Cloudfyre Falling - A dark fairy tale

by A. L. Brooks

  ‘Here be Dorubudur,’ Hawkmoth told them hushly, searching the place keenly.

  There were signs of recent habitation. Cat bones hanging from trees, animal skulls, tusked troll skulls, lining the tops of worn, crumbled walls. Some of the stonework had been painted too. Walls washed red by blood, Hawkmoth felt, and the guts and innards of intruders laid out on the surface of sloping walls in a rough pattern of the individuals they once belonged to, teeth and tongues and eyes completing these macabre portraits.

  And no sooner had the traveling group emerged from the Dark Wood, than they heard the march of boots upon rock and there emerged an army of skeleton warriors, clad haphazardly in armour, some bearing shields, and nearly all wielding some kind of weapon; maces, swords, morning stars, halberds, weapons and gear no doubt stolen from foot soldiers from kingdoms far afield. Hawkmoth knew that many of these skeleton men were what remained of those fallen foot soldiers; slain by the witches, left to rot, and finally enchanted, their meatless bodies rising and sent out as sentries, guards or warriors to do the bidding of their new masters.

  The foul reek that Gargaron and his friends had detected on arrival grew ever stronger now as the skeleton guard pressed forward.

  Locke laughed. ‘Ah at last, this day begins to meet my expectations.’ He had withdrawn his moon-blade, smiling all the while.

  Hawkmoth motioned for his companions to wait. And here he spoke.

  ‘Forgive our intrusion, but I am Hawkmoth Lifegiver, banished sorcerer of Sanctuary. I have with me friends from afar. The giant, Gargaron Stoneheart of Hovel. Forest nymph, Melai Willowborne of Thoonsk. Shore dweller, Sir Rishley Locke, of Barnacle-On-Sea. So hear me, if you will. We come in peace. And in hopes that we may finally put an end to this war that has raged for centuries beyond count. I return to you Mama Vekh. If you require it, I shall gladly give myself over to your keeping, if you desire it, hold me for a hundred years, for that is how long my foolish brothers held your Mama Vekh. If that be not enough, then let me offer up my life to end this conflict. But I plead, lay your boom weapons to rest. The world is almost at its end, enough blood has been shed. Let those that still live, live out their days in peace. Hear me now, please, I implore you.’

  There were no let-up in the eagerness of the skeleton warriors, grunting, hissing, pushing and heaving against Hawkmoth’s invisible force field. It told Hawkmoth one thing: that the witches had not changed their command, that they believed Hawkmoth were an advanced attack party.

  He sighed, and glanced left and right at his companions. ‘Looks like the witches are proving as stubborn as my Brothers. We have no choice but to fight.’

  Locke grinned. ‘Oh, how sad.’

  ‘So be it,’ Gargaron said, slurping down some strange brew from a blue gourd that give him a heightened battle mind. ‘Then let us be done with it.’

  Locke frowned. ‘I say, Gargaron. Might I ask what you are taking there, my friend?’

  Gargaron shrugged. ‘Something of my village druids’ making. Nectre of Newtlilly. A little pain ease is all. I shan’t be caught out again like I were with those damn Bewitched.’

  Locke smiled. ‘Pain ease, you say.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling pain ease is not all you take this for.’

  Gargaron shrugged and tossed the gourd over to Locke who caught it and studied it closely. He then popped off its lid, tilted it to Gargaron before pouring a measure down his throat. And then just to be sure, a second measure…

  ‘Right then,’ Hawkmoth called out to any witch ears that may have been listening. ‘To the leaders of Vantasia…’ His voice seemed to carry loud across the ruins. ‘Have it your way!’

  2

  Hawkmoth slammed down his staff, point first into the ground and the wall of blue light holding the skeleton army at bay pulsed and took a formation of mighty mastodon beasts that charged into the formation of warriors, knocking a hundred of them flying in a hundred different directions.

  Gargaron, Locke and Melai took this as a command to attack. And attack they did. Furiously, while the skeletal guard were rallying themselves.

  Locke heard music. The stirring tunes of the eighteen-string shelled jhotar, and shore horns and the haunting voices of beautiful crabwomen in song. He were not certain whether the song existed simply in his mind but to him it felt as though it rang out through the woodland. That everyone present could hear it. And it inspired him, strengthened him, boosted him.

