“Hold here,” Drake said. At which point both Hemlock and Bon Bon collapsed where they stood.
Their years of harsh training and ruthlessly demanding courses may have readied them for the bulk of what the Pyrate’s life promised. But no amount of physical exercise or mundane mercenary work could have ever prepared them for the sorts of trials installed on Naarfynder.
Drake used this moment’s respite to take an objective stock of their situation. It was at moments like these that he most sincerely hated being Captain. Whichever way he turned it they were in a bad place. And every moment they stayed here actively worsened their standing.
He swore he'd seen this hallway already. But then again he'd thought that about nearly every other room, chamber and corridor they'd seen so far.
Every facet and dimension of this desolate spire, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, was the same ultimate kind of sheer abysmal black.
There were no waypoints, no landmarks, no beacons or signs of any shape or variety on which to ground their telemetry.
Adding to the disquiet, every door, every aperture, every niche, nook, block and parcel shone like irradiated charcoal, bending and refracting nonexistent light back upon its superliminal source.
Even their torches, far from revealing anything useful or substantive, instead washed the limbic castle in macabre camera auroral projections that no normal material composite could have produced.
This made the prospect of discerning one direction from another all but impossible, even with the light from their torches.
Drake had sent Crow to scout ahead, to see if they were going in circles. He had been gone for more than an hour now, and Drake’s governing instinct was charging its influx coils.
He told himself this was irrational. That if any beast could handle being stranded alone in a haunted castle on a nightmare island living beyond the junction of no and where, it was Crow.
Besides, even if this were that one time in a billion that the Black Wolf actually needed their help, their all being in the same boat, so to speak, meant there was a whole great deal of nothing they could offer.
Ok, so they were in a bad spot. But this was nothing new, he said to himself. They were Pyrates. Trouble was most of the job description. But he knew better.
This was all part of his father’s grand scheme to keep those “inconvenient pestilences” out of his deeper sanctuary. Away from his dearest works.
The alarm had been rung. Naarfynder’s defenses were awake. The island knew its master like no other and so knew as well the unwary minds and errant footfalls of delectable intruders.
Drake had known all this would happen. Just like he knew that Sir Francis hadn’t been the one to issue Drohmsviire its brand as the “Dark Tower”.
He knew this was all going according to his father’s wicked plan. That no beast had managed to infiltrate the Mad Wizard’s inner sanctum in almost fifty years, though several armies had tried.
He had gambled everything on the assumption that between his outdated experience and their collective willpower they could override the castle’s untended guardian motors.
He was losing that bet.
He hadn’t counted on losing Ellie. In hindsight he couldn’t help feeling that had been a precisely calculated attack. Though calculated by whom he was at a loss to figure without more intel.
It was as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. Waiting. Watching. As soulless and hungry as the basement fires of the Abyss. As patient and tireless as its maker.
The Godfather of Chaos, Oboros, or Abraxas as the alchemists knew him, had forged a symbiotic pact with the sanctuary abyss of Drohmsviire. And he would not easily suffer the messy indecency of life treading upon the calm sanctity of his perfectly still realm.
Drake knew they had only seen Stage One.
Like spectators in an underground circus, the shadows were still and patient and hungry. The legion of cruel monsters that hid and festered in the foulest depths of this pit salivated. Tempted by the arrival of fresh succulents.
Predatory eyes glinted behind the veil. Their writhing bellies groaned. Vacuous spirits lusted after their imminent meal as their wretched hearts crackled with infernal thunder.
This was the start of Stage Two.
A wicked frost had surrounded them, crushing them in its iron grasp. It was siphoning their very spirits to appease its own avaricious appetite and attempting to strangle their wills.
The malevolent rime seemed to give rise to all their most fervent nightmares. The sinister visions were clawing at the backs of their skulls, leaving the crew vulnerable to whatever wicked forces lay within the consuming void.
The flickering glow from their torches gave little comfort. For in this dark and brooding place, Death was the Matriarch, and her mandate was suffering.
At least that's what the sailors at the Old Scabs' Pub in Menta used to tell them. On occasions too numerous to count, the young Drakes had been subjected to hours of the merchants’ and sailors’ drunken lectures about the infinite library of sinister ways their father was perverting and destroying everything that was good and decent about the world.
The younger sibling had never argued these accusations. Not for pacifism’s sake or because he hadn’t naïvely believed in his parent’s intrinsic virtue, but merely because he’d never seen the sense in trying to beat reason into a head that was too sodden with booze to remember the lesson if and when they woke up.
