Warden's Path

by Heath Pfaff

  “I can’t feel any power from this door at all.” A bit surprised that he couldn’t sense that himself.

  He attention snapped to me, a bit of confusion clear as he considered me a moment before replying. “You can feel the doors?”

  “Yes.” I answered. I hadn’t realized it was unusual. I’d assumed everyone could. “When I’m close to one I can feel energy, or power . . . it’s like a vibration that comes from them. I thought everyone could feel that.”

  Arthos shook his head. “As far as I know, no one can feel that, at least not without knowing how to ‘sound’ for the doors. It’s a skill that is very difficult to learn, but it’s how we found the ones we know about. The first ones were discovered unintentionally.” He sighed. “I would love to discuss it more with you, but we have a much more urgent situation to deal with. We’re lost, and I don’t know how to fix this.” That admission was troubling.

  “This place no better than the last. Haunted.” Dreea noted with distaste in her voice. “We should go outside, look at the stars. Stars can guide you.”

  She was right. Part of what I’d learned in my classes was navigation based on the position of the stars in relation to the horizon. It had been a great deal of memorization and understanding formulas, but I’d become adept at the necessary skills by the end of the lessons.

  “Yes, if we get outside I should be able to at least figure out which direction we need to go to get back, or to get to some place familiar.” I offered.

  “That is a good idea, but you’re forgetting that those doors can throw us much, much further than just to the other end of our world. We might not even be in the same plane of existence anymore.” Arthos pointed out grimly. “It can’t hurt to look, but we don’t know where we’ve come out. We also don’t know how dangerous this place might be.”

  He was right, and the realization was a startling one to have to come to terms with. We might not even be in an actual space in time. We might have gotten lost in one of those bubbles the doors could open up upon.

  “Then we’ll move cautiously, but standing here isn’t getting us any closer to home.” I tried to keep the worry from my voice as I spoke, but I could still hear it there. I was uncomfortable being the one who had to keep us moving forward. That should have been Arthos’ place. He was our leader.

  “Aren’t you pushy.” Arthos said, his normally wry humor tamed a bit by our situation. “Let’s go, then. There are windows over there, so that means that’s one side of this place. We’ll go that way, but let’s move cautiously. Those candles didn’t light themselves, no matter what this place may seem to be showing us.”

  We moved cautiously then, cutting through the dining room in a deliberate manner. We skirted the edge of the table which was laid in extravagant fashion, though it was clear it had set so long that any food that had been there had lost its shape to age. Piles of bones lay in a few places on plates. It would take a long time indeed for something to sit so long that no meat at all remained on the bone. The dust in the place seemed to indicate exactly that.

  We drew closer to the window and I realized that the dust was so thick over the pane that we couldn’t see outside at all. They might as well have been shuttered, and I wasn’t keen to try and clean one off. There was no seeing out to the world beyond those caked surfaces. I could tell that it was dark out, and just vaguely make out shapes I thought might be trees, but they might also have been just about anything else. Nothing seemed to move, which was at least something to be happy about. I didn’t want to meet the things that lived in such a forsaken place as this.

  After the dining room we passed into a smaller room with chairs surrounding a fireplace. The hearth was cold, and the room hung with spiderwebs and was coated in the same dust as everything else. As far as I could tell the decor looked relatively normal, but above the fireplace hung a picture of a man dressed in a fine tailored suit of turbulent black. He had pale skin and eyes darker than his suit. There was no white to them at all, just a pure pit of emptiness that seems to envelope all to fall within its gravity. He wore a smile that was just a little too wide for his face, with hints of teeth that were small and needle like. I didn’t like the way his eyes, even from the canvas, seemed to bore into me, through me. Behind him was a depiction of a beautiful sunset coming down over rolling hills. The face, though, stayed with me, clouding the otherwise beautiful image. It was an unnerving picture, and it made me wonder what sort of people had lived here before this place was abandoned. Did they all look like this man? Another question, one that didn’t occur to me at that moment, but would later; Why was that particular piece of art so pristine in the otherwise filthy, dusty mansion?

  Dreea and Arthos looked as well, but neither of them stopped to make comment as we filed through the room and out onto a walkway that stretched around a wide, open foyer. This place, wherever we were, was much larger than I’d thought. We were on the second floor, and this walkway allowed us to look down onto the room below and the single door that served as an entrance. There was another floor above that could be reached by a branching central staircase.

  The entry hall was large enough that it could have easily allowed a hundred people to mill about with room to spare. The floor was tiled in black and white boxes, though I could see that there was some kind of texture to the individual tiles. The white was now more gray than white owing, I thought, to the dust that clung there. All of this was just extravagance, interesting to see but not really spectacular, but what was most catching to my eye were the piles of bones littering the floor. There were so many, and each had a human-looking skull lying nearby.

