Halfway to the Village, Father Adam finally came too. He was sporting a solid purple bruise on the side of his head, and his old liver-spotted skin looked pale and weak.
“The Catacombs,” he said in a whisper. “We have to go to the Catacombs.”
I didn’t question him, and simply asked, “Which direction?”
“North. Across the river and at the foot of the Forlorn Castle cliffside.”
I quickly changed directions and took the first road that led north, rather than south to the relative safety of the Village.
We were heading towards the castle, which meant I’d have to fight the King soon. I wondered if the Forbidden Catacombs would be the Stage before the King’s, since I wouldn’t be going into the castle yet, but rather, under it. I still had no idea why the catacombs were so important, since Father Adam hadn’t explained it yet. But then again, I also hadn’t asked. I figured it would all be revealed when we got there, so I just focused on the road ahead, as the mare galloped across the gravel and dirt.
An hour-or-so later, we crossed a partially-broken stone bridge that spanned the wide, rapid-flowing Riven. Ahead of us was still nothing but the hilly landscape, stretching far into the horizon.
Sometime later, we passed through a small village.[1] The houses had boarded-up doors and windows, and its streets were covered with old dried blood and the scattered remains of people who’d died many years before. It reminded me of Silt and the Farmstead in many uncomfortable ways.
That village was the first of four such settlements we passed.
Upon leaving the fourth behind, the Father spoke up for the first time since crossing the river. There was none of the rasp in his voice any longer, and his eyes were clear-blue and saw the world. He even seemed slightly younger.
“Twelve years ago, the first of the Forlorn appeared before us, wearing the guises of those long-thought-gone. They set upon the cities, towns, and villages north of the Riven, indiscriminately killing every living soul. All to feed some sick desire within them. It was like a Shadow of Death had stretched across the land, cast forth from the gates of the abandoned castle. A group of our Kingdom’s bravest knights travelled to the castle, intent on finding the source of these Forlorn monstrosities. All but one of them perished in those halls, and the one survivor died shortly after of some sickness that turned his skin purple with rot. Before his death, he spoke in delirium of The Forlorn King. Nobody believed him of course, nobody but me, that is. You see, the Church has known about the Forlorn curse long before our lands became plagued by it.
“Once, long before our Kingdom’s downfall, a Prince found a blade on his expedition to some desert land far away. It imbued him with tremendous power, allowing him to defeat his foes and unite our warring Lords under one banner. But soon after, that power took control of his mind and those of his closest followers. They became Forlorn, and it shook our Kingdom to the verge of ruin, until a magician from those same desert lands came to our doors, holding a fragment of the sun. With his flame, the magician banished the shadows and killed the Forlorn Knights and their King. The cursed blade was hidden away in the deepest depths of the Royal Family’s tomb and the fragment of the sun with it.
“Fifty-two years ago, the last King was killed by his only son during a heated argument. It is said that the fiercely-loyal Royal Guard became so enraged with the Prince that they sealed him away in the Catacombs. Somehow, the Prince must have found the cursed blade, and turned his father’s Knights into his own, becoming the second Forlorn King.”
“Is that why we are going to the Catacombs?”
“Yes. With the key in your possession and the map in mine, we must locate the fragment of the sun and use its powers to seal away the cursed blade that rests in the hand of the Forlorn King. Only by the light of a True Flame can we banish the shadows.” I wasn’t sure how he knew I had the key, since I hadn’t mentioned it to him yet, but I just assumed he’d heard about the Tournament or something.
As if on cue, the tallest spire of a large castle crawled over the horizon. The closer we got, the more it became visible, until we were greeted with a full view of a stone castle, sitting proudly at the top of a great cliff. At the foot of the cliff, a cobblestone road snaked up the incline, lined with tall iron lanterns on either side and reaching all the way to the castle gates, where, even from this distance, I spotted a closed portcullis. The castle perimeter was lined with large stone walls, and its location at the edge of the cliff provided it with a natural defence that would’ve made sieging it a troublesome affair. However, if it was truly abandoned, and no soldiers patrolled its walls, it might be possible to simply waltz in there unannounced.
Five minutes later, we reached the tail of the cobblestone road, and before us lay the road towards the castle, but Father Adam pointed us left off the side of the cliff, to some downwards-sloping dirt path that looked too precarious to venture on horseback. We left the horse behind and took the descent one careful step at a time. Although the Father looked in far better shape than I’d ever seen him, he still hobbled like an old man.
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The slope took us down to the edge of the cliffside and treated us to a harrowing footpath along a narrow trail with no guardrail and a bone-chilling view of a fifty-plus-metre straight drop to a coastline of jagged stones. Beyond the jagged coast was a vast expanse of deep-blue sea.
As we edged along the side of the cliff, the wind off the sea beating at us relentlessly, I realised we weren’t going in through the main entrance of the catacombs, but rather heading for some alternate route that would take us to the crypt’s deepest level. The true entrance to the catacombs most likely lay within the walls of the castle. But I didn’t question the old priest’s plan. There were a lot of things he knew about this place, which I didn’t, and I was sure that this was ultimately the safest route, although one misstep would lead to a long fall and face-full of sharp stones.