  Gargaron heard whispers, the voices of the female sprites of the Summer Woods bordering Hovel, voices that warned of an attacker he could not see, and helped him anticipate attacks he did not see coming. Throwing his sword at thin air only to have it deflect a swinging blow by some bone-man. Swinging his sword out behind him, out of his range of sight, collecting attacks. He charged headlong into mobs of these bone men, swinging, slashing, parrying, stabbing, pushing his great sword between their ribs before twisting the blade and tearing the fiends apart from inside out. Either that or he dashed them up against trees, splintering them.

  Hawkmoth used the world around him: enchanting strangler trees, getting them to come to life, their roots like the tentacles of octopus; roots that grabbed armfuls of skeletals, crushing them, squeezing them, grinding them to dust and splinters, branches that swept great masses of bone men aside in single thrusts.

  Melai used specific arrows, ones containing gooey sap that roped and stuck their attackers to one another, rendering them immobile, to be battered to shards by a graceful Gargaron.

  Locke continued on his crazy berserk frenzy, roaring and skittering out into mobs of skeletons, lost amidst their numbers. The darts of his blowflute proved mostly ineffective; more seemed to miss their targets than hit. So he allowed his moon-blade do the cutting, each thrust sizzling, slicing through the skeletons like molten steel through fat. More than once Melai and Gargaron narrowly avoided being struck by his frenzied assault. But Locke seemed oblivious to it, yelling and laughing and talking to the enemy as he cut them down. ‘Come to the light,’ he yelled, ‘come on!’ and then, ‘Ha, there you go, have at it. Go on, have at it!’ Then when he found himself swamped, or his arms pinned, he drove his head at bone-man sternum, burrowing his horns into ribs, and with a violent twist of his head, pulled torsos apart in an explosion of shattered bone.

  Zebra slashed and bit and hissed and tore, and discarded bones flew every which way, like splinters of a wooden abode ripped apart in a storm. At one stage the skeletons of giants emerged and Gargaron told the others they were his. And off he went, battering, slashing, taking on these enormous fiends who wielded morning stars and maces. Once or twice he were clobbered, and his shield were smashed to bits. But he soon had the upper hand, hacking off their arms or legs before relieving them of their hissing, whining skulls.

  In the end there remained but a few scattered bone men, giant or otherwise, broken and injured, writhing about the ruins, unable to stand or continue their fight; some with dark vapour wisping from cracks in their skulls, others oozing reeking orange marrow from rents in their limbs.

  Locke stood there wild-eyed and panting, looking about bewildered, as if he had just woken up to what he’d been doing. The stirring music had gone from the world, now just the sound of his breathing, and the irksome scratch of busted bone against stone and ruins as bone men writhed weakly where they had fallen.

  Gargaron, more accustomed to the effects of his war syrup, simply stood there, taking in water, his muscles fatigued.

  Hawkmoth strode forward, stepping over dying skeletons, climbing up the ruins, clasping his staff. ‘Stay alert,’ he ordered his companions. ‘The next wave I fear will be the witches. And they shall be a far tougher force to reckon with.’

  But as he reached the height of the ruins he suddenly stopped in his tracks. For there they were, watching him. Thus he froze.

  3

  Something about the scene puzzled him.

  The attack he had anticipated did not come. Mighty
vanguards of witches on the backs of lizard steeds did not appear. All he saw, and it left him greatly suspicious, were a handful of emaciated, terrified witches cowering beneath an overhanging rock shelf.

  Gargaron and Melai drew up carefully on his flanks. (Locke had taken it upon himself to scurry about on his serpent taking up skulls as trophies, hooking them to the sides of his serpent’s saddle). Gargaron felt both a mixture of fear and anger as he set his eyes upon them. Fear that the beings he had come so far to see were now suddenly right before him, and anger that here were folk who had caused the death of his girls, the death of all his friends, his home, the deaths of millions across Godrik’s Vale. Melai too felt anger, but she also felt pity for instantly she saw the witches were in a terrible state.