More than once the brothers’ fists had been tempered on the skulls and jugulars of particularly incensed or zealous patrons who’d taken it to mind that the pups were actually daemons or ghouls conjured up by their father in one of his nebulous experiments.
“If there’s one thing I know to be absolutely and unequivocally true about all minds across the infinite span of space and time it is that they fear what they don’t understand and hate what they can’t control.”
To this day Drake maintained those had been the wisest words he had ever heard his father speak. And in his day, he’d reflected, Sir Francis was perhaps wiser than most gave him credit for.
But all that was in the past.
Drake was no longer the innocent runt he’d been when he and his lost twin could still brawl together back to back. He could no longer afford to be. Too much depended on his clarity of vision.
It could, and had been, argued that he’d grown in more than just physical proportions.
Ellie had told him once several years ago that he had learned what his brother could not accept. That he’d seen the light where his brother had been too utterly taken by Sir Francis’s poisonous spell.
She hadn’t used that exact phrasing, but her sentiment had struck most of the same chords. Even if he hadn’t wholly believed them. And indeed he knew she wouldn’t have either if he’d truly opened his mind and heart to her as he’d professed to have done.
He had seen his father’s true colors in the end. That was true enough as facts go. He had also witnessed the abysmal horrors of their works. He’d seen the brutal, unrepentant carnage wrought by Naarfynder’s infernal engines. The mass throngs of innocent souls led to the undeserved grave and then on to the rending teeth of nocturnal fiends.
He had stood there. And watched. He had just stood by. And then he’d gone on to defend the saarding depraved mind responsible!
Why?! What ghastly, evil force could have possessed him to think of such monstrous aberrations as anything other than the malignant pus of a truly diseased spirit?
He knew and hated the answer to that too.
Love. The pure, simple love of a child. That blind, foolish, singular admiration for the one who’d given him life but would not think to hesitate to take it again if doing so would serve his demented ends.
If ever there was a situation to make any Captain long for the soul console of his mate, this was that.
How he ached for Ellie’s girdle of warmth in this purgatorial well.
True, there were many charming adjectives he could use to describe Ellie. But soulful, angelic and nightingale were not on that list. She had the vocal range of a taxidermized Vulture and could carry a tune about as well as she could an actual concert hall.
He closed his eyes, and he could see her. He could hear her singing to him through the shadows. He heard her angelic voice sing his name. Softly, sweetly her voice carried his mind away. Her nightingale chords lulled his weary spirit to its earned rest …
A hand smacked him across the muzzle. Causing him to snap upright to attention faster than if his tail had gotten caught in a vice trap.
‘Ow!’ his brain blurted.
“What? Where?” dribbled from his mouth. He spit then looked around, expecting to meet Hemlock’s sternly judgmental countenance.
Adrian’s sun-golden face instead stared back at him with a tightly layered assemblage of curiosity and concern.
He’d been slumping into what Nikodontus had termed the “dream carapace”.
In the hours since their incursion into Drohmsviire’s black roots, simple fatigue had eclipsed all thoughts of mortal dread. Along with the debilitating languor came the engulfing fear, spawned by the dread of such fathomless apocryphal nightmares that words didn't exist to describe them.
Even to those who could only suspect the nature of the endemic envelope they were ensnared in, it came as little shock that Bon Bon had been the first to succumb to its degenerative toxins.
Drake in particular had guessed it would be so. Her unstable emotional bonds had made prime attack vectors for the Nihil web’s insidiously efficient spinsters. Paired with her, at best, tenuous relationship with reason, it had only been a matter of minutes before her mental and spiritual faculties had been quickly and mercilessly hacked to splinters by the Castle’s craven powers.
The only word coherent in her delusional ramblings being “Tom”, her wild mania had precipitously blossomed into wholesale lunacy. Manifesting first in bone-chilling howls. Eventually devolving into her trying to slay her former swain’s invisible phantom with a sword that her real hand hadn’t quite gotten the message wasn’t actually its to hold.
Adrian had first tried and, mainly to his own shock, failed to so much as reach, let alone settle her. Her perceptions having already been too thoroughly warped. The Nihil veil too tightly wrapped around her mind for even his unalienable aura to penetrate.
‘All part of the plan.’
Though he’d masked it well, Drake had been the only one wiser. Far stronger wills than hers had been laid low by Drohmsviire’s dragon skin arcane shielding.
