At last, after a day of much discomfort and few rests, the time came to make camp. Upon halting at the shore of a shallow, sluggish stream, Dank stretched his arms out like a crow’s wings and issued his commands. “Here’s the spot. The ground’s firm and the trees not too close. Saul, gather some deadfalls. Marlos, stretch out your canvas for a lean-to; I expect there’ll be rain. Garrett and Endross, set your snares for supper. Tonight will be one of few we can cook.”
Saul slumped to his knees beside the stream. He tore off several pieces of his Furyon mail and gulped many handfuls of water into his gullet, feeling like he might die if he did not.
“Like an oven in this armor.” Marlos plopped down beside him. “Better to let the Furies find us than broil to death.”
“How much farther did he say?”
“Five days,” Marlos spat. “Can you imagine? We should’ve stayed in Velum. We could be asleep in our graves by now, peaceful as pies.”
“Dead and peaceful, but useless,” he said, to which Marlos had no reply.
That eve, as he lay at the edge of the campfire and swatted at the cloud of gnats pestering him, Dank sat cross-legged beside the flames. When the warlock cleared his throat peered over the flames, he knew what was about to happen. He had seen it a dozen times during the journey.
He’s about to tell a story.
“A fine night,” Dank folded his skinny arms into his sleeves. “No ghosts are out, and the rain has yet to fall. If you’re interested, I think I’ll tell you of Darken Wood, of its place in history.”
“Odd you should tell us now, when it’s too late to escape,” remarked Marlos.
Dank ignored the outburst. He looked over every man, his green eyes contrasting with the red firelight. “Esti Nar was not always as it is now. The forest’s beginnings go back to my day, before the great war reached its end. How far the Archithropian Empire stretched, none can say, but it was known their dead and exiled were sent to one place in particular. It was said to be a boundless glade, east of the Corus Mountains. Esti Uthi, they called it; dark prairie. Presently Uthi would be here, though the climate is such that trees now grow where once only grass and rivers flowed. I thought this would be our safest road. The Furyons think Darken a cursed place. They don’t come here except to mourn.”
Dank paused, seeming to expect an onslaught of questions, but the men stayed quiet. “These were the burial grounds of Archithrope,” he continued. “A bit north of here, mounds of slate and earth lay at rest. They say there were tunnels beneath the earth, charnel caverns for the dead. The Furyons have since diverted a river this way, and swamps have drowned the underworld. I tell you this as a warning. If you should see stone markers or doorways in the trees, be cautious. There may be hollow places in the earth we might fall into.”
“Hollow places?” Marlos looked upset again. “You mean graves?”
Dank gazed into the night. “You’re wise to ask. You’ll call me superstitious, but there are reasons the Archithropians sent their dead so far away. If you should hear voices at night or whispers in your sleep, you must ignore them. There are worse than dead men in Darken. Deeds were worked here even death can’t erase. Men and…other things might still stalk.”
Saul felt so unnerved he chose not to listen to the rest. He rounded a gnarled tree opposite the fire, plunked down upon its roots, and gazed into the night. He knew sleep would elude him, and so his mind wandered.
What did he mean; other things?
More creatures like Morg?
No… he meant something else.
He dwelled too long on the matter. He wanted to reason that no such things as spirits and ghosts existed, but failed when he remembered all the supernatural happenings he had already laid eyes upon.
Later, long after the warlock had finished and wandered off, he caught himself listening as Garrett, Marlos, and Endross sparred over the meaning of the story.
“…every night with the staring.” He heard Marlos grumble. “What’s he looking for?”
“Northeast,” said Endross. “He marvels in the same direction every night.”
Garrett’s voice was calmest of the three. “He looks for the Furyon Object. He tells me he senses it by night, beneath the stars.”
“Naturally,” Marlos grumped. “And how does one sense something he’s never seen before?”
“Dank never said,” Garrett answered.
Marlos scoffed. “No surprises there. What about the black fire? Remember what he did to Morg? He says he’s from Nivil. Do all his people share his powers, or did the Archi-whoevers teach him during this centuries-long quest of his?”
“We have many questions.” Garrett drew a deep breath. “And he has few answers. He listens even now, I think, from somewhere in the dark. I know what he wants. He wishes me to tell you these things in his place.”
“Oh? What things?” said Marlos.
“That his magicks were twenty times as powerful during the days when the artifacts were assembled. That his powers were never meant for men, but belonged to those who made them.”
“The Tyberians?”
“No, not them. The Tyberians were not the first to use the dark powers, or so he said. If you believe him, he claimed the first to wield the forbidden arts were the forerunners, the ones who dreamed up the artifacts in the first place. He would not name them, and I knew better than to ask. He told me these creatures created all magic. They came before men, before Nivil and Archithrope, before any civilization we know of.”
“And you believe him?”
“I do not dwell on it more than I must,” said Garrett. “I know only what I have seen. Old worlds and dead men’s tombs do not matter so much as the Furies. They are all that matters now.”
“Aye,” agreed Endross.
