of snow dolls had appeared.
I ran towards another open chamber. Maybe I could duck out of sight and hide. It seemed like the only choice. If I didn't lose them I would be dead for sure. I threw the hood of my jacket over my face and began to crawl into the darkest hole I could find drifting into the underbelly of the gem. Deeper inside. One or two of the daemon’s puppets had followed me but they sensed nothing and the farther inside I crawled the less interested they became. I watched as they turned around and went back and joined the other puppets that had stopped coming after me. I breathed a small sigh of relief as I tried to regather my thoughts and figure out a new plan to escape.
My eyes slowly began to adjust to the dark.
The daemon came out after me again. It wasn’t hiding behind the puppets anymore. Perhaps it thought I was easy prey now. I still had one more trick up my sleeve. As it moved over me I let go of my sword and let my rifle hang down low. I lifted my limb. My amputated arm became my ice glaive and I drove it into the beast draining my stamina, My health dropped down to 30 than another ten points to 20. If I was going to win I had to break free from my limits.
The daemon fell dead and dissolved into the air.
Chapter 26
Jace, Ethan, Kale, Ariane, Bendi, and Molto found themselves staring down the king of the Trolls. He wasn’t quite what they had expected. Jace had thought for sure that the Troll king would be some kind of deformed ogre looking creature or at the very least a giant troll. Ariane had expected some king of grotesque beast, perhaps even a daemon of some kind. Bendi was the least surprised. In fact Bendi looked at the Troll king as if he had once known him.
The Troll king was human. Male. Dark hair. Pale skin. Kind of handsome in his own way but nothing special. He was well built and healthy. He looked like the kind of guy that enjoyed working out and playing video games. If he had wandered into Arcadia he wouldn’t have been mistaken for any kind of royalty or beast at all. In fact he looked like an adventurer just like Jace and the others.
The rest of the throne room was filled with trolls. All ugly. All smelly. All staring at the six figures as they walked towards the king without even a whisper.
Jace was the first to speak…
“Your highness?” he said questioning whether or not the man sitting atop a dark crystal throne was in fact the king they had been seeking. He looked back towards Molto whose eyes were full of fear. That was enough confirmation they had come to the right place.
“Your highness, I’ve come to bargain,” he finished.
“What can you possibly give me that I can’t take from you?” the troll king said.
“I have the man, the human traitor that killed your son. We would like to give him to you as a gift, a token of our respect and an offering of good will between the troll kingdom and humanity. We’d like the request that the attack on Arcadia stop,” Jace said without missing a beat.
“You think I’d stop all this fun what I can take easily?” the troll king replied.
“We believe that the troll kingdom would prefer to avoid a bloody war, perhaps our two kinds can even join forces and slay the daemons that have been plaguing both our world and your own,” Ariane said before Jace could answer.
“The daemons are humanity’s problem, they do not bother us as they bother you, humanity is the disease, spreading into my valley, into my home, destroying relics, shrines, polluting the forests, the canyons, the oceans,” said the Troll king.
“Do you not also benefit from our technology, just look at your palace, it’s built on the foundation of a starship, an old human starship, most likely some kind of colony ship,” said Ariane.
“Do not act like you know my home, this palace is built on what I have, what I own, this ship as you call it is culled from the same world from which I am born, from which I have been unleashed,” said the Troll king.
“Do you have a name? I am Jace, leader of the Five’s army, this is Ariane, Kale, and…” Jace was cut short as he pointed towards Ethan. “A name, my name is king, I am the King of the Valley, the King of Eda, I have lived in this world for generations and risen from the ashes. I am all that was and all that shall be, I am the alpha, the omega, I am life, and I am DEATH,” the Troll king said smiling. He held a purple gem in his hand.
“Tell me, are there anymore of you coming, my scouts had told me there were seven of you,” said the King.
“No, we lost one as we entered your palace,” Jace said.
The Troll king smiled.
“I don’t believe you”.
There was a sudden flash.
Jace and the others found themselves imprisoned within the gem.
For the next several hours they wandered the maze until finally there was hope.
Chapter 27
Another dead daemon.