  It looked as though all of these people had come here and stood in place until they died. It was like there had been a grand party, and at some point everyone had just stopped and died exactly where they’d stood. The three of us looked down over the railing at the mess below us, the piles of bone with their scraps of fabric still attached in places, and we were all quiet for several moments. I wondered if the others were as lost in confusion as I was.

  “Look, painting.” Dreea pointed to the head of the stairs, and there at the top, in the very middle of the wall just ahead of the massive foyer, was another portrait of the man with black eyes. This one was much larger, but he wore the same well tailored outfit, and had the same terrible expression on his face. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, hands covered in some kind of heavy gauntlets. The background, though, was entirely different. In this painting the man was standing in front of a macabre scene like something out of a nightmare.

  There were powerful men, naked to the waist, wielding hooked knives as they butchered women and children who were in various states of terror and dismemberment. These monsters committing the atrocities wore devices about their necks, metal rings that pierced their shoulders as though they’d been in place so long that the flesh was attempt to grow over them. The rings had long spikes on them that jutted upward, ending in barbed points, and the flesh from their heads had been carefully flayed into four distinct sections and then hooked to each of the four spikes, drawing it taut like the petals of some horrifying flower. Blood trickled down their torsos, and their arms were black with it from the slaughter. Their eyes bulged in their sockets, forever staring with no way to be closed now that the flesh from their head was peeled back in this awful display.

  I had never seen a piece of art that was so disturbing before, and it was made all the worse by the man standing before it with his too-wide grin, and pitch black eyes.

  “What is this place.” I said, my voice quiet, and yet somehow seeming loud in this skeleton of a building.

  “I’m certain this isn’t our world. This is something connected only through the doors, and I think we need to find a way out as soon as we can.” Arthos didn’t even glance my way as he spoke, but I knew his next words were for me. “Can you sense any other doors? There has to be another one around here.”

  I shook my head. “I can only feel them when I’m close t
o one, and I wouldn’t even know how to go about looking for one otherwise. I have no training in any of this.”

  Arthos took a breath, thinking. “I can teach you the scrying technique. I know it, but I’ve never been able to do it myself. Maybe you can, though. Maybe you’ll be good at it, but we should get out of the house. I don’t feel safe here. Those paintings are . . . “ He paused, then leaned forward over the railing a bit. “Did that . . . it changed.”

  I looked at it again, trying to see what Arthos had seen, but it took me a moment. The black eyed man was closer to the front of the painting, and his arms were no longer crossed. They were at his sides.

  Dreea whimpered softly.

  “Come on, we’re leaving this house.” Arthos said, and he was already on the move. We wasted no time getting down the stairs and heading for the front door. My eyes flicked back to the painting several time as we went, and each time it seemed like the black clothed man was getting nearer and nearer the front of the painting, like he was going to step out of it entirely.

  When we finally reached the door after carefully navigating the piles of bones that lay across the floor, I was more than a little shocked to see that it was unlocked. It swung open easily for Arthos. I’d been almost certain that it wouldn’t open, that we’d arrive and it would be locked and that nothing we could do would cause it to let us free from that place. Then we would be at the mercy of the man in the painting.

  That wasn’t the case, however. We moved out of the mansion quickly, and I gave one final look back behind us before slamming the door shut in our wake. The painting was entirely black, as though swallowed up in one of the pale man’s bottomless eyes. I was never so happy to slam a door closed in my life.

  “Come along, we’ll find a place to camp beyond the line of sight of this house and then we’ll figure out what to do next.” Arthos said, and that finally pulled my attention away from the door for long enough to take in our surroundings.

  We were in some kind of overgrown garden. I could see statuary that was now covered in vines and moss, and places where neat flower beds had become nests of weeds and long grass. The grounds looked as though they’d been exquisite in their time, but now everything was being taken back by the nature surrounding it. There were several notable aspects to the forgotten landscape.

  At the center of the garden area was something massive rising up, like a pillar, but it wasn’t as regular as one would expect of a manmade structure. It spiraled, and rose in the strangest way, like it hadn’t been built at all, but had risen up from the ground of its own accord and then frozen in place. I couldn’t make out any details from where we were, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to.

  Beyond the strange thing in the center of the garden, I could see the front gates of the estate. They were of exquisite design, much like everything else we’d seen, and looked like they would be easy enough to climb over if we had to. It was hard to be certain with as far as we were from them. That would, most likely, be our next goal, though we’d have to walk past the strange thing in the center of the garden or else take a creative route around, which at that moment seemed the wiser course of action.

  Another large building lay off to the left of us. It was constructed of stark white stone that gave it a cold and imposing appearance. It looked something like a mausoleum from where we stood, but it might have housed anything at all. It could have been a stable for all that I knew of it. The opposite side of the garden was the most overgrown. There once had been a neat hedge row, but now it had swallowed up the whole of the area, consuming it as though nature had been particularly voracious in the pursuit. I could only tell what it had once been by the fairly regular shape of its starting point. I couldn’t see much of anything through the bramble.

