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the Third Gate: Chapter One, cont. (NaNoWriMo 2015)
10 years ago
General
Okay, I revised a bit of the earlier post I made. This is more. I've completed about 3,200 words, today, in my NaNoWriMo story, "the Third Gate". Follow my progress if you like at http://nanowrimo.org/participants/s.....the-third-gate .Tell me what you think:
Aches and pains were six years gone, now. Provided the landscape of his life was not a tapestry rewoven by insanity and delusion, Adam hadn’t felt this good in ages. Physically, he never could have run so far, pushed himself for so long, without stopping for rest. And yet, he was in agony. What, at his age, would typically be called “aches and pains” were replaced by honestly earned agonies of stress, flight, running, and fighting. Unlike his past life, a life spent making columns add up to a predetermined number, his pains had been acquired not by walking up and down stairs or taking an extra-long walk at lunch but by chasing those who had taken Eris. Her absence had spurred in him a rush to action he’d not experienced since college. But that was the fact of it, wasn’t it? Here he was, climbing over tumble-down rocks in a tremor-wracked landscape of wind-worn hills and rising peaks, in a body scarcely beyond puberty. But sometime, in the years since arriving in this exploded-view version of a world, he’d crossed the line into fifty.
Halfway there.
His brother would have said he was “halfway there”.
It was what everyone had said when he had turned forty. He would have expected his fiftieth birthday to provide the same joke.
But that would have been a joke for humans in a human world. It would have been a joke to a member of a species that spent the first sixteen, eighteen, twenty years of life coming to grips with adulthood only to die in their seventies, eighties, or nineties. Those rules no longer applied. He was of dragon blood, now, and scarcely into adulthood as far as his body was concerned.
So his ten-day journey in pursuit of Eris and her kidnappers felt like it should be impossible. But his young body made it exactly the opposite. Not only was this chase possible, it was inevitable.
And Adam hated Eris for it.
Northeastern Dorath was sparsely populated. He hadn’t seen anyone since crashing here. The crew of the Amberglass had put up a fight as soon as they had spotted him. The cloud cover had been too sparse. But if he hadn’t attacked, hadn’t shredded their sails and ripped several air crystals from its hull, the airship would have been able to get out into the Deep Blue.
Adam wasn’t strong enough a flier to take on that kind of pursuit.
Imperfect sky cover, scatterings of grey against a dawning day of light rain, had been his only true protection. The scraps of leather he wore might turn an ill-aimed arrow but a direct hit would pierce his hide almost as easily as if he wore nothing. But the crew of the ship had known how to handle fliers. The fought back and put three bolts through his left wing; another through his right.
They went down, too; just later than Adam had. The damage he had wrought had been at least that effective.
Yesterday, he had caught up to the torched remains of the ship. Apparently, they had decided to leave no evidence. To Adam sight sent a chill of foreboding through him. The burned husk meant the raiders were committed. It meant they had another way out. They could afford to put their ship to the torch to not risk being judged for participation in the illegal slave trade. In short, they had a “Plan B”.
And with injured wings, Adam had pursued them on foot.
Why they had come this way, why they pushed so hard to reach the mountains, he didn’t know. But they were getting dangerously close to the edge of Dorath. He could only assume they would meet up with another ship. Eris and the rest would be taken to sell in far-off lands. They would be as good as dead to him if he couldn’t catch up.
He wouldn’t let that happen. Eris was the last connection to home that he had.
The island, barely the size of one of the lightlands high above the rest of Kellendar, was criss-crossed with fractures in the north. As such, only the deeply-buried earth stones kept it together. But every now and then, several times per day, the ground would tremble as the thin layers of rock shifted and tried to give in to the ever present pull of gravity. But the chunks and plates would shift, twist, meld, and reform keeping it whole while the air stones kept it aloft.
The constant tremors kept few from living in this part of the island. It was probably why the raiders had chosen their flight path over this landscape. Few of the mounted or aerial knights that patrolled Dorath would be likely to see their ship or report on its illicit cargo.
There were a few long-abandoned farms, here and there. Adam spied several tumbledown remnants of cobblestone fences and deteriorating homes dotting the wilderness. But the settlers who had made them had long-since given up hopes of taming this land. At least, today, there had been no quakes.
