The Soul Forge

by Andrew Lashway

  “I don’t… I can’t…”

  The Inanis were closing in, only ten feet away.

  “If I say ‘wench,’ you’d be upset. If you insulted my farm, I’d be upset. Words have power.”

  She stared unsure and terrified.

  “If I said kiss me, you’d probably be really surprised.”

  She looked up at him, and her fear melted away to be replaced with that coy look she favored. “Not all that surprised, no.”

  “Then surprise them,” Thomas said. They had nowhere else to go.

  The Inanis reached out, their wooden hands grasping for their throats. Thomas did the only thing he could think of and grabbed their arms, and they effectively began to wrestle. Maybe if Thomas was fresh, if his muscles weren’t exhausted and his brain drawing ever closer to shutting down, maybe he would have stood a chance. But in his weakened state, he couldn’t hold off the Inanis for more than a few seconds before it shoved him to the ground. It raised an arm, claws angled to tear into or tear off his face.

  “Stop.”

  It was so very simple, Cynthia’s command. As soon as the word left her mouth, the Inanis froze in their tracks. Thomas sat up, staring in shock at the unmoving creatures.

  “Well what do ya know?” he said. He looked at Cynthia, who was holding her head with one hand and pointing the other at the Inanis.

  “It… it hurts,” was all she could say.

  “I know sweetheart, I know,” Thomas said, pulling her towards the outpost. “Let’s get out of here, then you can let ‘em go.”

  “But they’ll attack the outpost,” Cynthia mumbled, the pain making her face redder than the blood that was filling it.

  “Okay,” Thomas said, trying to think fast. He was so very tired of thinking. But from the corners of his imagination came an idea.

  “Tell them to sleep,” Thomas said. Cynthia looked at him, confused, and the moment broke her concentration. The Inanis turned back at them and started forward, moving faster this time.

  “Tell them to sleep, Cynthia!” Thomas yelled, turning to run. Cynthia held her ground, and Thomas stopped before he could get started.

  “Sleep,” she commanded.

  And on cue, they all fell over as if knocked unconscious.

  “Bravo,” Thomas said, laughing his fear away. She looked up at him and without ado, she kissed him on the mouth.

  Taken by surprise, Thomas wasn’t able to kiss her back until she had already pulled away. Feeling cheated, he leaned forward and kissed her, and for a full ten seconds they stood there over the sleeping bodies of their foes, lips locked together.

  They broke apart, each one decidedly more red in the face than they had been previously. Without the need for words, both broke into a run for the outpost, time now decidedly against them.

  Nothing got in their way, and they ran through the streets without interference. They made it back to the mine, where they heard the dwarves working away at the wall of rock in front of them. It stretched up the mountain, hundreds of rocks of varying sizes reaching at least thirty feet.

  “It’ll take ‘em a million years to dig through all that,” Thomas said.

  “Well, what if we start digging from this side?” Cynthia suggested, looking around for any tools.

  “No time, we have to get moving,” Thomas replied, staring at the rock base for ideas. Then one struck him.

  “If we move the smaller rocks, that’ll take a lot of weight off of the big ones,” he said.

  “So move the small rocks?”

  “Yup.”

  Together, they threw whatever rocks they found out of the way. A time or two, Thomas pulled a rock from the stack that shifted them all, and he and Cynthia had to abandon the pile to avoid getting crushed.

  Thomas grabbed a rock that was just a little too heavy for him to move alone, and called Cynthia over to help him. The moment they both touched the rock, the whole stone wall shifted and they were thrown to the ground. Thomas hit the ground, winded, and wasn’t able to move as the stones fell around him. Cynthia wasn’t so lucky; the stones weren’t kind enough to avoid her, and one smashed into her leg. There was a sickening crunch, and her scream pounded into his brain like a nail.

  He hurried over to her, and he saw immediately that her leg was broken. He didn’t dare touch it, unsure of himself, but he was saved from having to do anything by the dwarves. Apparently, the shift in weight had at last done the trick, and they were free from the mines. Two or three dwarves converged on Cynthia, pushing Thomas away so they could help her.