But then something utterly unexpected had happened. Hemlock had disarmed the screeching young she Fox, clasped her in a locking embrace and taken them both to ground. There she’d sat humming some discordant lullaby and stroking the Vixen’s berry-blued mane all during the latter half of the pocket torch’s lifespan.
In the end, all was still and quiet again. Bon Bon no longer flailed or fought with the images of nowhere. She just lay and rested, barely breathing, her eyes half closed, half shrouded with delirious haze. Every so often the slightest gasp of a sob or a mumbled word
Drake stared into the waning fire. Heaping his enduring will upon it, but for naught. The light would soon die, as three others had already.
Temporal sands ran at a more frantic pace here. It was as though time itself fled in fright from what the next moment might bring.
But the one law consistent within all sides, realms, dimensions and permutations of creation is that time always, inevitably, runs out.
Drake knew there was no point thinking about retreat. They needed to find a drift to catch, to break free of this paratonic prison. Otherwise becoming a gibbering basket case would be the nicest thing their futures held in store.
This was Stage Three of the island’s castlelike defense stratagem. The “Master Stroke,” in Sir Francis’s words.
“Apriori gridlock,” in Nik’s words. An erratic, staccato assault on the invaders’ mental and spiritual fortitude. Followed by a prodigious flood of artificially incited emotional stimuli.
“A Wolfpack blitzkrieg,” according to Noah, whose brainchild this whole process majoritively was.
Drake had to hand it to his evil twin. Vile and black though the now eldest Drake’s heart and blood may have been, what the Sire Drake had wanted for in wit and cunning his first son made up for a hundred fold. As if nature itself had stepped in to even out the scales. Though it might have ever so slightly overcorrected. The same way inadvisably placed calk turns a relatively benign gas leak into a firebomb.
Never had the term ‘evil genius’ before so neatly applied to any beast not born of ink and thought.
Noah had a gift for planning that would have set Nikodontus’s teeth on edge if he’d had any. A trait the infamous pirate, Sinbad, now carried in their father’s dreadful wake.
His tactics were bold. His strategies without flaw. His command over logistics peerless.
As elegant in their simplicity as they were vicious in their efficacy.
Aided and actively asserted via a destructive negative feedback loop in the metaphysical dynamic. Targeting the range of basic fault lines common in all sentient psyches. Any and all repressed memories or urges, no matter how miniscule, would be simultaneously excited and exploited by the layered Nihil nexus.
The ultimate aim of which being to lock the enemy in an internal arena where they would battle the worst and most feverish fantasy contusions of their primal centers.
There the hapless prey would languish in their self-constructed prisons as their bodies gradually succumbed to the effects of dehydration and starvation. All while the Tower’s parasitic Miasma methodically picked and ate away at their charging animus fields.
This would all be the Fourth Stage. The “Apex Terminus”, according to Nikodontus.
Thence would begin the Fifth and Final Stage. The “Destiny Stage” as Drake’s misbegotten twin had coined it.
When the broken spirits of the deceased finally came untethered from their vessels, rather than being allowed to drift and dissipate peacefully back into the ether, that essence would instead be forcibly extracted, harvested, mutated and capsulized for whatever later use the island’s parent Necromancer saw fit.
Suddenly, as though in answer to a tacit prayer, a lone bright spot akin to the first star at dusk or the last at daybreak, appeared in his mind, breaking through the Miasma’s coddling mire. If just for a moment.
In the waking world this epistemological crowbar took the shape of a timely resurgent and abnormally animated Crow.
The Wolf whistled and gestured frantically back the way he’d just come, which chased off Drake’s rapturing delirium mask like a bomb blast displacing smoke.
The Captain could count on one hand the times he’d seen Crow act frantically. He willed himself back to rights to issue a concise general command.
“This way, let’s go,” he said. Being sure to make his voice stern and loud while also being careful to keep it below a shout.
Not that it mattered. Neither of the females so much as altered their gaze. Not a hair on an ear twitched. Like the miscarried dead they sat, as though waiting for a ship that would never come. Their eyes vacant and distant. Exemplifying the opining fog settling within.
Though he remained more cognizant, even Adrian only just managed to acknowledge his Captain’s mandate with a slight tilt of his head.
But Drake was resolute. His heart sported a fire that made the Empire’s great beacons look like rushlights. He had not led his herd all this way, through hell and high winds, only to see them fall to their own traitorous constitutional agents.