Foothills rose in cracked majesty. Filled fissures criss-cross the land more frequently as he progressed northwards. Their contours both paralleled and crossed the boundary from plains to mountains leaving cliffs in their wake. But game trails, left by the seldom-seen deer and askanabi, provided him some path to follow.
That and the corn husk doll he’d crafted and wore on a string around his neck that pointed in Eris’ direction.
Some times it seemed he had lost her. But a few hours of running, later, and the fetish would twitch to life and point, anew. He didn’t know how long it would last. He feared the time it would falter and never pick up the trail again. At least, now, he had an overland path to follow as ten to twelve raiders herded their captives higher and higher.
The morning crept into noon as the sky cleared. The sun warmed him and made his patterned hide gleam, dully, in the cold light. Red and black stripes and whorls covered his shoulders, hips and torso. Spots of deep blue, resembling scales, completed his look. His long neck and narrow-muzzled face echoed these colors although his eyes were slitted and flecked with metallic green. Small raised ridges, almost akin to vestigial horns, crowned his brow and travelled down the back of his neck. There, they spread along his injured wings.
But although he resembled a human crossed with a dragon, he was neither mammal nor reptile. Honestly, he didn’t know if the classifications from back home could identify exactly what he was. He was warm-blooded with external sexual characteristics but had a thick scale-free hide, instead of skin, and wings that sprouted from his upper back like a stained-glass image of an angel.
...Or a devil.
Strange that this world had those concepts, too. Its pantheon of gods were plagued by infernal forces from below and aided by servants from above. Similar to the religions of Earth, it surprised him. Eris would often tell him not to worry about such things. But he couldn’t help it. Everything, here, was like a patchwork of beliefs with new and unsettling things thrown in for good measure.
And that was the nature of a world like Talvali: it was all a patchwork.
And he was merely one of the most recent patches in that tapestry.
The passage of the raiders led up. It twisted and turned around the fractured foothills until, finally, coming to a broad arroyo flanked on both sides by unbroken cliffs. For the first time in his ten days of pursuit, Adam stopped in startled awe.
Large steps were carved into the far side of the arroyo, leading up into the hills. Each was carved with bas relief skulls around which ancient, spiraling letters served as an unintelligible frame. Moss and gross covered them, making spans of the stairs resemble miniature, terraced farms. But while small cracks and breaks appeared in them, the large, heavily-hewn blocks were, for the most part, intact. Some twelve or thirteen of them proceeded up an incline until they became flanked by tall spires of enormous, carved skulls. Still shadowed by the cliffs, these also seemed undamaged save in the most superficial of ways.
He slowed his pursuit. It did not look like a place in which an ambush could take place but Adam didn’t want to take any chances.
As tall as he was, the stairs were still a challenge to ascend. He climbed slowly, casting his emerald gaze about, carefully, looking for any hiding place the raiders might have selected. There were none that he could see and eventually, he reached the spires. Here, he saw he was wrong before. There was damage. Stones that he had taken for another step were obviously the fallen remains of a crossing arch that had once joined the spires. In centuries past it must have crumbled and scattered across several of the winding stairs.
His quarry had definitely come this way. The few animal tracks that had led him this far also ascended the fractured stones but were mostly rubbed-out by the passing of many feet.
“Kastri-fathi; mo’uon si templis car sorathes.” He intoned the words under his breath and focused his will to bend the ambient energies of the arcana majiere to his will. Drawing his blade, almost reverently, he pointed its tip at the rubble. “Mastani-arath; koe mun a’ lasatar. Hovath car sumnali si savasti’is.”
While the doll at his neck pointed onwards, up the stair into the hills and mountains, the sword in his hand throbbed with an inner heat only those versed in elemental magics could detect. To his mind’s eye he could see the footsteps and shadows of the feet that had cast them. Stone had a long memory. And although much of it was cracked and reduced to sand, it virtually sang when he tapped into it. He saw them, at last: the raiders and their captives. Like phantoms captured in amber they hiked upwards. The spell he had learned to reveal the past gave him hope. They had passed this way less than six hours ago. Further, there were fewer slavers than he had thought: eight, by the looks of them, and with seven chained captives.
