Trolled (The Trolled Saga Book 1)
Page 1
TROLLED
BOOK ONE
D.K. BUSSELL
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Copyright © 2016 by D.K. Bussell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Contents
Chapter One: Time In
Chapter Two: Variant Rules
Chapter Three: Non Player Characters
Chapter Four: Treasure Haul
Chapter Five: Magic Potion
Chapter Six: Critical Hits
Chapter Seven: Bug Hunt
Chapter Eight: Dungeon Crawl
Chapter Nine: Disarmed
Chapter Ten: Hack & Slash
Chapter Eleven: Time Out
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About the Author
Dedications
Chapter One: Time In
The Peak of Durkon, The Broken Lands, Tordocia
BENEATH A LEAD grey sky, shrouded in a fog as thick as curdled milk, rose the Peak of Durkon, its jagged cliffs capturing the surrounding winds and transforming them into a sound like a chorus of frostbitten infants.
Atop this brooding peak, protected by fortified battlements and patrolled by a garrison of guards that need never sleep, squatted the Citadel of Durkon.
Within this Citadel was an ink-black keep, and inside its shadow-drenched minaret resided Drensila the Black, a sorceress of bottomless evil and the scourge of all she surveyed.
*****
Chipping Ongar, Essex. England
BENEATH AN ALTOGETHER different lead grey sky, shrouded in a fog of exhaust fumes as thick as dirty dishwater, lay the parish of Chipping Ongar.
Once a thriving Saxon market town, Chipping Ongar had come to function as a traffic bottleneck for motorists commuting to their office jobs in the city. Motorists who—five days a week—found themselves stuck crawling by a ghastly procession of high street pound shops, grubby fast food takeaways, and a lone fancy dress store still somehow clinging on despite two recessions.
Would that these poor souls had a choice but to suffer this grim vehicular cattle drive, but since Ongar’s only Tube station was closed in Nineteen Ninety-Four, they could only grin and bear the congestion as it wound all the way to the faraway M11. Such was the story of Chipping Ongar, a lonely little place, beached by shoddy transport planning and human indifference. And yet, residing within this unremarkable patch of Essex suburbia, lived Nat Lawler: A Level student, left winger of her local under-eighteen girls’ hockey team and the future leader of the rebellion against Drensila the Black.
*****
OVER THE YEARS, Drensila the Black had seen off dozens of would-be usurpers. Though many had waged war on her, none had succeeded in laying siege to her domain. A wartime strategist would tell you that Drensila’s superiority over her enemies was threefold. Her first advantage was the Citadel of Durkon itself, an impregnable redoubt built by master craftsmen that could survive even the most brutal military assault. The second was the citadel’s location, surrounded on all sides by a yawning chasm and connected to the mainland only by the thinnest of mountain ridges. The third was her army, a ferocious breed of soldiers that were invincible, inexhaustible and altogether inhuman. Drensila’s men arrived in droves to serve her, surfacing from the bowels of a blighted pit that lay across the chasm, emerging into the light broad and bow-legged, their skin like black mould, sucking in fresh air and breathing it out with an odour like hot, rancid mulch.
To understand the nature of these creatures—these abominations—one must dip lightly into history, to a decade past when Drensila’s mother, Carnella the Cruel, sat upon the Durkon throne. Back then the pit was a functioning iron mine that provided the raw materials required to advance Carnella’s war effort. The House of Durkon was at odds with anyone who dared contest its rule, and had earned a reputation for dealing with its adversaries swiftly and mercilessly. Consequently, a time came when it had crushed all opposing forces, and so the House set its sights on the elves of the Whispering Woods, who refused to bend a knee to the wicked Queen.
Carnella’s army had been human in those days, a witches brew of barbarians and mercenaries that fought by her side for pillage and plunder. Given the order to eradicate the renegades, Carnella’s horde ransacked the woodlands, razing settlements and slaughtering the elves like cattle. Soon a leader named Gilon emerged to seek retaliation, consolidating the survivors of the decimated elf clans and mounting a blistering attack on the Citadel of Durkon that was as close as any came to unseating Carnella from her throne. Though Gilon’s forces were eventually thwarted by the bottleneck ridge that was the fortress’s only entryway, the elves claimed five times their number before they were driven back into their native woods.
Carnella’s anger at her near defeat was legendary. Instead of sending her remaining forces in pursuit of the routed elves, she ordered her men to clear the battlefield of corpses. Not just the bodies of their own fallen either, but of the rebels also. The troops weren’t to question her methods, nor were they to complain when they were instructed to drag the vulture-pecked cadavers from the field of conflict and toss them unceremoniously into the shaft of a nearby iron mine. Friend and foe alike were sent to the depths this way, piling up like rotten garbage, the swell of their combined stench drawing swarms of flies and assaulting nostrils for miles around.