Silently, without prior accord, he and Crow each hefted one of their mortified comrades over their shoulders and took off at a dead run. With Drake following his spotter’s spirited lead and Adrian chasing his Captain’s tail.
With numb minds and aching shoulders they flew through the blackness. Abandoning their spluttering light source in favor of making faster steps.
Their strident chase ended before a black iron door bearing a wooden plank with the words Tarde Arnan Grymvartuur painted on it in blotted streaks of faded scarlet.
Drake knew them to mean ‘No Living Soul May Pass’ only because he had helped his brother translate and paint them there when they were both still too young and stupid to comprehend the deeper significance.
For the first time in nearly a decade boots pounded the abyssal tract. Every step, every movement brought on the abrasive ire of a predator robbed of an easy meal.
Their heads were pounding. Their eyes shed droplets of gray glass as comprehension of impending salvation spread through their cranial cells like flames through an arid library.
All three males together managed to shoulder the onerous barrier aside and all five bodies tumbled through into another umbral abyss. Albeit one slightly cheered by the yellow-tinted glitter of a thousand million points of steel light that swathed the vast cavern in a thin film of celestial haze only just bright enough to see by and the striking absence of the Miasma prison field.
Were he stripped of his memory of the past several days and then told this was the bleeding edge of the sky itself Drake would hardly have given a thought to questioning it.
Having been granted no such mercy, he knew perfectly that, in truth, here afore lay the bottomless necrose well that was the heart and soul of the Necromancer’s infernal fortress.
The sky-bursting silo’s inner wall reached upwards beyond the range of what their natural lens perspective could glean. Tapering to an impassable singularity several leagues over their heads.
To the uninitiated it would have been a dazzling spectacle. The tower’s long black glass face coursing with ribbons of pale celestial colors made cheap the cosmos’s afterhours bonanza.
From the enlightened eye, however, could not escape the rivers of shed scarlet and the shimmering Sisyphean lanes of unpardoned souls trapped in pulsating veins just beneath the tower’s tenebrous skin.
Drake was first to rise. Such was his duty both as Captain and as their netherworld guide at the precipice of a stone ledge overlooking the cavernous expanse. A narrow corkscrew ledge spiraled clockwise around the nefarious trunk’s inner circumference.
Both it and the platform ledge on which they stood were hewn directly from the walls and both were festooned top and bottom with the pulsating lights so that the portside ramp appeared to vanish after just a dozen yards.
Drake’s eyes fell upon a single stone planted in the vertical face of the rounding plane and found himself inexplicably possessed by an intractable sense of profound purpose.
As an anchor drawn back to a ship by a line and winch, he approached the edge as though its cavernous deep harbored a slumbering dragon, which he knew it didn’t,
He knew the spire wasn’t actually bottomless. But knowing also that even in his father’s personal playpen gravity didn’t play favorites, he opted to respect the Pyrate’s Eighth and most widely applicable mantra: never gamble with what you can’t stand to lose.
Abiding his own and his predecessors’ amalgamated wisdom, Drake reached just as far over and into the saccharin abyss as was required to retrieve his target relic. Taking it in his fingers he popped the unusually enticing stone from its cradle with trapezial ease, then held it up for all to examine.
Like all things of true significance or worth, it seemed unremarkable at first. A bulbous auric gemstone about the size of a large nut or berry. It exuded a soothing summer aura that seemed to wax and wane in tune with his heartbeat.
In fact it bore a striking resemblance to a nexel. Except that where the volatile crystals had either a dark magenta or violet hue and were warm to the touch, this bluebell heart of a gem was the color of blushing gold and sang in an elegiac lyre timbre.
Unlike the king metal, it didn’t so much steal heat as trade for it a feeling of profound satiation which lay in the heart like a feast bought by the well-earned spoils of a successful war would in the belly.
And unlike any instrument made by living hands its song was of a kind discernable only to its bearer.
Drake stood there, staring into its labial facets. His mind and spirit hopelessly transfixed, though on what not even he could say with any surety.
At one point Hemlock made to physically break the spell’s bondage, but Crow barred her way with an arm.
No explanation was given for this, and one look from the Wolf’s dire candle eye stamped out all prospects of protest.
The four whist-fallen beasts watched on in fear and wonder as their Captain mused on matters which only outer minds of superior eldritch caliber could begin to parse in any true or accurate detail. Whatever Crow saw in that mysterious rite was a lock for which he would carry the only key.