His eyes rested on Eris’ image. He felt a twinge of guilt. No more human, anymore, than he was, she was small, covered in brown fur set with badger-like markings of tan and black. Scarcely an inch over three feet tall, her normal clothes had been replaced with tatters and rags. She was chained between two others: an auranathi man with an injured leg and a strange, surreal creature that looked like a slapped-together construction of avian and feline. A whimsey, no doubt. Constructed by magic for specific labors but considered free and independent people here in Kellendar’s Dorath client-state. He looked at Eris’ face for a long time. She didn’t look concerned but he knew she often hid her feelings beneath a blustery bravado that typified members of the tahvic race that she had become.
The mental image flickered and died as he resheathed his sword.
Adam glanced at the tall spires, remnants from a long-forgotten civilization, and frowned. Once, he would love loved to explore the remnants of the towering stones. But, now, he had to catch up and figure out how he was going to overpower eight skilled raiders and free Eris.
At least none of the raiders were physically intimidating. He had that going for him. None were fliers and most looked like they had at least some form of injury: probably owing to the crash of their airship.
He considered his options as, galvanized, he resumed his pursuit.
The cool, dry air of the foothills chilled even more as he ascended the stairs. A few wind-twisted trees lined the recessed climb. Stripes of umber and black threaded through the cliffs on either side showing layers of epochs, before. Dust swirled in dust devils as the wind blew off the plains, below, and was channelled up the stair after him. The fallen, yellow and brown leaves along his route grew less common as the hills gave way to the more sheer heights of the barrier mountains.
If he had had his wings, as uncomfortable as he was with flight, he could have ascended the slopes quickly and gotten ahead of his quarry. As it was, he knew enough about his new biology to bind his wounds but not easily treat them. Nor did he know any magics or rituals that could stitch himself together. There were ungents and enchanted dusts for such things but they were expensive and relatively rare. A farmer, the head of a large family, would often buy one to see their way through a growing season as a way to address unexpected emergencies. But Adam was, at best, an apprentice … unemployed in any real sense of the word. In fact, his abrupt departure in pursuit of Eris probably meant he would have no apprenticeship to return to. What little money he had would probably have to be spent on getting Eris back home. He doubted he’d be fit enough to fly her the sixty-or-so miles from the floating island of Dorath back to the larger aerial continent of Kellendar, proper.
Still, the stairs twisted and turned, ascending along natural contours in the black stone of the mountains. Here, the fractures from the plains and foothills, below, were less common. But Adam knew the edge had to be getting near. He could see the twisted and torn clouds, high above in the peaks, reacting to the conflicting winds both rising off the plains below and to the east as well as from the shell of winds, ahead. The mountains had probably been sheared in two when the island first came to find itself in Talvali. He doubted these stairs had been built after that so it seemed likely he was traveling in a truly long-forgotten ruin from some alien world, far away.
A forbidden thrill beat in his heart and he pushed it down, guiltily. Focusing on his mission was the most important, the only thing, that he should be focusing on. Adolescent fantasies of adventure were far before his time. Even if he was barely an adult as a dragonkin, with possibly centuries of life ahead, he couldn’t help but feel guilty every time he indulged an enthusiastic distraction or fantasy.
That was more in Eris’ nature.
As the autumn day wore on, shadows crept down the face of the mountains. He took a risk, resting for just a few moments, and tested his wings. The crossbow bolts had torn through their leathery membrane, barely missing structural bone and maneuverable muscle. But scabs had formed along the holes. Adam had patched them with bandages and gum resin mixed with a numbing sap. It was a simple curative and helped prevent infection. It was something he’d learned early-on. But even though his wings had gotten two days of rest, they were nowhere near being able to fly, let alone support his weight.
Broad, talons spreading across old, worn stones for support, he resolved to finishing his trek on his feet.
As the sun set beyond the heights ahead of him, he could see the mountains’ shadows stretch across the fractured grasslands behind him. Above, though, he saw something glint as the sun waned. With the small, blue moon Kormoran rising ahead of him, he caught sight of what, in a moment, looked like metal armor glinting against the sunset near a pass at the summit. The larger, red moon of Briac would be rising closer to midnight while Shotef and Khetef had already gone by during the day. But even as the light faded and blue washed down over the cliffs, Adam saw it: another pair of pillars.
