Darius Chapter 7

Before long, Marth caught sight of the Royal Forge ahead of him. He wasn’t sure if it had always been so, but since Darius had arrived, it had been a bustling hive of activity. The first day after they arrived, a permanent cloud of dust emanated from the alcove, courtesy of Darius’s order to deep-clean and reorganize the entire area. The forge was back running the next day, and now a constant stream of couriers took deliveries to and from the forge. Marth waited in line with the couriers, hoping to surprise Darius.

When he got to the front of the line, he saw Darius coming out of his quarters, holding the sword Marth had asked him to sharpen. He laughed as he approached.

“Marth! I saw you coming a mile away! Thought it would be funny to make you wait in line.”

“You rascal! Not too long and you’ll be bowing to me when you see me.”

Darius raised an eyebrow, considering the proposition.

“Hmm, nah I think not. Anyway, here she is, nothing too fancy!”

He handed over Marth’s weapon. It was razor sharp, and he had re-bound the hilt with hardened leather, as the previous hilt had been worn down to the shape of Marth’s grip. The old hilt was more comfortable to hold, but prone to slipping upon parrying a heavy strike. Marth marveled at Darius’s work.

“Splendid mate, absolutely top notch. Care to test it out?”

“Gods no, I’d probably take my own head off with that.”

Marth winced at the thought.

“Certainly would be a loss for Erinstone by the looks of it! Tell ya what, how do you fancy a break from all this business? I was thinking I could show you the Temple of Darius, considering it might have some significance to you?”

Darius looked around at the well-oiled machine he had created, and decided he could probably hazard a couple hours away from the forge.

“Yeah sure! I haven’t exactly had the time to go wandering recently, lead on, I’ll leave my gear here for the lads.”

Darius motioned to a boy of about sixteen who ran over and retrieved his gear, the heavy tool belt ladening him down as he hobbled away.

“Handy fellow there, young Bart. Not the biggest muscles, but the best appetite for work that I’ve seen in any of this lot.”

Marth cackled at Darius’s jibe. From what he could see, all the workers were doing more than their fair share, so the young man must’ve really been working overtime to earn that praise.

“Good to hear it, he’s got a tough master, doesn’t he?”

The pair trundled off back towards the heart of the Trader’s District, in the vague direction of where Marth thought the Temple was.

Not many people paid attention to the two as they walked south-west through the district. Amongst Marth’s nondescript outfit, and Darius’s coal-dusted clothes and hands, the merchants and market employees they wandered past didn’t expect much of a sale out of either of them. Darius felt his stomach rumble, protesting the lack of breakfast it had been subject to.

“Jeez Marth, I see you’ve got lunch there, but I reckon I might have to grab a light snack from one of these stalls if that’s alright? Won’t hold you up.”

Marth spread his arms, gesturing to the choices around them.

“The world is your oyster, Darius, go mad.”

He needed no encouragement. At the first stall, he paid a small handful of copper and silver for two strawberry puffs, a selection of preserved meats, and a cup of prunes. Next, an oyster stall caught his eye, and he selected four, added some small pieces of onion, and slurped them down right there. Another eight coppers. Finally, he came to a frail old man running a fruit stall.

“One whole watermelon please, sah.”

The old man hustled over to a net filled with bright green melons. He held his head close to each melon and gave them a few flicks each, eventually settling on one. He hefted it in one hand, and tossed it to Darius who almost dropped it, not expecting the salesman to pitch his produce at his customer.

“One silver.”

Darius placed the coin in his outstretched hand, and content with his haul, he and Marth continued down the road. Marth looked amused as he watched Darius adjust the watermelon under his arm.

“Looks like you’re trying to feed an army there. You know I packed extra for you?”

Darius tipped the cup of prunes up to this open mouth, chewed through the flesh, and spat several pips into the thin grass bordering the road.

“Unless you’ve got a magical pack, I don’t think there’ll be enough in there to feed me. You’ve only seen me have a real meal once, in that carriage of yours, and I held back to be polite.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“You held back!? You went through three days of rations!”

Darius assumed a look of innocence.

“Yeahhh well, some of us actually work for a living, and working with your hands really takes it out of ya. Takes a lot of fuel to keep me pumping out gear for the army you’re inheriting. Speaking of which, what will happen to the Barringvale soldiers that we came here with?”

“They’ll stay for as long as I do. They are a bit of a gesture of goodwill I suppose. They get assimilated into Erinstone’s current forces and are assigned to squadrons or platoons the same as any Erinstone soldier. They won’t just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs, thankfully.”

Darius seemed satisfied by the answer, he had been picturing the whole of Marth’s escort just sitting round campfires all day, drinking and gambling. He wasn’t sure if the stereotype was true, but he went with it.