After sidling across an edge no wider than two handspans, our hands glued to the jagged rock wall for safety, we reached an opening into the cliffside. It was only a metre-and-a-half at its tallest, so both of us had to stoop low to enter through it. The inside was even narrower, forcing us onto our hands and knees, and we carefully crawled through a tunnel that became progressively darker the further in we went. Twice I scraped my hands on the dagger-sharp jagged stones, but it was all worth it when we reached a large cavern system, after crawling in the pitch-black for some minutes. Of course, it was still incredibly dark, but not so much that you couldn’t sense your immediate surroundings. Father Adam continued on without pause, following some unseen path. I couldn’t see him, as he was too far ahead of me, but I heard his scraping steps echoing through the darkness and tried my best to keep up.
The climb through the cavern was far easier than our trek along the cliffside footpath, but it was a slow progress and we spent several hours in the darkness before we reached our destination. By then, I’d consumed half the loaf of bread, both of the sausages, and almost the entire waterskin.
Up ahead of me, light shone out of the side of the cavern wall and, in the light, I saw the outline of bricks. It seemed like the Catacombs had been built into the cliff. The Father’s silhouette was painted on the rock wall opposite the hole, his body illuminated by the light source within the man-made structure.
I followed him through the partially broken wall and we emerged into the dusty cobwebbed interior of the Catacombs, though our immediate surroundings didn’t so much look like catacombs as they did a prison. If the Father’s story was true, we were likely inside the patricidal Prince’s cell. Upon crossing the threshold, a powerful-and-deep male Latin chanting filled the air, echoing off the far reaches of the tomb. The chanting voices lamented the dead, like some religious prayer. A few seconds later, a banner appeared, “Now entering Emergent Stage ‘The Forbidden Catacombs’.”
At the opposite end of the tiny cell, a rusted-yet-sturdy cell door barred our way out. Beyond the metal bars was a large chamber with tombstones on the walls, the graves themselves seemingly carved into the stone. The middle of the chamber held a brazier atop a stone pedestal, a tiny brilliant flame yet flickering within it. I pulled the key from my inventory and approached the cell door, though quickly realised the lock wasn’t engaged and pushed it open, producing a piercing metallic screech that reverberated through the stale air for what seemed like ages. Dust, dirt, and a plethora of insect husks covered the tiled floor of the tomb and lay thick enough that our first questing steps into the chamber left behind visible footprints. I scanned our surroundings, but no clues remained of the ones who had lit the brazier.
“It is but a fragment of a fragment,” the Father mused, inspecting the brazier flame in the centre of the chamber. “What we seek is the Flame from which this piece was torn.” Prompted by his own speech, he pulled a rolled-up parchment scroll from his robe. It was stained by his own sweat and sagged slightly in his hands, but he seemed capable of deciphering it nonetheless.
Without a word, he immediately approached one of the four walls in the chamber and began tapping the various carved bits around the stone face, clearly searching for some hidden mechanism. I walked around the room while the Father investigated the wall. The room was perhaps ten-by-ten metres in diameter, and the light from the small flame seemed to reach even the farthest nooks and cracks. More disturbingly, the chamber had no entrance nor exit, at least if you didn’t count the broken wall in the cell. I also failed to understand what purpose my hard-earnt key served, when the cell door was already unlocked.
A sound of elation escaped Father Adam’s lips, as part of the wall before him slid aside with the sound of stone scraping across stone. It looked like the rest in the chamber, but the two tombstones attached to the hidden door were fake. As I passed through the opening, I noted the names of on the fake tombstones, which weren’t names at all, but rather a sentence written in Latin: “The path you seek is before you.” The dates beneath were marked with an X.
As we moved through the narrow opening, we came into a short tunnel and reached another fake wall that slid aside when Father Adam pulled on a handle recessed into its façade. Light flooded the claustrophobic tunnel and we emerged onto a narrow pathway in a long chamber. The path led straight across the room, but, as I joined the Priest, I saw that spikes covered the floor three metres below. The narrow path was no more than a handspan wide, so it seemed inevitable that I’d fall and each a face-full of spikes. What’s more, as the Father took his first questing steps across the dust-covered stone walkway, the room seemed to come alive.
Hidden within the walls next to the many lanterns holding brilliant flames, a plethora of crossbow traps started letting loose their long-kept supply of bolts. Plinks and crashes came in a deafening cacophony as bolts slammed against the walls opposite their traps, but I quickly noticed there was a pattern to the madness.
Right wall fires, then left.
Given that the firing patterns overlapped so that no place was safe to stand, aside from the exits, it meant that we’d have to stutter-step our way across the room. If we mistimed our steps, we’d be turned into pincushions. We could potentially just wait for the traps to run out of bolts, but something told me that, given the nature of this Realm, there would be no end to them.
“Seriously? Traps?? Since when did this World become a puzzle-platformer??”
“Follow my lead,” the Father just replied.
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[1] An actual village, not like the Forgotten Village, which, as I’ve already explained, was more of a town.