Into the Madness

by Richard H. Stephens

  The dragon’s head spun, its emerald eyes narrowing on the one responsible for its torment.

  Seeing the beast rear up on its hind legs, Helleden thought for sure his time had come.

  His rings flared, their magic coalescing with that of his ruby pendant. He waggled his fingers and released the controlling spell.

  A wispy trail of crimson vapour streamed between him and the dragon, the magical essence infusing the length of the cable pulled tight around the dragon’s neck—seeping into its metal surface.

  The dragon’s head jerked forward, bringing its forelegs crashing down; its open mouth exposed jagged teeth longer than his arm.

  Helleden flinched but the beast fell short of his position. He threw his cloak in front of his face, anticipating a fiery breath that never came. Instead, he sensed the mind of the enraged beast within his own.

  In the blink of his mind’s eye, he instilled the dragon’s brain with an agonizing pain that quenched the gout of fire building within its throat.

  The dragon gagged on the psionic pain. Helleden barraged the beast’s mind with images of Silurian hanging onto the end of the magical lasso cinched around its neck.

  The dragon’s backlash was so powerful it nearly overwhelmed his control and severed the link. Outrage. Extreme sadness. A primordial need to expunge those responsible for the dragons’ plight.

  Helleden fed his thoughts into the mind of the monstrous creature whining pathetically before him. An animal capable of incinerating him in seconds, or swallowing him whole. A dragon that had proven itself virtually indestructible according to the legends, and yet he had taken it down and was now exerting his control over it.

  With just a subtle twist in the dragon’s thought process, he could convince it to crawl over to the edge and throw itself into the pounding surf. As much as this pleased him, he was troubled by the lack of communication from this intelligent beast. Through all the anguish Helleden instilled within its mind, it remained curiously silent.

  He’d never employed his psionics on a creature of this size—nor, if his instincts were accurate, a creature of this intelligence. Men were easy to manipulate. Dragons, it seemed, were not.

  Manipulating its pain sensors to keep the beast at bay, Helleden slipped in nuances of how Zephyr’s kings and queens had orchestrated the hunt centuries ago. In that, he wasn’t far off the mark.

  He sensed confusion in the dragon as it attempted to reconcile its ancient memory of the atrocities committed against its kind. Helleden tread dangerous ground but as long as he merely tainted factual occurrences, at least the ones he had learned from the scrolls and books in the Wizard’s Spike, he was confident that by the time the dragon faced Phazarus and Silurian, the beast would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t.

  Since Silurian and the Wizards of the North had no way of communicating with the dragon, they would be forced to defend themselves against it. If things went as Helleden foresaw, their actions would fuel the dragon’s misguided belief that they meant it harm.

  As the dragon grovelled before him in the throes of agony, Helleden’s confidence knew no bounds. Through his mastery of the arcane arts he had at his beck and call an obsidian nightmare.

  Coming Home

  Stranded at the bottom of an impassable cliff, Silurian weathered the storm throughout the night.

  Lightning flashed, outlining a distinct promontory over his head that projected over the ocean. Even had he not seen the underside edge of the plateau, he knew he was close. The malevolent presence of Helleden’s stain had accosted him as soon as he approached Fishmonger Bay. The earth blood magic in his sword guided him through the sleepy hamlet and up the narrow trail beyond.

  Climbing a steep hill and descending to the shoreline on its far side, he sensed Helleden’s presence through his sword, but before he was able to reach the sorcerer, a storm swept in, battering the shoreline and leaving him helpless to do anything but wait.

  He located a sheltered alcove in the rock face to wait it out. Somehow, against his best effort to deny it, sleep found him.

  His eyes flicked open near the end of the night, awakened by strong magic being employed nearby. Carried on the shoulders of a gale force wind, rain hammered the coast. He squinted through the deluge at brooding clouds swirling across the night sky. As he watched, a brilliant crimson flash lit up the sky above the promontory.