  Thomas stood, torn beyond measure. He wanted to stay with her, he needed to stay with her, but he was running out of time. If the Necro-Caster got to the Makers, if anything happened to them… if anything happened to Gilkor or Miranda… to Zach…

  “Go!”

  The command came from a very angry Cynthia, though Thomas wasn’t sure if she was angry at him or the rock that had attacked her. But when she shouted at him again, he knew it didn’t matter. He nodded once, and sprinted away from her. All he had to do was find their quarters, collect the blade, and then find his way up the mountain.

  The first part of the plan was the only part that went off without a hitch. He found their quarters easily.

  It was smashed to nothing more than wood and pebbles from a boulder that had to have been larger than it was.

  “No…”

  Thomas moved forward out of impulse, hands shifting aside the wreckage in the vain hope of finding the General’s equipment. His hands hit something metal, and a spark of excitement surged in him. He threw the rock and wood away to reveal the sheath, with the hilt sticking out from it. Smiling, Thomas grabbed the handle.

  The sheath stayed behind.

  Thomas stared at the handle, disbelief etched into every line on his face. He stared it up and down, as if expecting the blade to pull itself back together.

  He slumped to the ground, momentarily defeated. There went their last chance.

  But wait, not quite. A new thought burst into his brain, one that rekindled hope in him. The blade had to be tempered anyway. So the Maker’s would have to re-forge the blade from the ground up now. It wasn’t that terrible. Even Thomas could probably do it. Probably.

  He gathered up the pieces as quickly as he was able, making sure to keep most of them in the sheath. He looked around for the shield, finally finding it smashed to pieces. He sighed, but it couldn’t be helped. If he didn’t get to the top of the mountain soon, all would be lost.

  Thomas sprinted back the way he had come, feeling his muscles were more like crossbeams than limbs. He made it to the spot where Cynthia had last been, but she and her dwarf caretakers had disappeared.

  “Hey,” Thomas asked a nearby dwarf, “where’d they take her?”

  “They said they were going to see the elves, down in the city,” she replied, “the Healer is the only one who could save the leg.”

  “Save?” Thomas repeated, aghast. “How bad was the injury?”

  “Well,” she replied, looking almost green, “her leg… they said it was bending in the opposite direction.”

  Thomas immediately felt disgusted and ashamed. It was his idea that had caused her to be hurt. She had only been following his instructions.

  He nodded to the dwarf, trying and failing to keep his emotions under control. His anger at himself demanded motion, and he started to sprint up the mountain. Rock walls jumped up from all sides, some covered in snow the higher up he got. His exhaustion forgotten, his mission pushed to the back of his mind, all he really wanted was to get to the top and punch the Necro-Caster’s face into a greasy smear.

  The deviant would pay for what he had done.

  The smoke hadn’t cleared around the summit, but as Thomas approached he found he didn’t much care. Only when a stark need for oxygen presented itself by threatening to make him pass out did he finally stop running, but his anger hadn’t stopped. Every moment he had to wait was another moment he was losing. The only advantage
he had was that he was taking a path while the Necro-Caster was climbing the mountain.

  Thomas started running again, ignoring the protest of his lungs. His shoes were wearing away, revealing parts of his feet to the jagged stones he ran on. He ignored that too. He focused every ounce of his mental energy on climbing the mountain, drawing ever closer to the smoke that hid the Maker’s home.

  Suddenly, he was there. Smoke surrounded him, making it impossible to see or even think. The smoke was everywhere, pushing into his lungs and his eyes and his brain. He fell to the ground, hoping the smoke would float over him. This plan also met with failure as the smoke was there too.

  Thomas punched the stone beneath him, ignoring the shout of pain and spurt of blood that greeted the action. He put his hands together and started rubbing them, his hands moving back and forth so fast they appeared to grow by several inches. Fire appeared, but Thomas didn’t stop. He simply kept working up heat, moving faster and faster until he felt he was going to burn himself from the friction.

  Then he blew into his hands, and the fire became an inferno.

