Warden's Path

by Heath Pfaff

  “Move quick. The counter weight mechanism is filling with water, and once full, it’ll close the door again.” Arthos said, hopping across the space in front of us. Dreea and I followed him, and less than a second later the massive stone circle was rolling back into place. The remaining light in the tunnel snapped away as it sealed shut, and then we were in complete darkness.

  “We should have brought a torch.” I noted, trying to get my bearings in the total darkness, and thinking to urge Arthos to possibly bring out his portable light.

  “Yes, too dark.” Dreea agreed, and if she couldn’t see, than things were dire indeed. Dreea’s night vision was very good.

  I felt a small, precise surge of Will, and then suddenly a faint glow lit up at intervals along the path ahead. Will lights. They were a glass vessel that contained water, a particular kind of algae, miniscule sea creatures that fed on the algae, and two pieces of a particular mineral in a device that allowed them to slowly absorb into the water providing energy to the system. A Warden could focus their Will and cycle the device forcefully which caused an excess of the mineral to be added to the system which caused the somewhat dormant algae to spring to life and start a more intense grow cycle. Light was a byproduct of that. The light would go for up to an hour depending on the force applied. I didn't have the finesse to work the lights. Arthos carried a small one with him. It had been the bane of my existence during training sessions so far, but it was nice in complete darkness, assuming one could work the cursed thing.

  This particular device seemed to have a starting mechanism at this end that triggered the start of the lighting process, and then the remainder of the lights fed off the initial reaction. It looked complex, but it all seemed to work with flawless precision.

  Dreea made a pleased sighing sound and moved close to examine the nearest light. “Will.” She said, having changed from using the word “magic” to describe the things we did, though she said the word with the same reverence. “This I will learn too.”

  “Come along. The path won’t stay lit indefinitely, and it’s impossible to light from the middle. Let’s get to the next door before it goes out.” Arthos said, urging us onward.

  “We could always trace our way back and light it again.” I noted as we began to move.

  “Yes, but I don’t really feel like spending more time in these caves than necessary. Do you?” His voice had taken on a wry edge. “I’m sure it’ll be much more comfortable in the Watch.”

  I frowned at that. “I’m not as certain. How long has it been since anyone has been here?”

  “Someone stops in every decade. It has probably been eight years or so since anyone has checked the Watch. Bandits moved in a long time ago, but by the time we discovered them the path they’d taken had collapsed on itself. Most of them died of starvation, a few fell into the cleft trying to climb down. Getting rid of them involved piling bones and sweeping away the dust that remained.” Arthos explained casually.

  “You know this place well.” Dreea spoke quietly into the echoing cave.

  Arthos shrugged. “I’m one of the people that comes to check on it from time to time. I’ve been here three times before. It’s a good task to bring trainees on.”

  “How old does that make you?” I asked, suddenly curious. If he’d come here three times before, and it had been eight years since anyone had been here, that meant he’d been here over the course of the last 38 years if he’d been in the party of people checking on this place for each of the last visits. He looked like he might be in his late twenties or early thirties at the most, so I knew that wasn't an accurate way to judge his actual age.

  “I’m one hundred and seventy-two.” He answered with no seeming concern for the information. “I’ve been a Warden since I was 18. I’ve been training other Wardens for about 80 years, give or take. Before that I was a Knight for fifty years, and then a scout for the other twenty-four. I prefer teaching, though. Passing on knowledge is interesting, as is meeting the new generations. It keeps me connected to the passage of time. Some of us get lost in it and eventually falter, lose the Will necessary to go on.”

  We began to climb a section of cave that took us up in a gentle spiral until finally we reached another door, though this one was much more clearly a door. It was solid stone, carved with skulls, demons, and other macabre pictures. I frowned at it, still mulling over the reality of Arthos’ long, long life.

  “Have things changed a great deal over the course of your life?” I asked, reaching out and tracing some of the pictures on the door.

  “Not as much as you might expect. Language changes a great deal. Some of the words we use now, we didn’t use when I was young, but people mostly stay the same. The Iron Will keeps things from changing too much. There are laws regarding what can and cannot be developed in our country, which technologies should be pursued and which should be abandoned. Things the King deems dangerous are quickly destroyed.” Arthos’s voice was calm and even as he spoke, but I thought I detected a bit of distaste for this.

  “You don’t agree with that?” I jumped on the opportunity, finding a single point of give in the wall he’d built around his ideology involving the King.

  “It doesn’t matter. That is simply the way things are. It is for the good of everyone.” He was covering up for his slip, and I could tell by the way he jumped quickly to an answer.

  “Stupid. Thinking is good. Creating is good. That is how we grow stronger, smarter.” Dreea gave her own opinion. “Iron Will is not so good at thinking.”

  Arthos laughed at this. “Perhaps not, but things are as they are. We do well, our country is strong, and so are its people. We don’t have to agree with everything, but we live with it.”

