by Eddie Patin
He rifted again and again looking for a good landing zone. It took several tries, just like back when he'd tried to guesstimate his way onto the top of the necromancer's tower while Riley and Gliath were holding off the undead horde. Eventually, Jason found a way, and was looking at a vision of a white marble walkway around the outside of the castle with a protective battlement to serve as a guard rail.
"Awesome. Here we go," he said, smiling up at Gliath.
The leopardwere stared through the whirling, sparking portal, holding his Blessed Warblade in his right fist. His tail swished back and forth violently. Jason's cat, Zelda, only did that when she was agitated or impatient. Jason could understand Gliath feeling that way now.
Shouldering his AK-47, Jason took a deep breath, thinking about how in a few seconds, he was soon going be up on that floating castle high off of the ground.
He led the way through.
Chapter 25
"Another bitch coming in!" Jason shouted, tracking the flying part-human part-bird-thing creature with his rifle. The harpy arced through the air toward them, high over the bog.
"Stand aside!" Gliath bellowed, ready with his Blessed Warblade. "I will kill her!"
The harpy's feathers were long and rigid. They fluttered in the air as she came about, then she threw up her wings as she dived at Jason, raising her taloned feet and descending with a wicked shriek.
"I've got her!" Jason replied.
He tried to forget that there was a drop of a few hundred feet on the other side of the waist-high, marble battlement as he centered his front sight over the pale, naked chest of the monster and squeezed the trigger twice. His AK-47 boomed against his synthetic eardrums, and Jason saw two dark holes appear between the harpy's pointy breasts an instant before her fierce yellow eyes lulled and she veered off course.
Jumping to the side with a flush of fear—careful not to fall over the wall—Jason narrowly avoided the harpy as she crashed onto the narrow walkway in a crunching heap. Several of her steel-colored feathers burst from the crumpled body, fluttering through the air, some over the wall in a tumbling, twisting freefall to the swamp below.
"Fuck..." he said, aiming his rifle at the ruined body and staring at the creature's face. Her neck was probably broken—kicked back at an extreme angle—and her mixture of naked lady parts mingled with a feathery bestial lower body and arms that doubled as wings was downright bizarre. The harpy's mouth was slack now, but her eyes—even yellow like an owl's and glazed over—reminded Jason of that psychotic and furious glare that he'd seen in his life from time to time in some women. She had the crazy eyes. Her face was drawn into sharp angles and hawkish. She had a curved nose. If Jason was to ignore the rest of her weird body and the dark-red quill-like feathers sprouting from her hairline, she'd look like an exotic but angry human woman; her face, neck, collarbones and shoulders, breasts, and stomach down to where feathers started to sprout from her flesh at her sides and near her pelvis. Everything else was beast.
Two lines of dark red blood ran down from the entry holes that Jason's 7.62x39mm rounds had made in the creature's sternum.
Jason remembered that he was looking down at a vicious predator.
He could hear the singing of two more around the bend. Their melodies had an ethereal quality that made him want to sit down and listen...
The dark form of Gliath moving next to him against the brilliant, white walls of the floating castle took Jason's attention. Looking over, he saw Gliath collecting some of the longer 'flight feathers' that had been knocked free by the harpy's plunge against the marble walkway.
Gliath straightened and looked down at Jason, his yellowish-green eyes devoid of emotion. He stuffed the feathers into a dump pouch on his belt.
"Jason Leaper 934, you should cover your ears," he said with a low voice. "I have seen harpies dominate the minds of humans with their songs. Stay out of the way, and I will kill them and lead the way inside."
As he heard the words, Jason's thoughts went back to DnD once again. He realized that the leopardwere was right. Traditional harpies had their 'harpy song'. Was it strange that Jason wasn't feeling anything? Would he even realize it if he was?
"Lead on, man," Jason said, standing out of the way to let Gliath take the lead around the curving outer wall of the castle.