Late one moonless eve, a coruscating vermilion light was seen to flare up in the uppermost turret of the citadel’s keep. The Night Queen had been performing blood magic it was said, and her soldiers could only wonder at the nature of her foul sorcery. After the magic came strokes of lightning, painting the sky silver and illuminating the terrified, upturned faces of the soldiers below. The clouds opened, pouring down a deluge of ink-black rain that fell like darkness made solid. The rain settled as pools of tar before soaking into the ground, corrupting the earth below. When a wan sun rose the next day, disturbing reports arrived from the soldiers attending to the battlefield. Noises had been heard emanating from the pit it was said. Terrible noises. Screams as dire as a banshee’s wail, and worse than those, moans. Moans so pitiful they made the hardiest of men weep just to hear them. Stories began to spread. Stories of subterranean horrors, of angry spirits seeking vengeance for their unjust deaths and ignoble burials. The stories sent a shiver through Carnella’s ranks, there was even talk of mutiny, but the revolt never came. It was never given the chance. Once the sun had gone down that day, the horrors below came to the surface. Not phantoms or wraiths or shuffling corpses, but something else. Something new. Carnella hadn’t raised the dead. Carnella had given birth to a whole new breed of evil.
The Night Queen called her creation trolls; hideous, snout-nosed monsters that stood eight feet tall, with charcoal-coloured flesh and mouths full of dripping yellow fangs. They weren’t a race so much as a pestilence, a fungus sprouting from the bodies of the dead like pungent blossoms. A cankerous infection born of black magic and decay, wriggling from a rancid cocoon. A fermentation of evil distilled into its purest form.
The trolls grew quickly, germinating and multiplying until soon they were legion. Cowed by Carnella’s sorcery, the creatures carried out her first command at once. Their order was simple: to kill her men, each and every one of them. All her soldiers were sentenced to die—slowly and painfully—and the trol
ls went about the task with gusto, ambushing their victims in their cots and subjecting them to savage, unspeakable deaths. Carnella had no use for men who would fail her in battle, and besides, what was left of their bodies would make good compost to further grow her troll army. Soon she would wield an unstoppable army of these foul beasts. Driven to serve. Driven to conquer.
*****
NAT LAWLER’S MOTHER had known her share of foul beasts, at least if the noises Nat heard coming through her bedroom wall were anything to go by. Nat’s mother had welcomed a horde of them into her bed since the divorce eight years ago. Caroused with the creatures into the small hours, then laid back while they bounced her from her headboard so hard it made Nat’s hockey trophies rattle. It happened so often that Nat had started to wonder if the woman’s bad parenting was born of alcohol abuse or concussion. Nat didn’t care though. She wasn’t long for Chipping Ongar. She was going to get her A Levels and she was going to get out of this town and she was going to live happily ever after in a land far, far away.
It was a sunny Sunday morning and Nat was at home, a two-up two-down, semi-detached squatting opposite the Esso garage. Presently, Nat was sat in her bedroom, tucked under a desk and drafting a Biology paper. It was the same desk she’d had since she was seven years old, and her thighs had grown large enough in the meantime that they chafed against its underside. “Thunder thighs,” her mum called them, which was a bit bloody rich given that they were brought about by the tyranny of her own DNA. Thick thighs, a dusting of unwanted freckles and crop of red hair that never quite sat the way Nat wanted.
To look at Nat Lawler you’d think she was a nerd—and you’d be right—but a nerd in the classic, studious sense, not the wasp-waisted, cleavage-baring selfie-taker you’re presented when you Google “nerd” nowadays; all cool tattoos and faux coquettishness. Nat was nothing of the sort. Nat was a serious girl. The kind who wore sunscreen every day and drank plenty of water and had absolutely no idea how a person could drop a phone in a toilet. The kind that had a paper round by the age of ten and kept at it all the way into her teens, reporting to the newsagents at 5:30 am while her friends slept off their hangovers, all because she didn’t want to let down poor old Mister Chaudry. Nat was fastidious too. If she’d have been at Houston Control when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, she'd have been the one walking around with a bin bag collecting the rubbish as the flight controllers cheered and threw their charts in the air. It was Nat’s scrupulous work ethic that had her sitting indoors writing a biology paper on a balmy Sunday morning, despite it only being the first week of the summer holidays. Because Nat was never one to leave things until last minute. Nat didn’t believe in thriving on pressure, she believed in hard work and being prepared. Of course, some things you simply can’t prepare for.
*****
SINCE CARNELLA THE Cruel’s passing, the trolls obeyed the command of her daughter, Drensila the Black. The beasts continued to rise from that same cursed pit to fight for the House of Durkon, conveyed across the chasm and delivered to their new queen by a complex apparatus built to transport iron ore. By repurposing this mechanical gondola system, Drensila was able to further swell her ranks without the need to open the citadel’s gateway and risk a breach of her defences. Once inducted into Drensila’s dread legion, new recruits were equipped with crude weapons and taught the ways of war. After that, most were sent to march across the Broken Lands to enforce her iron rule, for the loyalty of Drensila’s people was not given willingly. Others were dispatched to the Whispering Woods to locate the remaining pocket of elves and exterminate their kind once and for all. A number remained at the citadel to man its battlements and keep watch on the thin crease of rock that bridged the Durkon Chasm. Only those who proved themselves especially worthy of this task were granted the honour of crossing the chasm for another, very specific purpose. Their job was to stand guard at the foot of the gondola system, ensuring that none used the transport as an infiltration point. Those assigned this task would quickly learn that the duty was a ceremonial one, since when not in use, the gondola was parked at the top of the lift’s climb, far out of reach of any would-be invaders. Nonetheless, despite being a most unlikely inroad, the lift system was attended to by a detail of elite soldiers who guarded it from dawn till dusk. It was an extreme measure to be sure, but then Drensila the Black had never been one to take chances.