At his distance, he found it hard to see them, shrouded as they were in the shadows of twin peaks to either side. But, squinting, he thought they, too, were carven skulls reaching up to an intact arch. It looked like a giant gate without bars. He would doubtless find out more as he got closer. As good as his sight was, he was no gryphon. And although he no longer needed glasses or bifocals, he was ill-equipped to see in the increasing night. Wolfen, like half the raiders he pursued, would be seeing things far more crisply and clearly than he could. Like the leonine auranathi, they were at home in twilight and dusk. It was something more he would have to take into account.
As for the glint of metal, it was gone as quickly as it had come. He hoped they had reached the summit and were now making camp. Perhaps it had been a glimmer from one of the raiders’ armor. Possibly the glint off a shield. If they were camping, Adam could catch them by pushing on.
Despite how tired he was, he resolved himself to do it.
Making his way in the dark was difficult, even with the soft blue light of Kormoran coating the stair.
Another hour passed.
Then, another.
With perhaps two more to go before midnight, he spied the flickering of firelight reflected off the inward-facing surfaces of the spires. The illumination lent a ghastly, infernal cast to the skulls.
The stairs were leveling off with small side trails and paths winding off into narrow meadows and passages. Adam set his jaw and decided to take a risk.
Setting off to his left, he followed several paths to get closer. In an hour, he had found them.
Perched at the terminus of a narrow rise, still fifty or sixty yards from the stone gate, he saw their camp. Five raiders surrounded even more captives. A trio of lean-tos had been set-up against the howling winds that moaned up from the dark night on the other side of the mountains. There, as Adam had suspected, was the edge of Dorath. The floating island just stopped, maybe a hundred yards from the peak where the arch spanned the ancient stair. Below was darkness: the Great Blue. Beneath floated larger continents and, below them, the dark, savage world of terrestrial Talvali.
Whether or not the slavers had known about the ancient stair was irrelevant. Clearly, they had made their way here, to the edge, to meet another ship. And if it wasn't here, yet, it would probably not be far off. Proud that he’d caught up to them, Adam now faced the difficult choice of what to do about it. Where the missing three raiders he’d seen in his vision, before, had gotten to, he wasn’t sure. Possibly taking posts along the lower stair watching for pursuit; Adam figured they’d eventually make themselves known. But by then, all eight may be in the same place, again. That would make the odds much worse.
He had his sword, his tough hide, his magic: but that didn’t make a fight with eight enemies any more even. Even against five, he was out-numbered. He had to even the odds.
Carefully, he watched and thought.
Aches and pains were six years gone, now. Provided the landscape of his life was not a tapestry rewoven by insanity and delusion, Adam hadn’t felt this good in ages. Physically, he never could have run so far, pushed himself for so long, without stopping for rest. And yet, he was in agony. What, at his age, would typically be called “aches and pains” were replaced by honestly earned agonies of stress, flight, running, and fighting. Unlike his past life, a life spent making columns add up to a predetermined number, his pains had been acquired not by walking up and down stairs or taking an extra-long walk at lunch but by chasing those who had taken Eris. Her absence had spurred in him a rush to action he’d not experienced since college. But that was the fact of it, wasn’t it? Here he was, climbing over tumble-down rocks in a tremor-wracked landscape of wind-worn hills and rising peaks, in a body scarcely beyond puberty. But sometime, in the years since arriving in this exploded-view version of a world, he’d crossed the line into fifty.
Halfway there.
His brother would have said he was “halfway there”.
It was what everyone had said when he had turned forty. He would have expected his fiftieth birthday to provide the same joke.
But that would have been a joke for humans in a human world. It would have been a joke to a member of a species that spent the first sixteen, eighteen, twenty years of life coming to grips with adulthood only to die in their seventies, eighties, or nineties. Those rules no longer applied. He was of dragon blood, now, and scarcely into adulthood as far as his body was concerned.
So his ten-day journey in pursuit of Eris and her kidnappers felt like it should be impossible. But his young body made it exactly the opposite. Not only was this chase possible, it was inevitable.
And Adam hated Eris for it.
Northeastern Dorath was sparsely populated. He hadn’t seen anyone since crashing here. The crew of the Amberglass had put up a fight as soon as they had spotted him. The cloud cover had been too sparse. But if he hadn’t attacked, hadn’t shredded their sails and ripped several air crystals from its hull, the airship would have been able to get out into the Deep Blue.
Adam wasn’t strong enough a flier to take on that kind of pursuit.