  Fighting to see in the ensuing darkness, he staggered and almost fell into the raging surf. The silhouette of a beast of enormous proportions hovered over the rock formation. It folded its wings and dove out of sight.

  The outcrop lit up in a fiery glow, and shortly afterward someone flew off the ledge, arms flailing wildly and dropping out of sight.

  Flames erupted beyond the lip of the rock formation, the fury audible from where he stood at its base far below.

  Something big was happening up there and he was powerless to intervene. Had anyone been close by, they would have heard him shout his frustration to the gods—not once, but many times. He was so close to confronting Helleden but he may as well have been back in Nordic Wood.

  He unsheathed his sword, its blade bursting into blue light and dripping tiny blue flames. The weapon illuminated the path at his feet leading beneath the waves. He considered braving the water and swimming across the base of the cliff but the thunderous retorts of the waves kept him at bay. He gritted his teeth and waited for the conditions to ease.

  With dawn came the tide, forcing him to wait even longer. He impatiently bided the morning hours away until the surf calmed. Not waiting for the shoreline to become fully exposed in the falling tide, he waded into the cold surf.

  The path dipped lower than he hoped. At its deepest point, a frothy swell rode up over his sword belt. He didn’t care. The cold, the wet, the hunger, the pain in his joints—they meant nothing. He had one thing on his mind. He didn’t dare think beyond that.

  Reaching the far side of the cliff’s base, he spotted an animal track leading into the dizzying heights. Even though the path ran away from the plateau overhead, there didn’t appear to be another way to access the heights.

  Standing at the end of the shoreline trail, he stepped away from the edge to escape the worst of an incoming swell. The wave surged past the broad rock under his feet and crashed into a shallow alcove that prevented anyone on foot from travelling farther up the shoreline.

  He craned his neck. The promontory extended over the water, casting the immediate area in shadow. The sun lay hidden behind the plateau and the iron-grey clouds sweeping northeastward.

  With his life’s goal in reach, self-doubt entered his thinking. The devil responsible for robbing him of his reason to live stood atop the rock formation. All he had to do was climb up there and fulfill the desperate yearning that fueled his will to live. If not for his insatiable desire for revenge, he would have succumbed to the dark desire of falling on his blade the day he had returned home to find his family slaughtered.

  And yet, with Helleden within reach, he faltered. Fear gripped him. Not fear for what he assumed awaited him. He didn’t care if he died as long as the son of a bitch died with him. He feared failure. What if he wasn’t up to the task? What if Helleden killed him and lived? He couldn’t bear the thought of that outcome.

  He believed that by discovering the earth blood fount, he had been afforded the power he required to finish the task he’d let slip through his fingers on the bloody plains of Lugubrius.

  How many people had died as a result of his failure? Tens of thousands of innocent people at the very least. All because he had lacked what it took to rise above his grief and go after the vile sorcerer years ago.

  And then Alhena…he shook his head…Phazarus had come along. Reaching through his self-loathing, the old man had given him the opportunity to make amends. Looking back, he couldn’t help thinking he was already too late.

  His beloved queen had died because he wasn’t strong enough to face his demons. If he could believe the tale
of the Chamber fiasco, the merciful Abraham Uzziah had been subverted by Helleden, and had prepared the kingdom’s stage for the day the sorcerer returned.

  Silurian shivered at the thought of how the poor chambermaster’s spirit must be dealing with the result of his actions. Facilitating King Malcolm’s death must have driven a knife through the Chambermaster’s heart. Silurian hoped the gracious man hadn’t been aware of his actions in the end.

  And then there was Rook. His best friend had died defending those left behind—doing his best to pick up the shattered pieces of the broken land in a futile effort to make things right.

  He screamed his frustration into the howling wind. It should have been him! If he’d acted faster, his best friend—his sister’s husband—might still be alive.

  His sister. The only important person left to him. The one who fueled his passion to do what must be done. He steeled his resolve. He mustn’t fail. Her life depended on it.