*****
THERE WAS A knock on Nat’s bedroom door. This was no good at all. Nat had work to do, and any interruption to her studies was entirely unwelcome. Okay, so yes, she had spent the last twenty minutes scrolling through a BuzzFeed page entitled “37 Things Only Millennials Know,” but that was entirely beside the point.
The door pushed open and a young man stuck his head around the jamb. “Hello lover,” he chirped.
Nat didn’t bother to turn from her studies to look at him. She already knew what she’d see; her boyfriend Terry—doughy, uncoordinated, slow on his feet—an easy catch in every sense of the phrase.
“I love you, Tel,” Nat told him, “but if you don't let me get on with this paper I'm going to stab you in the face.”
Terry chuckled, mistaking her statement for a joke. “But I came to invite you to a party,” he said.
“Is that right?” replied Nat.
“Well, not that kind of a party,” Terry admitted, “a party like a group of roleplayers. A party of adventurers.”
Nat shook her head. “You know I hate all that Dungeons & Dragons crap. I hear one person say “I'm Lord Such-and-Such of the House Whatever,” and I'm a mile away.”
“You shouldn’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
Nat ran a highlighter pen through a line of notes. She’d pretty much highlighted the whole page at this point, making the process utterly worthless. “Just so I’m clear,” she said, still not turning around, “is this the roleplay where you sit around a table pretending to be an elf, or the roleplay where you go to the woods and actually dress up like an elf?”
Terry balked at the oversimplification. “Actually, it’s a lot more nuanced than that.”
Nat swivelled in her chair to find him wearing cotton stockings, a suede harlequin patch tunic and a pair of pointy rubber ear tips poking from his mess of curly brown hair.
“Jesus wept,” she responded, understandably.
“What’s the matter? Is it my bow?” He unhooked a plastic shortbow from his shoulder and drew back the string. “It might not look like much but let me tell you, I’ve cut down armies with this bad boy.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, I call him Widowmaker.”
“And how did your wife die exactly? From shame?”
“That’s not why it’s called—” Terry started, then sagged his shoulders. “You’re mean.”
Nat had a sudden thought. “Wait, how did you get in here? Did my mum let you in dressed like that?”
Terry stood up straight. “Yes she did, and she loves my weapon.”
“I’ll bet she does,” thought Nat. It was only a matter of time before she got tired of chasing scrubs at the local Wetherspoons and started going after her boyfriends.
“Come on, hon,” said Terry, throwing up his arms. “It’s a beautiful day out there. You can’t spend the whole summer in here with the curtains drawn. Come LARP with us!”
LARP. Live Action Role Play. Four words that—as far as Nat were concerned—went together like “Bad News, It’s Cancer.”
“Please leave me alone,” she begged him. “I have to write this paper.”
“You’re not doing yourself any favours cramming for hours at a time, you know? I read this article about study and the brain once and—”
“—Don’t you think I know about the brain?” Nat cried, waving a fistful of papers at him. “I’m training to be a doctor.”
“Well… I thought maybe you hadn’t gotten to the brain bit yet.”
“Is that how you think studying medicine works? That we start at the feet and work
our way up? Podiatrists aren’t just doctors who took one class and ducked out for the next seven years.”
Terry folded his arms defensively. “Look, are you coming out or what? Because you know I’m just going to stand here talking until you say yes.”
Nat placed her forehead on the desk. She knew Terry wasn’t going to leave until he got the answer he wanted. It was just as she was lamenting this sorry fact that something caught in her nostrils. “Is that… urgh, did you track dog mess in here?”
Terry lifted a calf-length leather boot, peered at the sole and winced. “See, now there’s another good reason to get out of the house.”
*****
ACROSS THE CHASM from the Citadel of Durkon were the fossilised remains of a forest. Perched atop the blackened skeleton of one of its trees, creaking in the night breeze, squatted a slender figure. His owlish gaze landed on a structure a short way ahead: the ground-level departure point of Drensila’s gondola system. A cable threaded through its pulley and led all the way across the chasm to the citadel’s highest battlement. It climbed at an impossibly steep incline, reaching almost into the cloudline. No man could scale an obstacle so treacherous. No man could keep his head at such dizzying heights, or stay his footing among the chasm’s screaming winds. And yet Gilon Redsky was no man.
Gilon the elf had arrived by cover of night with one purpose in mind: to single-handedly infiltrate the Citadel of Durkon, kill Drensila the Black, and end her cursed bloodline for good. Though her army had yet to locate the elven domain—disguised as it was by a powerful cloak of enchantment—her incursions into the Whispering Woods had drawn ever closer these last few years. Elven huntsmen had been ambushed by troll scouts, and acres of woodland had been desecrated in search of their prey. Hiding was no longer an option. The elves had to fight back.