  Deciding the subject had run its course, I turned my attention to the door. “Why did they cover it in carvings like this? I don’t recognize any of this from my lore classes.”

  “The carvings are just here to scare off anyone who might stumble upon this door. They’d have to have been lucky to get by the first door, but hopefully seeing this one would stop them from wanting to go on any further. It’s Will locked, though, so if they were seeing it, I’m not sure how they would get past it. I think it was mostly just a bit of theatrics on the part of those responsible for the architecture, perhaps even a nettle at the Wardens who were making sure they built this place.”

  He pointed to a depiction of a massive demon with multiple arms that were clasping at humans and shoving them into mouths that ran all along its body. The bodies were mutilated and screaming, and before the massive demon ran hundreds of others, all similar to the larger, all killing and people and dragging the bodies back to the larger creature. “The big demon is the King, the smaller ones are the Wardens, or that is what a lot of us believe. The King devours what he needs to grow stronger, taking from the common people, and the Wardens just help him feed.”

  There was a hesitation before he went on. “The designers, the work men, they were all killed after construction.” He spoke this last part in a hushed tone.

  “Killed?” I was shocked, though a part of me knew I shouldn’t be. The Wardens were secretive. They had to make sure no one who knew how to work any of this would be left alive.

  “To the last man, and then their families as well.” Arthos was grim. “It was the same with the school. Thousands died to make that place. Thousands died to make this place. If you ever walk the outer wall of the school, their are names carved all along its surface. Everyone who died is written there. Every man, woman and child. They are honored for their sacrifice, though none of them agreed to such a cost. In fact, after word of what happend here got out, the King assured the people that the same would not happen there. The school was to be a new beginning.”

  Dreea growled. “That was wrong. Evil.”

  Arthos sighed. “I’d agree on that point. I understand the importance of these secrets, but in some places the Wardens went too far. I’ve read every name on the wall, and I’d recommend you do
the same some time, Lillian. It’s important to remember those who died in our war, especially the ones who didn’t even mean to. When a soldier dies, he dies having known that he would probably engage an enemy, that his life was on the table. When an innocent dies for a cause, that is a greater tragedy. Often they never had a say. They are not considered brave because they didn’t know they would need to fight. They are not idolized because they never made the choice to stand, but that just makes their death’s more tragic. They never had a chance.”

  I wanted to use this moment to make a point about the Wardens, about what we were, but I felt like it would be wrong to push Arthos on this. Clearly he already held a dark view of these deeds. It would be divisive to push this point now, and it didn’t need pushing. It was obvious what was wrong here. It was better to remember this, to keep it for later. It would fule the fire that drove me, and there would come a time when we’d have to discuss the Wardens on a grander scale. Arthos would have to become an ally to the cause I pursued, or simply be another person helping me along without knowing he was doing so. This wasn’t the time to strike. It might be years before it was time, and maybe this was an argument best won through attrition.

  “Open the door, Lillin. It works the same as the last one.” He told me.

  I nodded, pushed away other thoughts, and focused my will, slamming it into the stone in front of me, the left side of the wall. The door groaned in place and then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, began to slide downward into the floor. It stopped when it was level with the walkway and we moved across it and out into the open world beyond, though perhaps “open” was too strong a word. The path ahead narrowed quickly, a funnel that was encased in jagged cliff walls. Looking up I could see the sky, bruised dark with night, but only through a narrow slip of space between the two rock faces.

  Arthos turned to me and nodded towards the door. “This one has to be closed. Hit it again to seal it.”

  I did as instructed, and a moment later the door was sliding back up into place. It closed with a loud, reverberating thump that seemed to make the ground beneath us tremble. This door had been thicker than the first, and the back of it was designed to look exactly like the rock around it. I couldn’t even see it while it was closed and locked in place. It was hard to imagine the mechanisms hidden somewhere in the rock that allowed for those slabs of stone to move the way they did. It occurred to me that if one could find their way inside of those, they would probably have a much easier way of breaking into the Watch. There had to be access tunnels somewhere, paths through the stone for servicing the machines that made things work, and if there were service tunnels, were there other routes in and out of this place, routes that might have been built by the designers and forgotten with time?

  “It’s not far now. Follow me.” Arthos’ voice broke my chain of thought, and I turned to hurry after him. The path here was narrow enough that I had to occasionally turn sideway to slip through a piece of it. This felt like more security. A force of any size would have a hard time moving through here, and probably couldn’t manage it at all in a suit of armor.

  We walked on for a few more minutes, and then we pressed our way through a narrow gash in the rocks and came out onto a flat area, rock that had been shaped, etched out to be walkable. Ahead stood the Watch. From the ground I’d mistakenly thought it was all crafted of stone meant to look like mountain, but that hadn’t been exactly true. The Night Watch was carved from the mountain itself. All of its features were chiseled precisely from the existing rock. We’d approached it from behind, and as we walked from the narrow crevice we’d come through, it was easy to be lost in marvel at the scope and skill with which it had all been crafted.