  He envisioned her innocent face, recalling her fear the day they had faced Hairy and Thonk all those years ago. He had delivered her safely from those nightmarish beasts. He planned to do so again.

  It was time to set things straight.

  Fishmonger Bay bustled with early morning activity. Fisherwomen and men were bent tending nets or loading bait in the scuppers of deep hulled skiffs as they prepared for the day. The sun remained hidden behind The Spine, leaving the coastal hamlet in cool shadow. Judging by the thick cloud cover drifting over the churning ocean and the branches and other loose debris littering the area, a bad storm had ravaged the coast last night.

  To Sadyra and Melody, the temperature felt balmy compared to the cold of the mountain pass. Sweat dripped from their faces—it had been a long night. Neither woman had slept much since leaving their companions, but their spirits were bolstered by their proximity to their destination.

  Sadyra’s eyes flitted from the local tavern to the smithy, from the poor excuse of a shipyard to the mercantile building—its roof sagging precariously in the middle. Nothing ever changed in the backward community of her youth.

  Her pace slowed as childhood memories assaulted her. She envisioned her younger sisters playing in the surf, looking over their shoulders as if worried about who watched them. A huge wave rose out of the sea and washed over them. When it receded, only the older girl remained. Sadyra gasped…

  “Sadyra!” Melody’s voice brought her back to the present.

  Sadyra shook her head. She’d imagined it. Of course. Her sisters—she swallowed the lump in her throat, correcting herself—her sister was grown up now.

  Her tired gaze drifted beyond the town centre to where a path wound farther up the coast toward the hovel she had grown up in.

  She blinked back the tears blurring her vision. She had fought so hard to forget her past and now, here it was, unfolding before her. She bit her lower lip and glanced at Melody.

  “Sorry. Just a bad memory.”

  The Wizard of the North gave her a strange look, but her question wasn’t what she thought it would be. “Where now?”

  “You said the Summoning Stone is a jut of rock protruding over the water not too far north of here, right?”

  “That’s what I gleaned from the tome in the Wizard’s Spike.”

  Gleaned? Sadyra frowned. She had no idea what that meant. However, she understood the gist. “The coast from this point on is almost impassable by land. A small trail leads up that hill.” She indicated the steep rise on the far side of Fishmonger Bay. “From up there we see a great, black rock sticking out of the mountainside. I’ve been there many times. It’s nothing special really.”

  “Take me to it.”

  “It’s a rough trail. It wanders up and down the mountainside, passing by the bottom of a cliff along the shoreline to just beyond the outcrop. If the tide’s in, we won’t be able to get there.”

  Melody studied the mountain heights. “If that’s the only way there, let’s move.”

  Sadyra followed her gaze. There were other ways into the upper levels if one knew where to place their hands and feet.

  Walking through town, which consisted of a dozen or more ramshackle, wooden buildings leaning away from a solitary dock jutting into the waves, Sadyra noticed Melody’s interest in the odd statues and washed out murals on the cliffs behind the hamlet. She’d forgotten the villagers’ fixation with dragons.

  It never dawned on her until that moment to make the correlation with what they might be facing. As far as she was concerned, the tales of flying beasts indoctrinated into the history of Fishmonger Bay were nothing more than fanciful myths to entertain children and the rare visitor. She’d never thought much about the statues. Growing up, they were just something that was always there, like a tree, or an old building.

  To her, Fishmonger Bay was a dead-end village inhabited by backward thinking people. A place without a future. She dismissed the notion that her hometown was anything but a mishmash of jumbled buildings offering nothing more than poverty and heartache.

  She shook her head at the local pier. Without a break wall, the dock on their left was a muddle of planks and posts loosely tied together. How many times the townspeople had rebuilt it over the years, Sadyra had no idea. In calmer weather, it served as a great place to moor the heavily laden fishing boats, but in heavy seas, any boats tethered to the pilings were churned into driftwood. The jetty lay empty, its deck disappearing beneath rolling whitecaps.