“Aye, I suppose,” Marlos conceded. “Damn them all. And damn Dank and his secrets.”
His first evening in Darken made Saul loathe it all the more powerfully.
He and the rest tried to sleep that night, but the eeriness that had seemed so vague during the day drew ever closer, like a noose tightening around his throat. Clicking and scuttling and groaning, the sounds of the night encircled the camp, often rousing him to grab his battlestaff, as though beating back the hidden horrors were possible with a stick made of oak and rusted iron. He tried humming to himself and feeding the fire until it roared, but managed a meager amount of sleep only after covering his ears with two blankets and curling closer to the fire than any of the others dared.
The men awoke slowly the next morn. All gazes save Dank and Garrett’s were drawn from lack of sleep. Marlos, who had slept worst of all, looked so shaken by the night that he kept his tongue behind his teeth. Saul almost confronted Dank then, wanting to throttle the warlock for bringing them this way, but in the end thought better of it.
“We go until noon, then stop again,” Dank announced. “We rest until a few hours before dusk, and then travel beneath the dark for awhile, when it’s cooler. Each of you, grab some vines and make up some torches. You’ll need them at night.”
“Is it safe to travel at night?” Saul asked while fastening his armor in place.
“As safe as it is to sleep under it.” Dank frowned. “More importantly, it’s easiest for me to guide us in the dark, when the call of evil is strongest.”
Saul finished his breakfast of overcooked hare and moldy bread, and began the day’s trek with little hope in his heart. I want to believe, but much more of this will lead me to madness. King Lumaur, did you ever guess this is where your servant would meet his end?
Wordless, he followed Dank ever deeper into Darken. He clanked uncomfortably in his armor, his tines snaring on vines, his black-steel greaves biting into his shins. The forest became denser and the hours hotter. No Furyons sprang upon him, but there were other foes, other things that made as much misery for him as any man with a sword. The way grew wilder. His every footfall landed upon gnarled roots, rotting leaves, and squishing, squelching mud that seemed to w
ant to eat him up to his knees. Eventually the firmness of the ground gave way entirely, becoming a shallow but boundless mire of unmoving, lifeless water. Darken seemed a bog anymore, dead in all directions.
Three more days and nights in the mires of Darken, and Saul’s spirit began to break. The realm he wandered in seemed no longer a forest, but a cemetery in which countless tree corpses watched over him, waiting for him to join them in the afterlife.
On the fourth eve, he hunched beneath his lean-to during a warm drizzle, his skin feeling as though it might slide off his bones for all the humidity in the air. Dank’s campfire was failing, the rain hissing against the embers. He stared at the weakening flames, his mind gone blank. No Furies here, he repeated the thought a thousand times. Perhaps they’re already dead. Perhaps the Object has already consumed everything.
“This place is endless,” he heard Marlos say.
“No, not endless,” Dank murmured. “We’re almost out.”
“You’re certain you’ve not taken us the wrong way?” Marlos stirred the fire with one of his short Grae blades. “We’re at our ends. The gnats chew on us, the rain rots us, and our bellies are full of half-cooked mire rats. Our feet are rank from the swamp. Our toes will soon fall off, and then what good will we be for killing Furies?”
“This is the right way.” Dank’s reply was calm, yet cold. “The Object’s call is powerful here. Go back if you like. Degen and his men might still be working.”
Saul expected Marlos to carry on, but the Gryphon captain said no more. The misery of Darken had days ago conquered most of his complaints. Which worries me all the more, he thought.
Later that night, as the rain slashed again and Dank’s campfire died, he sat awake in the darkness. His lean-to sagged, his supper sat sourly in his belly, and his state of mind bordered on delirium.
Did I just hear something?
Surely not.
My lack of sleep plays tricks on me again...but there it is again.
I hear a voice in the night.
The hour was late. The others were quiet. The sounds issuing from the gloom beyond the rain crawled into his ears like spiders. He assumed he was dreaming. There are no horrors but what my mind creates, he told himself. But when Garrett slid beneath the lean-to and hunkered beside him, he feared it might be otherwise.
“Look to your left.” Garrett’s voice startled him.
“I see nothing.” He shivered. “Too dark.”
“Look closer.”
For many moments he searched the rotted tangle, scanning the darkness with terror in his heart. At last he saw what Garrett spoke of. A pair of faint lights moved in the outer gloom, two points of whiteness wavering at the edge of perception. They were paler than the moon, bobbing up and down, drifting like lamps through the Darken tangle. “What are they? Furies?” he whispered.
“Eyes,” said Garrett beneath his breath.
He shivered so hard he thought his ribs might crack. “Eyes? What do you mean, eyes? Where are the others?”
“Hiding.”
Never in his life had he felt such horror. The rain seemed to weaken, dwindling the same as the sound of his breathing. Eyes, he thought as he stared at the white points moving. Yes, eyes. They’re looking for us, no… they’re hunting us. If we’re hiding, it means Dank can’t protect us. Marlos was right. We should’ve died in Velum.