Imperfect sky cover, scatterings of grey against a dawning day of light rain, had been his only true protection. The scraps of leather he wore might turn an ill-aimed arrow but a direct hit would pierce his hide almost as easily as if he wore nothing. But the crew of the ship had known how to handle fliers. The fought back and put three bolts through his left wing; another through his right.
They went down, too; just later than Adam had. The damage he had wrought had been at least that effective.
Yesterday, he had caught up to the torched remains of the ship. Apparently, they had decided to leave no evidence. To Adam sight sent a chill of foreboding through him. The burned husk meant the raiders were committed. It meant they had another way out. They could afford to put their ship to the torch to not risk being judged for participation in the illegal slave trade. In short, they had a “Plan B”.
And with injured wings, Adam had pursued them on foot.
Why they had come this way, why they pushed so hard to reach the mountains, he didn’t know. But they were getting dangerously close to the edge of Dorath. He could only assume they would meet up with another ship. Eris and the rest would be taken to sell in far-off lands. They would be as good as dead to him if he couldn’t catch up.
He wouldn’t let that happen. Eris was the last connection to home that he had.
The island, barely the size of one of the lightlands high above the rest of Kellendar, was criss-crossed with fractures in the north. As such, only the deeply-buried earth stones kept it together. But every now and then, several times per day, the ground would tremble as the thin layers of rock shifted and tried to give in to the ever present pull of gravity. But the chunks and plates would shift, twist, meld, and reform keeping it whole while the air stones kept it aloft.
The constant tremors kept few from living in this part of the island. It was probably why the raiders had chosen their flight path over this landscape. Few of the mounted or aerial knights that patrolled Dorath would be likely to see their ship or report on its illicit cargo.
There were a few long-abandoned farms, here and there. Adam spied several tumbledown remnants of cobblestone fences and deteriorating homes dotting the wilderness. But the settlers who had made them had long-since given up hopes of taming this land. At least, today, there had been no quakes.
Foothills rose in cracked majesty. Filled fissures criss-cross the land more frequently as he progressed northwards. Their contours both paralleled and crossed the boundary from plains to mountains leaving cliffs in their wake. But game trails, left by the seldom-seen deer and askanabi, provided him some path to follow.
That and the corn husk doll he’d crafted and wore on a string around his neck that pointed in Eris’ direction.
Some times it seemed he had lost her. But a few hours of running, later, and the fetish would twitch to life and point, anew. He didn’t know how long it would last. He feared the time it would falter and never pick up the trail again. At least, now, he had an overland path to follow as ten to twelve raiders herded their captives higher and higher.
The morning crept into noon as the sky cleared. The sun warmed him and made his patterned hide gleam, dully, in the cold light. Red and black stripes and whorls covered his shoulders, hips and torso. Spots of deep blue, resembling scales, completed his look. His long neck and narrow-muzzled face echoed these colors although his eyes were slitted and flecked with metallic green. Small raised ridges, almost akin to vestigial horns, crowned his brow and travelled down the back of his neck. There, they spread along his injured wings.
But although he resembled a human crossed with a dragon, he was neither mammal nor reptile. Honestly, he didn’t know if the classifications from back home could identify exactly what he was. He was warm-blooded with external sexual characteristics but had a thick scale-free hide, instead of skin, and wings that sprouted from his upper back like a stained-glass image of an angel.
...Or a devil.
Strange that this world had those concepts, too. Its pantheon of gods were plagued by infernal forces from below and aided by servants from above. Similar to the religions of Earth, it surprised him. Eris would often tell him not to worry about such things. But he couldn’t help it. Everything, here, was like a patchwork of beliefs with new and unsettling things thrown in for good measure.
And that was the nature of a world like Talvali: it was all a patchwork.
And he was merely one of the most recent patches in that tapestry.
The passage of the raiders led up. It twisted and turned around the fractured foothills until, finally, coming to a broad arroyo flanked on both sides by unbroken cliffs. For the first time in his ten days of pursuit, Adam stopped in startled awe.
Large steps were carved into the far side of the arroyo, leading up into the hills. Each was carved with bas relief skulls around which ancient, spiraling letters served as an unintelligible frame. Moss and gross covered them, making spans of the stairs resemble miniature, terraced farms. But while small cracks and breaks appeared in them, the large, heavily-hewn blocks were, for the most part, intact. Some twelve or thirteen of them proceeded up an incline until they became flanked by tall spires of enormous, carved skulls. Still shadowed by the cliffs, these also seemed undamaged save in the most superficial of ways.