The Earth man followed in dread and wonder, trying to avoid looking over the edge down to the bog far below. He realized that if those bitches wanted to kill him, they could just snatch him up and drop him over the edge—if they were strong enough—just like that gargoyle had tried to do back in New Bozeman on Morgana's home world. The harpies were the size of humans. Maybe they weren't strong enough to snatch up a full-sized man.
Fortunately, the wicked female creatures never had the chance to try. As Jason followed Gliath around the walkway—staying well away from the battlements that barely served as elegant guard rails—they killed any of the creatures that came close. Whenever they came from the front, lying in wait around corners or hidden on strange elevated bridges that led to various outer buildings of the weird castle, Gliath killed them with ease. The leopardwere was faster and stronger with larger reach, so he cut them to bloody pieces with bursts of displaced feathers and soft, downy plumes that fell to the walkway floor or floated over the edge and out of sight. Jason covered their backs, killing that one harpy close to the walkway where she crashed and bled out, and shooting another out of the sky, sending her plummeting to the swamp.
Eventually, Gliath turned into an archway that was very tall, but not tall enough for the giant that lived within.
"What is this?" Jason asked, following the leopardwere into the shadowy interior. There were no torches on the walls. In fact, the wall on his left was covered in something like a hardwood floor.
"I don't know," Gliath rumbled. "The castle changes."
Once they were inside, they weren't troubled by the harpies anymore. Gliath cinched closed the dump pouch holding the many harpy feathers he'd collected.
"What are those for?" Jason asked. His voice echoed through the quiet hall. "I remember seeing that harpy bounty before, but it's gone now, isn't it? Think we can sell these to Skinner?"
"That bounty is passed," Gliath replied, scanning the darkness ahead. Jason turned on his night vision. "But we will keep them to sell later, should the opportunity present itself again."
"Good idea. May as well."
They continued into the castle. The whole while, Gliath kept looking up at the ceiling, peering through space as if trying to make their way to somewhere up high. Before long, they came to an open room and stopped at its threshold. The floor of the vast, empty room was fifteen feet below the floor of the corridor they were standing in. The ceiling was perhaps fifty feet high. They'd followed their path to a drop-off that didn't make sense.
"What the hell?" Jason asked.
"Follow me," Gliath said, easily scaling down the wall and dropping to the stone floor below.
Jason frowned down at the distant floor. He pulled up his OCS and rifted to the floor instead, after closing his right eye to keep from blinding himself. As his rift lit up the vast room with blazing orange light, he saw that the floor looked more like a ceiling. In fact, about thirty feet inside, there was a gargantuan crystal chandelier—lightless and devoid of torches, candles, or any other source of illumination—installed in the center of the floor and sagging to one side.
After stepping through to the floor/ceiling, Jason collapsed the rift and followed Gliath toward another corridor with a polished stone slope heading up after a short step up. As Jason followed Gliath onto the strange, wide incline, he looked up and saw that the ceiling—thirty feet or more above him—was shaped like gigantic upside-down stairs. Each step-like carving was about five feet deep as if ... sized for four-foot-long feet...
Stairs! Jason thought, gaping up at the upside-down staircase.
He struggled to climb the forty-five-degree angle slope of polished stone. It was a lot harder than
he thought it would be—like climbing the sloped wall of a drainage ditch, but the surface wasn't porous and rough like concrete.
After slipping and sliding for a while, Jason looked up and saw that Gliath was having no trouble.
"Hang on, Gliath!" he said, trying not to shout. Jason took off his backpack.
Gliath waited and looked back.
"What is it?" he asked from above.
"Take this." Jason fished a coil of paracord out from his CamelBak backpack and tossed it up to the leopardwere, who caught it with ease. "Lower that down to me from the top so I can get up, okay? Can you hold my weight while I climb up?"
"Yes, Jason Leaper 934," Gliath replied then continued up.
Once the Krulax was a long way up the slope and out of sight, Jason saw the coils and end of his thin, black rope tumbling down toward him. He took the loose end, considered it for a moment, then ran the line around his waist in a way that would let him climb up with less risk, gradually taking the slack in as he went, without having to outright pull on the skinny cord with his fists.