Amongst their talking, they had crossed over the main trade paths that split the Trader’s District in two, and were gradually entering a more lush, peaceful area of the district that sat in its south-western corner. The tightly packed stone roads they had arrived here on turned into gritty gravel paths, punctuated by large steppingstones, providing some semblance of direction. Towering totems, painted with bright colors and inscribed with illegible writing watched over them, and heavy stone gargoyles sat on gray pedestals at intervals of about fifty paces. The lushness turned into full-fledged gardens, and in the dense shrubbery and dark foliage of the trees, Darius started to make out small shrines here and there, sometimes a small group of worshippers kneeling before them or lighting incense. The constant shade made the air cool and still, their steps becoming louder and clearer as the noise of the Trader’s District faded away.

“It’s really a different world, isn’t it?” Marth said.

“It is, I didn’t think Erinstone had any time for this kind of beauty. It seems a very industrious kingdom, but it’s nice to know that someone was feeling at least a bit spiritual when they designed this place.”

“Mhm.”

They continued looking around, trying not to talk too much and disturb the peace. As they went deeper into the gardens, they started to see small animals bouncing through the trees and scampering around. The shrines here were far older than the New Gods that they had seen people worshipping, some of the altars having crumbled in areas, leaving a half-headed monk or a monstrous beast with half a tail and a leg missing. Marth wished he’d brought the map with them, cursing himself for assuming he could remember the exact route.

“Yeah look Darius, I’m gotten a bit out of sorts here, the map said it was virtually a straight line once we got on this path.”

“That’s fine mate, I haven’t seen anything this ancient since I last saw my grandfather. We’ll keep going, eh?”

They ventured even further in, eventually stumbling through some overgrown weeds into a small clearing, disturbing what looked like thousands of butterflies of all different colors. The space around them moved with the countless beats of thousands of wings. Marth and Darius both closed their mouths tight to avoid swallowing any of the little buggers.

When the swarm cleared, the Temple of Darius lay before them.

It was in an almost pristine condition despite being possibly the oldest structure in Erinstone. The story of its origin was told in two ways – one more exciting than the other. The more fantastical rumor was that the legendary blacksmith, Rath, had buried the secrets of his creations in the temple before leading the charge against the underkind in the appropriately named, ‘Rath’s Battle’. It was said that his most promising apprentice, a young man also named Darius, was intended to inherit Rath’s knowledge, but he was killed in the Battle, and Rath chose to take his knowledge to the grave, leaving the Temple as a tribute to Darius.

The boring version was that the first settlers of what eventually came to be Erinstone had constructed the temple as either a base of operations while construction took place, or it was also a religious haven to them, too.

Darius pushed open the heavy doors, entering the dark interior. A thick smell permeated the room, something he couldn’t describe aside from just ‘old’. Marth followed behind, stopping to check out a room to the left of the entrance. He poked his head out and cast an eye over the rest of the Temple, noticing four other rooms spread out in a semicircle around an immovable iron altar. He went back to the room he had first picked, running his hand over the inscriptions that plastered the wall. They were written in the Common Tongue, but it was like another language had been created out of the same symbols, nothing even coming close to resembling any words he knew. He whispered the sounds as he ran his finger across a line of writing.

“Tel...thar...telthar na hesteen...hesten-anko. Telthar na hesteen-anko. Fair enough.”

He went out to the main sanctum to find Darius trying the same mimicking process with one of the two stone tablets that lay on the altar.

“Any luck?” Marth inquired.

“Eh, some. My grandfather used to say this ‘eshen’ word a lot when he was pissed off –which was all the time when he taught me anything.” He chuckled with the kind of laugh that said, ‘it was hell when I was there, but it’s nice to think back on.’

Marth eyes went wide, and he ran up to the altar next to Darius.

“Wait, what?! I was joking! No one knows how to read this stuff, some people think it's just an ancient art-form, not even a language. How do you know this?”

“Well, I don’t know it do I? I picked one word out that I don’t even know what it means, I’ve just heard it.”

Marth was glad they had made the journey. From what he read, out of all the historians and scholars in Erinstone and even those who had travelled to Erinstone to see the Temple, no one had made heads nor tails of the writing. A team of scholars, specializing in deciphering military codes, had camped at the Temple for weeks, poring through the words, coming up with all the possible combinations and permutations to rearrange the letters into. One scholar had screamed ‘eureka!’ when he found a formula that gave the sentence ‘dough eats small eats man’ on the wall in the second room, but it was only coincidence, confirmed by applying the formula to any other segment of writings.

But now the mystery was reopened. Marth let his head run wild for a moment, dreaming of the possibilities. He thought about the advancements that could be made if Rath’s machinery was in fact real, the power it would give to whoever was in control of it. The value of whatever knowledge Darius’s grandfather had was incalculable.

Then, a terrible thought came to his head, making him pray he was wrong, praying that Rath’s machinery was not real.

If it was, somewhere out there, wherever Rath’s Battle was held, there could very well be underkind, waiting to be awoken, bringing death and destruction to the whole world.

Marth shivered, and suddenly the Temple and its surroundings were not so inviting. He opted to go outside and eat his cheese and bread, leaving Darius to finish his perusal. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head.

“If the underkind came back, and they were as powerful as the legends say, we’re fucked.”

All he could do at that moment was keep chewing.