He slowed his pursuit. It did not look like a place in which an ambush could take place but Adam didn’t want to take any chances.
As tall as he was, the stairs were still a challenge to ascend. He climbed slowly, casting his emerald gaze about, carefully, looking for any hiding place the raiders might have selected. There were none that he could see and eventually, he reached the spires. Here, he saw he was wrong before. There was damage. Stones that he had taken for another step were obviously the fallen remains of a crossing arch that had once joined the spires. In centuries past it must have crumbled and scattered across several of the winding stairs.
His quarry had definitely come this way. The few animal tracks that had led him this far also ascended the fractured stones but were mostly rubbed-out by the passing of many feet.
“Kastri-fathi; mo’uon si templis car sorathes.” He intoned the words under his breath and focused his will to bend the ambient energies of the arcana majiere to his will. Drawing his blade, almost reverently, he pointed its tip at the rubble. “Mastani-arath; koe mun a’ lasatar. Hovath car sumnali si savasti’is.”
While the doll at his neck pointed onwards, up the stair into the hills and mountains, the sword in his hand throbbed with an inner heat only those versed in elemental magics could detect. To his mind’s eye he could see the footsteps and shadows of the feet that had cast them. Stone had a long memory. And although much of it was cracked and reduced to sand, it virtually sang when he tapped into it. He saw them, at last: the raiders and their captives. Like phantoms captured in amber they hiked upwards. The spell he had learned to reveal the past gave him hope. They had passed this way less than six hours ago. Further, there were fewer slavers than he had thought: eight, by the looks of them, and with seven chained captives.
His eyes rested on Eris’ image. He felt a twinge of guilt. No more human, anymore, than he was, she was small, covered in brown fur set with badger-like markings of tan and black. Scarcely an inch over three feet tall, her normal clothes had been replaced with tatters and rags. She was chained between two others: an auranathi man with an injured leg and a strange, surreal creature that looked like a slapped-together construction of avian and feline. A whimsey, no doubt. Constructed by magic for specific labors but considered free and independent people here in Kellendar’s Dorath client-state. He looked at Eris’ face for a long time. She didn’t look concerned but he knew she often hid her feelings beneath a blustery bravado that typified members of the tahvic race that she had become.
The mental image flickered and died as he resheathed his sword.
Adam glanced at the tall spires, remnants from a long-forgotten civilization, and frowned. Once, he would love loved to explore the remnants of the towering stones. But, now, he had to catch up and figure out how he was going to overpower eight skilled raiders and free Eris.
At least none of the raiders were physically intimidating. He had that going for him. None were fliers and most looked like they had at least some form of injury: probably owing to the crash of their airship.
He considered his options as, galvanized, he resumed his pursuit.
The cool, dry air of the foothills chilled even more as he ascended the stairs. A few wind-twisted trees lined the recessed climb. Stripes of umber and black threaded through the cliffs on either side showing layers of epochs, before. Dust swirled in dust devils as the wind blew off the plains, below, and was channelled up the stair after him. The fallen, yellow and brown leaves along his route grew less common as the hills gave way to the more sheer heights of the barrier mountains.
If he had had his wings, as uncomfortable as he was with flight, he could have ascended the slopes quickly and gotten ahead of his quarry. As it was, he knew enough about his new biology to bind his wounds but not easily treat them. Nor did he know any magics or rituals that could stitch himself together. There were ungents and enchanted dusts for such things but they were expensive and relatively rare. A farmer, the head of a large family, would often buy one to see their way through a growing season as a way to address unexpected emergencies. But Adam was, at best, an apprentice … unemployed in any real sense of the word. In fact, his abrupt departure in pursuit of Eris probably meant he would have no apprenticeship to return to. What little money he had would probably have to be spent on getting Eris back home. He doubted he’d be fit enough to fly her the sixty-or-so miles from the floating island of Dorath back to the larger aerial continent of Kellendar, proper.