  ‘Do not be fooled,’ Hawkmoth warned. ‘They fool us to lull us. Their attack will come. Of that you can be certain.’

  4

  The attack however did not eventuate.

  The witches huddled there, watching their invaders.

  They were ashen skinned hags, Gargaron observed, bony, bug-eyed, black toothed. They wore piercings through their upper arms and legs, they had bulbous sacks of flesh hanging from the sides of their bellies; each sack perforated by a blackened opening, where Gargaron had heard witches stored and carried tinctures and poisons and mind altering brews.

  As he watched, one of them, an older more haggard looking thing, squeezed some wisping grey, thick, viscous bubbles from one of those sacks in her belly and threatened to throw them at Hawkmoth if he came any closer. ‘Leave us!’ she howled. ‘You have done enough! Leave us be!’

  Hawkmoth withdrew his staff and held out his spare hand, as a conciliatory gesture. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘please, do not release your ghost stones. We come in peace.’

  The hag laughed. ‘Peace? Ha! What would you know of peace?! You decimate us, you decimate our armies! Why sing peace when all you know is dealing death?!’

  Hawkmoth frowned. ‘If it be the army of these bone-men you speak of then we decimated them merely as a measure of self-defence. I did herald our arrival and intentions. Did you not hear it?’

  ‘Aye, we heard it, sevuck! But why should we trust the poison from the mouth of one such as you?!’

  Hawkmoth frowned again. He knelt now and unhitched the bundle from his shoulders. He lay it before the witches, untied it, pulled it open and let them feast their eyes upon its contents.

  He stood and withdrew, allowing them time to absorb and study and accept.

  At first their faces were of disbelief, of suspicion, but quickly it turned to recognition and sorrow. Even anger.

  Hawkmoth spoke up again. ‘I am deeply sorry for her hundred year incarceration. I am deeply sorry that my forebears and current overseers of Sanctuary felt the need to firstly take her from you, and then to hold her to ransom. I acknowledge that it has caused your kind undue pain, anger and continued animosity toward my brethren. Therefore, what I said earlier, still stands. So hear me: I offer my life to you, for whichever way you see fit to use it. If you should choose to take my life here today then so be it. If it puts a stop to your boom weapons, if it puts a stop to all this dying, then I wish for only that and nothing more.’

  ‘Leave us,’ the hag screeched. ‘Leave us to our Mother now that she be returned. Are you not satisfied?’

  Hawkmoth bowed. ‘I shall give you time to accept her back. But I shall not leave. I will return in one hour to hear your verdict.’

  5

  Hawkmoth retreated, calling back Gargaron and Melai, and they climbed down the ruins to where Locke presided over an excessive number of bone trophies.

  They sat to wait out the hour. Though Hawkmoth surveyed all approaches to these ruins from the surrounding woodland.

  Gargaron watched him. ‘Do you expect an attack?’

  ‘I declare that I do not fully comprehend what is going on here. Though, aye, I feel they delay things while the greater number of their kind surround our position.’

  This comment had them all searching the surrounding forest.

  ‘Are you really meaning to give your life over to them?’ Melai enquired as they sat there scouring the woodland. ‘Or be that some false ploy?’

  ‘If giving up my life means putting an instant stop to the boom weapons and the curse that goes with it, if it means my dear wife go on living, that all the animals I have saved shall not perish, that you my friends can set forth from here and eek out some sort of life after all of this, then so be it. I can ask for no greater calling.’

  It were not something Gargaron wished to hear. And he hoped it would not come to that.

  6

  The hag Hawkmoth had addressed fetched him on the hour. Hawkmoth were chatting amongst his friends, ever speculating on what the witches planned to do.

  The witch stood there, looking ill, weak, withered, emaciated. Gargaron had heard the witches were a tall breed, some as tall as his own kind. But this thing were bent over and hunched, and she were all limb and bone. Her ashen skin ran with a map of dark veins, her bulging eyes were a deep, stone blue.

  ‘We have never pretended to understand the ways of your kind, sorcerer Hawkmoth, nor that of your agenda,’ she croaked weakly. ‘We appreciate the fact that you have returned our dear Mother to us. I am glad to have lived through all my long life to reach this day. But now we ask you to leave so that we may die in peace.’