  So much incredible craftsmanship had gone into the process, and all the people who’d worked on it were gone, their lines torn from the earth like the roots from a weed in a garden. It was impossible not to look at this and see all of the lost potential. What had that cost our world in the long run? What skills were gone forever because of what the Wardens had done in service to their King? I couldn’t shake those thoughts as I looked on at the Night Watch.

  The area in front of us was clearly a training yard. There was old equipment still set out, though it was now in terrible condition. It might have been a training yard at any military facility if not for the fact that the “yard” was solid rock instead of grass. It all seemed so cold and lifeless, but from somewhere ahead I could hear the flow of water.

  “At least there’s fresh water up here.” I noted.

  Arthos nodded. “Springs and a natural river flow through this whole area. I’m told there are caves beneath all of this that stretch far down into the earth.”

  Dreea had heard the water as well. Her ears were pointed in that direction, but she pulled to a stop quite suddenly. “Something wrong.” She said a moment later, and then she hunched down onto all fours, which always looked just a bit odd while she was wearing a dress We’d gotten her a few more, and she insisted upon being dressed in a normal fashion even though we’d assured her it wasn’t necessary. She wore the clothes well enough though, and if it made her happy so I didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t do as she wished. If anything it just made blending in easier if we encountered anyone.

  I opened my mouth to ask what was bothering her, but the sensation of “wrongness” struck me a moment later, a sick lurching, a twist of my stomach. I knew immediately what it was without having to see it. We were near the blackness. I looked back at Arthos, and I could tell by the expression on his face that he knew it as well. We crept forward carefully then, moving towards the running water. I knew what we’d see before we got there, but I still wasn’t quite prepared

  There was a river flowing through the Watch, cutting through the rock of the mountain. It had likely been there before the Watch had been built. In fact, the Watch was likely built in such a way that it could take advantage of this natural source of running water. It was maybe fifty paces from side to side, flowing quickly, but the water was flowing around pools of dark, tar-like material that, for some reason, refused to move with the rest of the current, as though they were islands in the river.

  We’d come all this way without seeing any of it, but here there was a great deal of the corruption, and if it was in this stream, I had no doubt that it had flown down river as well. How far did this stream go? It had to come out somewhere lower on the mountain, though I could see that it flowed back into the cliff face not far from where we were. This would be part of an underground stream like Arthos had mentioned, a spring that might flow for hundreds and hundreds of leagues, even out into the sea.

  “It looks like we’ll have something to report after all.” Arthos made reference to our responsibility to track this muck, though he didn't sound all that pleased at the revelation. I wasn’t either.

  “Dangerous.” Dreea commented. “It is dangerous.” She tapped her chest. “Instinct, I can feel it inside. We should go.”

  “I’m afraid we have to make our appointment.” Arthos replied. “Dangerous or not, we’ve come this far.”

  Dreea sighed. “Duty. Iron Will.” She waved a dismissive clawed hand in the air. “Still a bad idea.”

  I nodded my agreement. “This place feels like that village, Camiden. If we’re going to have to stay here, I recommend we find a defensible location, someplace without this stuff anywhere in sight.” I nodded at the ooze. “I think it can warp your mind, and I’m convinced there is some kind of malice in it. It feels bad.” I said, but I couldn’t really emphasize why I felt that way, or exactly what I meant when I said that.

  “That seems like sound thinking.” Arthos said, moving away from the stream. “Let’s get inside the Watch, find the door, and then set up a secure camp in a room that we can lock down. Come on.”

  Dreea and I followed after him. The rest of the walk to the entrance was quiet. I could feel the tension hanging in the air, draping from us like armor weaved of lead rings. It weighed at our every ste
p. At the entrance, a massive oaken double door, we were met with what appeared to be an impassible portcullis. The iron gate was down and clearly locked in place, but a surge of Will from Arthos sent something beyond the gate into action, and a moment later the gate rose and the doors swung open. The mechanism, despite having set for a long time, worked flawlessly and with little of the groaning fanfare one would have expected of such a large ancient machine.

  The doors swung open and I was surprised to see that inside the stone structure the building had been meticulously crafted to look comfortable. There were wood floors, and the walls were all paneled in wood as well. As the doors swung closed at our back, and the portcullis dropped back into place, I turned to watch them seal and saw that, other than those massive doors, the inside of the Watch didn’t really look like a fortress.

  The room we entered was large, with stairs on two sides, doors opening up in three different places on each floor. The second floor was just a walkway that circled the main room, though I could see it had been designed in such a way that archers could use it for cover to repel anyone who might get through the front door, though the design was quite striking on its own. It looked comfortable despite its functionality, a difficult mixture of form and function to achieve in a keep.