  Arthos only hesitated for a moment before he began to lead us down and around one of the paths that circled the center of the garden on route to the fence. I was happy to see he was avoiding the unusual pillar in the center for now. Clearly he felt, much as I did, that whatever that thing was, it was best left a mystery. The path did take us closer to the object, and I was able to make out more of the details of its shape whether I wanted to or not. It looked like a giant, plated worm, the layers of its scales heavy and covered in thick barbs. The stone it was carved from was a red hued black, and it seemed to be incredibly detailed all the way up its length as it spiraled into the sky, ending in a massive mouth that was more of an opening of the entire front of the thing than any separate piece of its anatomy. It had six protruding teeth that stuck out in front of it like tusks, each nearly as long as I was tall, and from what I could see of its insides, it’s mouth was lined with thousands of pointed little teeth. The size of the worm it made it look like it was a subterranean tunnel that had come to life and developed an appetite.

  The whole statue seemed as though it was something real that had been frozen in time, but I was just as happy that it was only some form of twisted artistry. I wasn’t sure how one would even approach the task of killing such a beast. It was all armor and teeth.

  “What is it?” Dreea asked as we rounded the part of the trail closest to the awful sculpture.

  “It’s nothing I’ve seen or read about before.” Arthos answered. “It must be something significant to the people of this world if they built this statue of the thing, but I’ve never encountered anything like it. This whole place is strange. We’ve collected lore on most of the worlds the doors can connect to, but there is always something new to be discovered. When we get back we’ll have to make a full report on all of this.”

  I was happy to hear he was saying “when” and not “if” because it had occurred to me that we might not find a way back to our own world, though it was possible Arthos might have only been speaking in positive terms to comfort us. If that was the case then it was working somewhat. It would have been nice if it had been working to a greater extent.

  We made it the rest of the way to the gate without trouble. I’d thought we might find the gate shut and locked, but it was hanging open, the doors now locked in place by the growth of weeds up around them. The road out was covered in growth as well. This place seemed like it had sat empty for years and years. In that way it echoed the Watch we’d left, but I did wonder why everything was so empty and quiet. The entire world here felt abandoned.

  It took me a moment to realize why I felt that way, but when it struck it was an eerie realization. We were outside, the weather was decent, though not quite warm, but there wasn’t a single animal or insect making noise. Everything was still and silent, and it didn’t feel right. No place should feel quite so dead. Birds always sang, crickets always chirped. There wasn’t even a breeze.

  “Smoke ahead.” Dreea spoke softly. “Smell it.” She nodded off in a direction. I turned to look, but I couldn’t make it out through the path ahead. Trees grew up around the property we were on, and they obscured any clear view of the sky.

  “How far would you say?” Arthos asked.

  “A mile. Maybe a mile and a half. Smells like meat cooking.” She said, and her mention of food reminded me that I was quite hungry. We hadn’t exactly had time to stop and eat recently. I was trying to decide whether or not it was a good idea to look for an inhabitant of this place, but Arthos made the decision for all of us.

  “We’ll go and check it out. Whoever is there might be able to tell us about this place, or at least point us in the direction of a city or a town. Plus I don’t think we should stay near this old house. It feels . . . off.” Arthos looked as uneasy as I felt. I thought “off” was perhaps giving the haunted structure too much credit.

  “Bad place.” Dreea agreed, nodding, and giving a look over her shoulder at the old mansion.

  I didn’t speak, but I hardly needed to since I was in complete agreement with both of them. Whatever this place was, I didn’t like it. However, having exited the house I wasn’t sure how much more I liked the forest we’d stepped into. It felt just as wrong, though it was less immediately appare
nt. Arthos led us on.

  On foot, over the rough terrain, it took us longer than it should have to reach our destination, and strangely enough the heaviness of the air seemed to lessen as we went until finally, just before we broke the tree line and came out near a small cabin, I heard a bird singing in the trees ahead. It was a sudden shift. It felt like we stepped out of darkness and into the light almost at the same moment that the trees fell away.

  It was so startling that I found myself looking back over my shoulder at the path down which we’d just traveled. The trees looked grayer there, the air darker. I frowned at the strangeness of the scene, but I didn’t know what to make of any of it. “Did you feel that change?” I asked the others.

  “Yes, not dark anymore.” Dreea said. “Not heavy.”

  “It did feel like a weight came off my shoulders when we passed beyond the wooded area.” Arthos added. “I hope we don’t have any need to travel back that way. Let’s go check out this cabin and see what we can learn of this place.”

  I looked onward, enjoying the relief from the darkness even as I began to wonder about the occupants of the cabin ahead. Who would live so close to whatever that place was we’d just come from? I supposed we’d find out soon enough.