Jason scaled the slope, sweating and grunting step by slippery step, until he finally reached Gliath in a vast hall with a floor of mismatched stone of random colors and styles butting up against each other in a way that didn't make sense.
He nodded at Gliath, listening and looking around as he coiled up his rope again. Then, taking off his pack to put the rope back inside, Jason gasped when the entire castle around him seemed to shift. A loud, grinding sound started up from all directions that filled Jason with the terror of the unknown.
"Prepare yourself!" Gliath bellowed over the suddenly very loud noise of stone grating against stone. "The castle is changing!"
"What do you mean changing?!" Jason asked, stuffing the rope into his pack and throwing it back around his shoulders. He slung his AK and tightened down his straps. Without thinking about it, his hand drifted up and grasped the 'home key' around his neck.
Then, the walls cracked open in several places, letting in varying colors of light. It seemed like the whole world around Jason was opening up at the seams. In some directions, he saw the glow from fire; in others, the white light of daylight, dazzling in the image intensifier of his right eye.
"Follow me!" Gliath shouted, then ran down the hall.
"Holy shit!" Jason cried, then kicked his ass into gear, immediately struggling to keep up with the nimble leopardwere.
"Jump!" Gliath bellowed, running ahead of him.
Jason suddenly saw a gap opening in the stone floor in his path. He leapt over it, seeing nothing but a black void opening under him with the shadowy forms of gargantuan blocks twisting and turning in shades of green in his night vision.
He ran. Moving without thinking—trying not to think—Jason just focused on Gliath and their rotating surroundings. It seemed that entire segments of the castle were shuffling around, swiveling in random directions, all while Jason's senses were swallowed by the chaotic grinding of untold tons of stone and marble sliding and crunching against other pieces of itself.
The deep, crunchy grinding was loud all around him. Every once and a while, there was a monstrous slam as if pieces of the castle were colliding or joining together.
At one point, the two of them needed to go up.
Jason knew that he couldn't do it. He felt a thrill of terror when he saw Gliath spring up a ten-foot wall. He knew that he couldn't follow, but then, the leopardwere stretched down—reaching with most of his body—and Jason wrapped both arms around the leopardwere's iron-like black hand and was pulled up to join him.
Another time, the floor and right wall of a tall corridor suddenly rotated laterally away from them, and a yawning triangle of expanding darkness appeared right under Jason's descending boot...
As he yelped, Jason felt something strong pull on his backpack, wrenching his shoulders with the straps, and Gliath had him. Looking down, Jason saw the darkness open through shadowy cubes and other huge shapes bathed in the dark green of his night vision, and he saw the world open up below them. He saw the grey and red muddy colors of the swamp far below and the black clouds of the storm raging around down there.
They were in another maelstrom.
Was the storm connected with the castle? It had to be. Every time that weird, unnatural gale started up and faded a few minutes later, it seemed to retreat toward the floating fortress, or somewhere nearby. The castle, the giant, the storms, and the will-o-wisps were all connected!
"Thanks!" Jason shouted back to Gliath above the noise of the grinding stone.
They stood for a while near the precipice, until another moving floor appeared. Just as they were about to continue down the chaotic hall, the floor rose up—Jason and Gliath both leapt backwards to avoid being crushed—and it slammed into the ceiling, creating a dead end.
Gliath led the way back. They then turned into another hall that hadn't been there moments before. Jason was so fried by adrenaline that he wasn't surprised to see a huge, polished throne of some kind fixed sideways to a wall decorated with plush, red carpet.
As they stepped past the giant's gargantuan sideways chair—very out-of-place in a corridor—then around a corner and into another huge, random hall, Jason realized that the grinding sound was quieting.
They slowed as the noise settled down. There were several more chunky slams here and there in all directions around Jason through the floor, ceiling, and walls.
Then, things were quiet again.
Jason realized that he was breathing like he'd just run a race. His heart was pounding. His lungs hurt.