The strange, lonely lights wandered nearer. They belonged to no living thing, he decided. Darken was as Dank had said, brimming with things older than men, older than life itself. He watched, unable to blink, as the eyes drifted atop the mire and halted where the water was utterly still, the air unmoving.
“We must run.” The air felt frigid when he inhaled.
“Dank said not to.” Garrett stayed still as death beside him.
“He knows what it is?”
“He knows. But he will not say its name.”
The eyes moved. Saul held his breath, fearing that to make any sound would be to die. He saw it then, the shadow atop the water. The shade was taller and lankier than any man, and its eyes looked like dying stars. Not alive, but not dead. Saul stiffened. Please go away. I fear no man, but this…
How long he sat beside Garrett, quaking in the darkness like a child hiding beneath his bed, he could not say. The eyes shifted and narrowed, dimmed and brightened. The shadow was much darker than the night, the abyssal blackness of its body a color he never thought could exist. It floated at some intervals, then later stalked through the fens as though it had the legs of a man. Garrett whispered many times that he believed it was not a real horror, but a mere reflection of something that had existed long ago. Saul could not accept it. It’s real. Unless Dank created it to scare us from our skins, it’ll kill us. It wants to. Just look at it, Garrett.
Look at it…
And then, in the deepest trench of night, the eyes blinked a final time and were gone. The air warmed, and Saul snapped his eyes open and shut several times as though uncertain whether he was dreaming or awake. “Was it real?” he asked long after the shade vanished. “Are we still alive?”
“Aye,” he heard Marlos murmur behind him.
“Aye,” Endross agreed.
“How long have you been hiding there?”
“The whole time,” said Marlos. “You didn’t notice. You were…staring. We didn’t dare say a word to you. We didn’t want it to see us.”
“Wise of you.” All of them turned to the sound of Dank’s voice. “We’re lucky to be alive. What we just saw was a fragment of a thing that lived here ages ago, a ghost of a ghost, but more than enough to kill us all.”
Illyoc
After the gloom and despair of Darken, striding into the Furyon plain under a cloudless twilit sky felt the same as emerging from a dungeon after a century of captivity.
Garrett was first to do it. He squinted behind his Furyon helm, the beads of sweat on his forehead like little flames scorching his skin. He walked beyond Darken’s final tree, a grey-leafed, slate-barked beast, and he breathed a sigh of relief none of the others could hear. I will not miss the place, he thought of the foul, shadowed fen that had owned the last six days of his life. But I am still alive.
The air beyond Darken felt dry and cool. He removed his helm, and his view was suddenly unbroken to the edge of sights. The lavender skies, uncluttered by storms, looked none too terrible. His instinct was to march into the grass and wait for the others to catch up, but before savoring too much of what he saw, he turned his attention to the debate erupting behind him. Dank was standing stiffly in the twilit Furyon grass, arms crossed as he lectured Saul.
“Your battlestick…throw it in the grass,” the warlock urged. “Of all the things we carry, it’s most likely to betray us.”
Saul was tortured, Garrett knew. Darken affected him the most, and now Dank wants to take the one thing that reminds the poor man of home.
“I’m no swordsman,” Saul argued. “I’ll be as much use as a farm boy with his daddy’s scythe.”
Dank stood fast. “Then have Garrett teach you, or Marlos, or Endross. You’ve a fine Furyon blade on your belt, the only thing capable of carving through Dageni steel. What good will a stick do you? None.”
Saul tore his helmet off. Pride burned in the man of Elrain’s eyes. “I slew six Furies with this stick. Marlos knows. He was there.”
“Unless you can kill six hundred, leave it,” Dank said fiercely. “Elegant or no, no Furyon knight would ever carry such a thing. There are no oaks here, and little iron that isn’t black. The only people your weapon will kill are us.”
For a long moment, Saul compared his trusty length of iron-banded oak to the ugly, bonelike scabbard of the stolen Furyon blade. After a long look of disgust at the sword, he made his choice. He laid the staff to rest amongst the reeds at the edge of Darken and walked past Dank like a thundercloud skimming dangerously close to a sapling. “You’re lucky you are a wizard,” he said as he stormed by, with which Dank seemed not to disagree.
Before his eyes lay a land unlike any other he had seen. A far-reaching steppe, its grasses shaded olive, ochre, and bright amber, spread out across the land like a carpet welcoming him to Furyon. The evening wind was cool, the grasses swaying less like swords and more like dancing children. There were few trees on the steppe, no mountains, and no ebon Furyon pillars. The land was as flat as any ocean, as fair as any woman save one. He stared, and the evening sky began to smolder violet, alighting the heavens with a glorious sunset, a painted pyre for the day to die upon.
“A night of peace for us,” said Dank. “Tomorrow we cross it.”
“You know the way?” Marlos stepped out from the shadow of Darken’s last tree.
“See there, and there?” Dank pointed to the faint row of shadows standing like ghosts upon the horizon. “Hard to see from here, but those are mansions. The lords who live there are gone to war, but their servants remain. Our path lies between them.”
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 68