  Trying to remain inconspicuous, they walked through the town with their faces pointed straight forward, trying not to make eye contact. Sadyra kept her head low. Recognizing many of the grizzled faces walking about, she dreaded the prospect of anyone remembering her but as they passed beyond the last dilapidated warehouse and started up a slick mountain trail, she felt oddly sad when no one had.

  Near the top of the slope, the traces of a path branched up into the trees to the right. Had she not known where the ancient grave markers of some distant relatives lay partially hidden beneath an old lilac bush, she would never think it was anything more than an animal track. She knew better. The path led to her old home. The hovel she was born in. The one her parents had died in. The one she had killed them in. She stifled her tears. They had had it coming.

  Standing on top of the hill, the coastline spread out before them, littered with jagged reefs that were forever pounded by ocean swells.

  Sadyra recalled more than once being caught out there, unprepared for the sudden storms that swept over the heights unannounced and battered the coast. She’d wrecked a few of the family’s fishing boats as a child. She could still feel the welts she’d received as a result.

  “There!” Sadyra yelled over the noise of the wind and surf, pointing to a promontory that appeared too heavy to be hanging off the mountainside. It projected over the sea at a higher elevation than where they stood, but she knew its top was as flat as Madrigail Lake.

  “How long will it take us to get there?”

  Sadyra pursed her lips and tilted her head. “If we catch the tide out, we should make it there by noon.”

  Melody frowned. “That long?”

  Sadyra nodded. “Unless you know how to fly.” As soon as she said it, she regretted her choice of words. It wasn’t lost on her what they might be up against. She tried to envision what kind of damage her arrows would do against a dragon. Provide it kindling, more like.

  “Will the tide be out then?”

  “Not sure. It changes daily. We should’ve asked in town.”

  Both women looked back at the distant hamlet, barely visible from the hillcrest through the trees.

  Melody’s hood blew off her head, whipping her blonde hair in the wind and covering her face as she spoke. “We can’t go back. We have to find Silurian.”

  Sadyra pulled her own hair from her face. “How do you know where he is?” She examined the crags above their position. “He could be anywhere.”

  Melody threw her arms in the air. “I don’t. We’ll just have to start there
and hope we discover something.”

  Sadyra followed her gaze to the promontory. As fit as she was, the last few days had been grueling. She didn’t relish traversing the hazardous trail up to the so-called Summoning Stone. How Melody had kept up with her was a mystery. The woman was driven, and with good reason, but there were limits on what a body could do.

  Melody started down the steep hill, using that same staff to keep from slipping on the slick layer of mud amid the rock-strewn path.

  Sadyra let her get a good distance ahead, making sure no one followed. She wouldn’t get a better overview of the land until they reached their destination.

  For some reason, she had an urge to fire an arrow toward Fishmonger Bay. She might have if she thought it would fly that far.

  She took two long, steadying breaths—a technique Pollard had taught her years ago, and her tension eased enough to focus on her role with the Wizard of the North.

  Melody wasn’t exactly thinking straight. The woman had too much to concentrate on. Too much to lose. Sadyra knew she would have to be the level-headed one if they wished to get anywhere near their intended target.

  She took a third breath for good measure and let it out slowly. If the sorcerer was up there, today would be judgement day. Depending on the outcome, it might prove true for the rest of the world as well.

  She adjusted her gear and made to step onto the trail but stopped, her attention riveted on the promontory. She squinted, trying to focus on the ledge. Something moved up there. Something huge. She watched a while longer, but whatever it was had moved away from the edge.

  She checked on Melody’s progress. The wizard rounded a bend far below and disappeared.

  Sadyra gauged the waves against the crags jutting out of the surf. They were in luck; the tide appeared to be pulling out. She realized she knew this just by watching the rhythm of the sea. This was her home town. She had grown up here. She had laughed and loved and worked hard here. She knew the nuances of the coast as if it were an old friend. A friend she had abandoned to escape the cruelty of her parents. She fought back tears. A tough place to come home to.