Still, the stairs twisted and turned, ascending along natural contours in the black stone of the mountains. Here, the fractures from the plains and foothills, below, were less common. But Adam knew the edge had to be getting near. He could see the twisted and torn clouds, high above in the peaks, reacting to the conflicting winds both rising off the plains below and to the east as well as from the shell of winds, ahead. The mountains had probably been sheared in two when the island first came to find itself in Talvali. He doubted these stairs had been built after that so it seemed likely he was traveling in a truly long-forgotten ruin from some alien world, far away.
A forbidden thrill beat in his heart and he pushed it down, guiltily. Focusing on his mission was the most important, the only thing, that he should be focusing on. Adolescent fantasies of adventure were far before his time. Even if he was barely an adult as a dragonkin, with possibly centuries of life ahead, he couldn’t help but feel guilty every time he indulged an enthusiastic distraction or fantasy.
That was more in Eris’ nature.
As the autumn day wore on, shadows crept down the face of the mountains. He took a risk, resting for just a few moments, and tested his wings. The crossbow bolts had torn through their leathery membrane, barely missing structural bone and maneuverable muscle. But scabs had formed along the holes. Adam had patched them with bandages and gum resin mixed with a numbing sap. It was a simple curative and helped prevent infection. It was something he’d learned early-on. But even though his wings had gotten two days of rest, they were nowhere near being able to fly, let alone support his weight.
Broad, talons spreading across old, worn stones for support, he resolved to finishing his trek on his feet.
As the sun set beyond the heights ahead of him, he could see the mountains’ shadows stretch across the fractured grasslands behind him. Above, though, he saw something glint as the sun waned. With the small, blue moon Kormoran rising ahead of him, he caught sight of what, in a moment, looked like metal armor glinting against the sunset near a pass at the summit. The larger, red moon of Briac would be rising closer to midnight while Shotef and Khetef had already gone by during the day. But even as the light faded and blue washed down over the cliffs, Adam saw it: another pair of pillars.
At his distance, he found it hard to see them, shrouded as they were in the shadows of twin peaks to either side. But, squinting, he thought they, too, were carven skulls reaching up to an intact arch. It looked like a giant gate without bars. He would doubtless find out more as he got closer. As good as his sight was, he was no gryphon. And although he no longer needed glasses or bifocals, he was ill-equipped to see in the increasing night. Wolfen, like half the raiders he pursued, would be seeing things far more crisply and clearly than he could. Like the leonine auranathi, they were at home in twilight and dusk. It was something more he would have to take into account.
As for the glint of metal, it was gone as quickly as it had come. He hoped they had reached the summit and were now making camp. Perhaps it had been a glimmer from one of the raiders’ armor. Possibly the glint off a shield. If they were camping, Adam could catch them by pushing on.
Despite how tired he was, he resolved himself to do it.
Making his way in the dark was difficult, even with the soft blue light of Kormoran coating the stair.
Another hour passed.
Then, another.
With perhaps two more to go before midnight, he spied the flickering of firelight reflected off the inward-facing surfaces of the spires. The illumination lent a ghastly, infernal cast to the skulls.
The stairs were leveling off with small side trails and paths winding off into narrow meadows and passages. Adam set his jaw and decided to take a risk.
Setting off to his left, he followed several paths to get closer. In an hour, he had found them.
Perched at the terminus of a narrow rise, still fifty or sixty yards from the stone gate, he saw their camp. Five raiders surrounded even more captives. A trio of lean-tos had been set-up against the howling winds that moaned up from the dark night on the other side of the mountains. There, as Adam had suspected, was the edge of Dorath. The floating island just stopped, maybe a hundred yards from the peak where the arch spanned the ancient stair. Below was darkness: the Great Blue. Beneath floated larger continents and, below them, the dark, savage world of terrestrial Talvali.
Whether or not the slavers had known about the ancient stair was irrelevant. Clearly, they had made their way here, to the edge, to meet another ship. And if it wasn't here, yet, it would probably not be far off. Proud that he’d caught up to them, Adam now faced the difficult choice of what to do about it. Where the missing three raiders he’d seen in his vision, before, had gotten to, he wasn’t sure. Possibly taking posts along the lower stair watching for pursuit; Adam figured they’d eventually make themselves known. But by then, all eight may be in the same place, again. That would make the odds much worse.
He had his sword, his tough hide, his magic: but that didn’t make a fight with eight enemies any more even. Even against five, he was out-numbered. He had to even the odds.
Carefully, he watched and thought.
oswanwolf
~oswanwolf