  It shot out from his palms and pushed away some of the smoke with pure momentum alone, momentarily revealing the path ahead. Before the smoke had a chance to settle, Thomas started running again, a hunger he had never felt before present in his eyes. He sprinted for the Maker’s forge, slipping on the stones and the blood he was leaving behind, but the pain wasn’t going to stop him. Nothing was.

  He had promised that the Necro-Caster would die, and he was, if nothing else, a man of his word.

  The smoke descended again, and this time Thomas didn’t have the strength to create a hole with fire. He pressed on, using the walls of the mountain as a guide, but after a few feet he found that the wall had disappeared. All that remained was snow, which cooled the burning in his blistered feet and somehow cooled his rage as the cold pushed into his skin.

  He walked a few more feet and found he could breathe again. He hunched over, hands on his knees, and tried to get his heart rate and his temper under control. It was harder than he could have imagined, and that scared him a little bit.

  Then a blast of lightning missed his face by about two inches, and he found the control he was trying to exhibit vanish.

  He had been the Necro-Caster to the top, somehow, but only just. Now the defiler of the dead was here too, and he was clearly displeased to see Thomas.

  Thomas couldn’t have cared less how the Necro-Caster felt. His temper boiling over, he sprinted towards the Necro-Caster, unknowingly leaving bloody footprints behind him. He drew his fist back, ready to sink it into the Necro-Caster’s face, when the Necro-Caster ducked away and Thomas’ punch went awry. The Necro-Caster took advantage, sinking a fist of his own into Thomas’ gut and momentarily winding him. He then tried to club Thomas on the back, but Thomas caught the taller man’s fist and responded with a straight shot to the Necro-Caster’s nose.

  Both backed away, trying to gather themselves. Thomas was first, and he let loose with three lightning fast punches that all connected with the Necro-Caster’s face. The counterattack was a punch fired into Thomas’ face that knocked Thomas to the ground, and he rolled in the snow as he attempted to recover his bearings.

  The Necro-Caster didn’t give him the chance, kicking him in the gut and sending him tumbling further down the slopes of the mountain. Before Thomas even knew it, he was lying at the edge of the summit, faced with a perilous drop down the slopes of the mountain. Ignoring the blistering pain in his abdomen, Thomas regained his feet and snarled. The Necro-Caster approached slowly, his eyes narrowed, wary of a trap.

  Thomas put his hands behind his back, rubbing them together as fast as he could without breaking eye contact with his foe. Belatedly realizing what Thomas was up to, the Necro-Caster summoned his forks of lighting to his hands. The lightning shot out at him at the same moment he dropped to his knees and blew flame like a fabled dragon in return.

  The lightning missed him by only a foot. His fire blasted into the Necro-Caster, knocking him to the ground with a scream of pain. Before the downed man could recover, Thomas sprinted forward and jumped on top of him, bringing his fists down one after another. He didn’t relent, didn’t stop, until he felt other hands grab ahold of him. He immediately started squirming, trying to throw off the intruders so he could continue beating the Necro-Caster’s face into mush, but there were too many other pairs of hands.

  With a tremendous effort, they pulled him off and smothered him in the snow. Thomas tried to resist, but their combined weight was too much for him.

  Finally, he stopped resisting. It was only when he did that he recognized the scent of flowers that was Miranda and the ever-present smell of smoke that was Gilkor. The presence of his friends did nothing to slake his anger.

  “Buddy, calm down,” he heard Zach say.

  That sentence, that simple command, killed Thomas’ temper as if it had never even existed. Never before in all of his life had he ever been told to calm down. Not once. Instantly, shame filled him as he lay in the snow. He felt every bit of pain that was racking his body now, from his torn knuckles to his bleeding feet.

  But nothing hurt worse than the shame. He had been willing to beat a man to death with his bare hands. No, not just willing, he had tried! He was going to!

  They finally released him, and Thomas shifted to a sitting position as he stared at his hands. They were covered in blood, both his and not his. What was happening to him? It felt… it felt like someone had put a slow acting poison into his bloodstream, just waiting for it to activate and kill him.