  Hawkmoth frowned. ‘I do not comprehend. Die? Has your boom curse affected you lot too? I offered myself up to you for you to put a stop to your boom bombs. How is this difficult to comprehend?’

  The witch eyed him closely, and it were her turn to frown. ‘What do you play at?’

  ‘Your boom weapons,’ Hawkmoth said. ‘Don’t you hear my words? I offer my life for you to halt the detonation of your bombs. I cannot paint it any clearer than that. I shall not leave here until I have a deal!’

  She kept frowning. ‘There are no boom weapons. The world is in its death throes. You ought to know this as well as any.’

  ‘I haven’t the time for games,’ Hawkmoth warned. ‘Take me or suffer our wrath.’

  ‘Do not threaten us,’ the hag warned.

  ‘Why? If you will not hear me you leave me no choice.’

  It were Gargaron who stepped forward here, his hand on the sorcerer’s shoulder, enough gentle pressure to suggest the sorcerer should step back, calm down, let someone else have a go at diplomacy.

  Hawkmoth hesitated, though retreated.

  Gargaron knelt, his hand on his heart. ‘Hear me please, oh witch. I am Gargaron Stoneheart of Hovel. I am not your enemy nor have I ever been your enemy. But hear me, I beg of you. I saw you up there, under shelter, with your own kin. Sisters, perhaps. Daughters. Mothers. I do not presume to know. But you are with your own kind, your own blood. I have none left. No blood, no kind such as I. Nor does Melai. Nor Locke. Some great blight has killed nearly all beyond these woods. We were informed that those of your kind, and I am not saying it were you nor those up there sheltering, but that witches are the cause of it. I sense now however, you know another truth. Pray you tell us. For the sake of my dearly departed wife and daughter.’

  The witch hardly moved, but her eyes did search him deeply he saw. And in the end she slumped against a rock and weakly spoke. ‘Whatever treachery this is, whatever rolls out across the world killing most and all, be not of our doing. And these boom weapons, I do not know of which you speak. If it be the shockwaves that bombard us periodically then it be naught to do with us. We thought initially that it were these sorcerers of Sanctuary, one final campaign to wipe us out. So with all our remaining reserves we conducted a counter strike upon Sanctuary. Only to find the place decimated and overrun with dark entities unknown even to us. We were forced to retreat. My sisters were beginning to succumb to some mysterious ailment. We assumed it to be some sickness orchestrated by the sorcerers. And the shockwaves kept coming, shaking our home, killing more.

  ‘Sadly, we are all that rema
in of our kind now. All our mothers have perished. Maychild the Fair. Hyndilla the Sleeper. Chianay Timethief. Pinnezelle Skywitch of Bluefield. None of them with their mighty magic could withstand this dark tide.’

  Gargaron blinked as he heard the names of these witches. ‘Chianay?’ he asked. ‘She who distorts time?’

  The hag gazed at him, wondering how he had heard of one of the Revered Ones.

  ‘Aye, even she. All of them perished. And it were not until we retreated here that we discovered what be killing us all. For, now we know there is naught to be done… but die.’

  Gargaron, Melai, Locke, even Hawkmoth now, all watched her keenly, fascinated, intrigued, confused, waiting for her to go on, to tell them the secret of this mystery.

  ‘What be it, pray tell?’ Gargaron asked. ‘What be the cause of this great dying?’

  The witch coughed. Dark green phlegm spluttered over her lips. ‘Return me to my kind, if you will. And I shall tell you.’

  Hawkmoth stepped forward here and this time it were he warding Gargaron back with a gentle hand. Gargaron, who had been about to take the witch into his grasp, looked around at him.

  ‘Please,’ Hawkmoth said. ‘Let me. My kind owe her and hers much. It be a small token, but it should be I.’

  Gargaron nodded and the witch did not object. She even raised her hand to him. ‘Come then, enemy, help me to my sisters.’

  Hawkmoth crouched and shuffled his arms beneath her bony frame and he hoisted her easily into his grasp. Together they returned to the shelter, Gargaron, Melai and Locke all following. The other witches were hunched around Mama Vekh, as if their passing would be eased by her presence. Here Hawkmoth lay down the witch.