I spent the next several minutes letting my stamina and mana recharge while making my way back through the layers of the gem until I could see the light from the outside world again. There were no more puppets. Only the silence and claustrophobic feel that was the gem itself.
I was ready to strike the ceiling again when I dec
ided to fire at the wall towards the silhouettes I had seen earlier. The blast broke through the gem’s wall. Suddenly I could see my friends. Ethan, still dead smiled as I ran towards them. Jace ran over towards me. He looked like he was going to give me a hug but decided to pat me on the back instead. Ariane smiled and Kale told me how happy he was that I was still alive. Molto was gagged, cuffed, and covered in blood. They hadn’t killed him yet but they probably should have. Instead it seemed they had been using him. Making him move first through the maze. They were trapped here the same way I was by the troll king. I had been right before. The whole thing was a trap and we walked right in. We were deep inside the troll king’s dungeon. An artificial pocket reality.
“They used one of these gems on me before but I was only trapped for a few seconds, I used all my mana too break free, this one, I can barely scratch the surface,” Jace said telling me all about the dangers they had endured since I had plummeted into the palace’s underground. I told them too of my encounter with the ghost girl. Once we were all caught up I showed them the small break I had managed to make. We could feel the air outside. Warm as it flowed inside. It wasn’t enough. The troll king still hadn’t noticed and I was ok with that. Jace’s previous experience was proof enough that we could escape.
“They really should have taken our weapons away from us,” I said as we broke through the gemstone over-saturating it with power from the inside out. In a flash all of us were back to our normal size. Jace lounged at the Troll king with his sword only to find himself being countered at the last second. The troll king had grabbed Jace’s sword with his bare hand. He held it there and smiled.
“I am a God, have you not figured it out, this war, this hell on Eda is all that can be, for humanity to fall,” the Troll king smirked.
The rest of us, including Molto, stood back to back as the trolls surrounding us unsheathed their weapons and began chanting for blood.
“ENOUGH,” I screamed unleashing a fury of ice cold wind around the entire throne room, “I had made a vow not too long ago that I wouldn’t kill anymore unless I was forced, we have no reason to fight, this planet is big enough for all of us and all we want is to be left in peace, we have brought you the traitor. There is no reason for anymore of us to die,” I finished.
“You don’t get it?” said the Troll king, “this is what we live for, trolls from the moment of their conception begin cannibalizing their mother’s womb, this war is our destiny, to conquer this world as our ancestors had conquered worlds in the past, it is the reason the gate has brought us to this place and now that our numbers are high our time has come,” he finished.
“Gate?” I said making a mental note.
“The gates are how the trolls, the goblins, the elves, the dwarves, all the species of this world came, all except your kind, your kind having fallen from the stars and you have ruined everything,” the troll king said. His eyes were filled with rage. I had seen it before. It was the same hatred and sorrow I had seen in Julie Luyten’s eyes. Everything about him. The way he talked, the way he fought, the Troll king had been here a long time. Longer than the other humans. Longer than most of this world. I knew as he held Jace’s sword in his hand he wasn’t just some NPC. He was a player. A player that had lost his sense of reality. This was his world. The world he had made and humans and daemons were upsetting his status quo.
I scanned him.
Name: Unkown
Age: Unkown
Gender: Male
Race: Human / Golem Hybrid
Level: 90
Class: Paladin
HP: 1000
Mana: 1000
Stamina: 1000
Agility: 10
Endurance: 10
Intelligence: 10
Charisma: 8
Luck: 8
Abilities: Unknown
Skills: Unkown
Inventory: UnDun Scythe, UnDun Great Sword
Reputation: King of the Trolls, King of the Valley, Goblin King
Alignment: Troll Kingdom
Languages: Common (English), Troll, Elvish, and Goblin
A human / golem hybrid. That was interesting. Was it possible than that the Troll king himself wasn’t even real.. He was created. He said himself he had been here a long time, long enough he had lost his mind, long enough he has seen the world go through many different changes. Long enough he passed his memories down from one body to the next losing a piece of himself each time. That can’t be right. Darkness Beyond is a new game… even if I’m trapped here this kind of technology can’t be that old. The world inside this game is thousands of years in the making and the Troll king acts as if he has been here since the beginning. Time displacement. Time must move different here. Perhaps what is a day is shorter in the real world. A week could be a day. A month could be a week. An hour could only be several minutes. Maybe in the real world I haven’t even been playing that long.