  What would Ms. Anna say? Probably nothing, she was so young. She didn’t understand. She still needed to call him when she spilled milk. Gods, how long ago had that been? One week? Two? Was that really it? He felt like months, years had elapsed since he had seen his surrogate family. Thomas wondered if they were okay, if they had survived the Inanis invasion. If they hadn’t, if they had fallen to the dark…

  He put his head in his hands as tears started to roll down his cheeks. Unbidden, unwanted but unstoppable, he just sat there in the snow and cried, surprised that the snow didn’t freeze them on his face.

  “It’s going to be okay, Tom” he heard Zach say. Zach, who had already done so much for him in the short time they had known each other. Who had come through when it mattered most time and time again. Thomas had been a poor friend to him.

  “Where’s Cynthia, Thomas?” Gilkor asked. Instantly, Thomas felt he had taken another kick to the gut. How much pain was he supposed to handle today?

  “The rockslide…” he eventually forced out. “We were trying to clear it when it shifted. A rock, it hit her leg…” He couldn’t describe it, he couldn’t even think about it. “The dwarves took ‘er to see Morando, they said he’d be the only one who could… that would… save the leg.”

  “Gods…” Zach murmured, his face screwed up in sympathy.

  “She’ll be alright,” Gilkor smiled, “she’s a tough girl. Now come, we’ve made it to the Maker’s forge! Though how you made it up through the smoke is impressive.”

  “And you all,” Thomas replied, “climbing the side of a mountain.”

  “Truth be told,” Gilkor said a bit quieter, as if anyone could be listening in, “our way was probably the less dangerous. The smoke doesn’t sit on the cliffs the way it does in the path.”

  Thomas stood up, drying his face on his dirty sleeve. Miranda was smiling at him, he dress cut in several places but otherwise she looked fine. Zach was covered in dust, as if he had been clutching the rocks very tightly. Gilkor alone looked like the trip had been nothing out of the ordinary, and he simply stood there smiling.

  Thomas’ gaze turned from his friends to his foe at just the moment to see the Necro-Caster was propped up on one arm with his other arm directed not at him but at Miranda. Zach had put an arm around her without noticing the Necro-Caster, and now both of them were in the line of fire.

  Please, let me do this right
.

  He vaulted in front of them, taking the full blast of lightning to the stomach. Instantly, he felt all of his senses whited out as if someone had placed a heavy cloth over his brain. He flew back, disappearing from sight.

  Chapter 16: The Makers

  It was the strangest feeling, flight. Not bound by gravity for a moment that never seemed to end, he was sure he was literally flying. The whole open sky stretched out in front of him, untarnished, unmitigated. He smiled, or at least he thought he smiled. He never used half of the words in his vocabulary, as normally his conversational partners were a nine year old girl or the people in town who didn’t read much. But he knew a lot of complex words, he really did.

  None of that mattered right now. All that mattered was that he was flying, he was free. He didn’t have to worry about anything ever again.

  But wait… what about the nine year old girl? Something about her was sticking out in his memory, something he couldn’t place but he knew it was important. As he stared at the sky, he pondered why the clouds never stayed in the same shape. Did they change often? Were they just unsatisfied to stay in the same shape?

  Wait, the little girl. He shook his head, or he thought he shook his head, and tried to refocus. What about that little girl was so important?

  Oh, he thought, that’s what.

  Ms. Anna. Little Ms. Anna, the badly behaved little girl with the unresponsive mother and the father with so much on his plate. Ever since the accident… ever since that day…

  Ever since they had all burned.

  Thomas’ parents were over the Kimpchik’s doing whatever grownups did together while Thomas tried to find a book and a quiet place to read. Ms. Anna was just four at the time, so very little. So very young. Too young.

  Too young to watch her big brother die.

  She almost did, if Thomas had decided to read in the barn and not under the tree like he had originally planned. But the tree was closer, and it was such a nice day. The Kimpchik’s had gone for a walk, leaving the Finn’s and… and… what was his name?