"Oh my God—that was crazy!" he said.
"Come," Gliath said. "I believe I can find the way to Ranaja and Morgana Soloster from here."
Of course Gliath wasn't breathing hard. He stared down at Jason in the dark, totally unfazed. Just another day for a Krulax warrior, huh?
Jason unslung his AK-47 again, taking long, deep breaths. He pulled up his bite-valve and took several long drinks of water before dropping it again. The motion made him feel better.
Shit—that was insane, he thought.
"Okay, let's go," Jason said.
As they turned toward the other end of the long, random room—Gliath was eyeing another tall archway leading to another great corridor—a blue glow appeared down there and grew so rapidly that Jason couldn't do anything but stare...
The giant—goddamned Voro the broken god himself—suddenly walked through the arch and stepped into the room; tall and regal, carved from stone with an inner glow that radiated from his smooth skin like a turquoise-blue moon, covered in motes of multicolored fire that quickly explored his body like flowing water. He was wearing the same ancient-Greek-looking skirt and sandals; his face placid and invulnerable, his eyes like golden embers, instantly considering both Jason and Gliath.
Jason wanted to raise his rifle, but he didn't dare move. He yearned to grab for his lava key, but stared in awe instead.
Gliath darted off to the side, gone.
The primordial giant's glowing eyes followed the leopardwere for a moment before returning to Jason.
When Jason met his gaze, he felt an overwhelming sense of power and peace.
What?!
Standing maybe forty feet away but still seeming close because of his tremendous size, the giant moved as a man, crossing his arms over his naked, blue chest. Jason saw golden bracelets the size of hula hoops over Voro's forearms. A strange pendant hung between the large, smooth pectorals of the giant's chest. The titan's belt was made of shining gold as well, subdued before the blue luminescence of his slender and muscled stomach.
In the image intensifier of Jason's right eye, the Voro's skin and strange fire circulating around his body felt almost painful, but he was too scared to turn his night vision off.
He could see the brilliant colors clearly with his normal left eye.
The giant spoke.
"Why are you in my castle, small man?"
The words almost blew Jason's m
ind. He heard them aloud from the huge, smiling lips as deep as thunder and with the timbre of a bottomless ocean. He also heard the question in his head.
Jason looked up at Voro in wonder. He couldn't believe it. The size and scope of the giant was incredible. The top of Jason's head might reach the titan's knees. He was taller than the Tyrannosaurus Rex from the Wilderlands. He might have made Jason's Dreadwraith his pet.
Yet, there was not a bit of malice radiating from this magnificent creature.
Jason felt like Voro could squish him like a bug without much thought, but he felt at that moment like the giant had zero intention to do so.
Was he being charmed somehow?
"I ... I uh..." Jason stammered for a moment before grounding himself and trying to use a bigger voice. "I'm here looking for my friends!" he called. "There's a man and a woman. You ... you took them away with you from next to a troll's cave!"
The titan raised a massive glowing hand and stroked his naked chin in thought.
Jason was reminded again of Doctor Manhattan from that movie 'The Watchmen' in his gigantic form. Voro's skin glowed turquoise-blue a lot like that superhero's skin did in the movie, but there was also the rainbow fire traveling all around his chiseled form...
"A man and a woman?" Voro repeated with a gently booming voice that doubled in Jason's mind. "I suppose you mean a man and a woman like you."
"Yes!" Jason replied, feeling a little angry but also terrified to holy hell. "You took them here! I need them back! ... Please."
"I have no other creatures like you, little man," the titan replied with a smile. "I've no friends here but the harpies and my pets."
"Pets?" Jason repeated. Every time the giant spoke, the deep, rolling voice sent a fresh jolt of adrenaline through Jason's blood. This creature was powerful. He was very different than the ettins and the trolls; another whole level. Voro gave off an aura of Zayden-Skinner-levels of power. "What pets?"
Jason then felt a hand on his shoulder and just about jumped out of his skin. He turned back and saw Gliath standing behind him.