For the first time in a long time I felt like I had some hope.
I formed my limb into a glaive and yelled towards Jace, “he’s mine!” before attacking the Troll king head on myself.
“I have questions, you are a player aren’t you!?” I shouted as my icy glaive came into contact with the Troll kings sword. Sparks flew and steam rose as his blade pierced through my own. I was barely a foot from him staring him down.
“Darkness Beyond, the game, this world, ANSWER ME!” I shouted again taking several steps back and attacking again. The Troll king stared at me hard looking me up and down,
“So you are from the outside world,” he said smirking,
“Yes, please stop fighting, talk to me, tell me how to get out of here,” I screamed swinging upwards to block the blow of the Troll king’s sword. Jace was standing back with the others fending us off from the Trolls that were gathering to assist their king.
“You really have no idea where you are do you?” the Troll king laughed, “there is no going back from Eda, only forward unto heaven,” he continued to laugh as he swung at me, his eyes turning from silver to red. He was beginning to cast some kind of spell summoning energy from the Trolls around us who began falling over dead. Still, they kept coming forward attacking Jace, Ethan, Ariane, Kale, and Molto who was holding a sword alongside the others still gagged and cuffed.
“I came to this world alone, trapped, it wasn’t what we thought, it was a living hell, I made it my own, shaped it, dying again and again until I found ways to harness my magic and I turned this valley into my kingdom,” the Troll king shouted, “you will not take it away from me!”
“What is this world!” I shouted again. I wanted answers and my enemy had them.
“Eda is the world between worlds, the rift between the above and below and it is MINE!” the Troll king shouted again. Our conversation wasn’t getting anywhere. I tilted my head. I knew at that moment that the Troll king I was facing now was nothing more than a shadow of someone. Maybe he was real once upon a time but now he had lost all that made him human. He may have been level 90 but I had friends. I shouted, “Bendi now!” aloud and the creature appeared from behind the Troll king with a small carbon dagger. The dagger had been laced with poison from the fleshlings. Bendi read my mind and dug it into the back of the Troll king and twisted before disappearing back into the shadows.
“You are finished,” I shouted as the Troll king stepped back. I extended my glaive out as far as I could, several yards from my body and through the side of the Troll king’s chest. The entire room grew silent. The Troll king reached out his hand and several trolls began to die as he sucked the life from them. I turned him inside out before he could come back releasing several smaller sharper icicles from my arm like tentacles and inside his chest tearing him apart before releasing him to the ground.
He was laughing again. His eyes once again silver as he broke apart like he was made of mud. He was mumbling something… more nonsense about being the creator of this world, that he was a savior, that he was unst
oppable. He kept going until there was nothing left and he was dust in the wind.
The other trolls stopped turning to stone where they stood. I could only hope that was the affect everywhere and not just inside the palace.
I slung my rifle around my arm and aimed it at Molto.
“Was his son human like him?” I asked.
“What’s it matter,” he answered still holding a sword in his cuffed hands. I shot his shoulder and watched as he dropped his sword.
“Yes, his son was human just like him!” Molto shouted.
“He was more than the Troll king’s son, he was a golem of the Troll king himself, a clone,” I said before firing and killing Molto.
Jace and the others looked at me in shock but didn’t object to Molto’s execution.
There was silence throughout the palace. The dark crystals that made up the Troll king’s throne began glowing different colors such as purple, green, blue, and red before each and everyone of them shattered. A wisp of energy appeared over the throne and dissipated into the air.
“The Troll king’s throne was a prison of souls, with his death they have all been set free,” said Ariane smiling. Ethan walked over to the throne and picked up one of the shattered crystals holding it in his hand.
Glimmer, A Throne of Souls (Convergence Book 1) Page 19