All the rest of them could do was wait and hope. A fact which was not lost and which sired its own Mongol share of indignant, useless emotions in each and every witness. For once, Crow being no exception.
As the minutes ticked by, regular life slowly reclaimed the Captain’s derelict body. As his hands remembered their purpose, they turned the stone over. The sickly isosceles barbs which had grown in and permeated his heart’s every cell and had begun boring through to his mind were receding. Melting under the stone’s lustrous aether.
‘Tim will have a lot to say about this I’m sure,’ a part of him reckoned sagely. At which another, less astute, part improperly speculated, ‘maybe Ellie can use it in one of her necklace patterns …’
Castrated though it was, the thought struck Drake’s insides like a spiked club. To whose grievous aftermath the stone seemed to almost speak. Chasing away the ice and fire of premature grief with a chordate whispered melody.
Drake hadn't survived his life’s seminal crucible by trusting in fate to carry him, and he saw no reason to break a successful trend.
He and Crow settled Bon Bon’s weakly apologetic frame onto Hemlock’s slumping back. Draping her limp arms over her comrade’s shoulders like cagey backpack straps and lashing her knees to the Doe’s waistline by the same rope that had saved them from the clutches of the Naarfynder host.
Their minds settled, their bodies rested and their direction as abundantly clear as one can be under such circumstances, the trio and a half waited on their Captain’s signal to move out.
The moment before giving the order, however, another minor bout of inspiration took over Drake. This time causing him to press the profound crystal into Bon Bon’s clammy fingers.
He shrugged off his crew’s inquisitive looks. It was only a hunch. One he couldn’t have explained even if he’d tried. He simply suspected they were going to need all the available hands very shortly. And if what was true of the heart and mind was so of the body, then by the Ninth line in the unofficial Pyrate Codex, “waste a moment now, waste many a tear later”, he would see that they didn’t need luck where they were going.
He nodded to Crow, who, in his clinically obtuse way, drew his pistol and took the lead. Drake did likewise and brought up the rear. Between them they herded the invalid and her barely-managing crutch.
Their progress was slow, but consistent. Carefully they tested each footstep and warily they studied every bump, flake and groove of the chimerical tract. All the while they kept their bodies pressed against the wall, just as they had been trained.
Thankfully, they hadn’t gone far before Drake’s intuitive inspiration was vindicated.
Sure enough, before their very eyes the stone’s ineffable magick didn’t just taxidermize Bon Bon’s flesh and spirit, but wholly mended and even reconstructed anew those bits lost to the dire abyss seemingly out of the wishful aether.
And not just hers either.
Hemlock’s vitality and constitution seemed to restore faster with each step and breath, as opposed to the reverse that one might be forgiven for anticipating given the circumstances.
As soon as the Vixen was fit enough to walk on her own Drake promptly reclaimed and stuffed the miracle elixir stone into his most secret and secure pocket.
‘Definitely gotta put this under Tim’s scope,’ he thought as he issued the gesticular order to move out.
Two by two the group proceeded up the transverse rampart at a far more marketable pace. It didn’t escape anyone’s notice, save for Bon Bon’s obviously, that she was sidling along inordinately close to her pair partner.
No one said anything. Having her attention fixed squarely on something at her left arm meant her mind couldn’t happen across the subject of the midnight plunge off to her right.
Adrian kept up a brisk, detached pace with her hectic wit and sidelong diatribes. His lackadaisical manner and sparkling humor evoking as much the ashen blue fire of choice combat as the regular lapping golden teeth of irritation.
Images of Ellie’s honeyed coat scorched Drake’s internal eye. He reached into his cloak and felt there the firestone bleed its precious zeal back into him.
Not long into their march Drake became subliminally aware they were being shadowed by something with a distinctly corporeal scent.
Actually, thinking more on it, shadowed wasn’t the right word.
Surveyed? No. Too professional.
Tracked? Too sleek.
Stalked? No. No. Still too much connotative stealth lodged in it.
Who or whatever was tailing them was either extraordinarily bad at sneaking or else it wanted them to know theirs was a known presence.
Maybe it was just a witless creature curious to see what was trespassing in its lair.
Perhaps this was some strange form of posturing known only to cave creatures and denizens of pseudo-imaginary islands.
Or maybe it was sapient and just didn't give a fart in the Abyss if any beast knew it was there or not.
Either way it was unquantifiable and that made it a threat.
Pyrates’ Eleventh Rule: you don’t have to see a problem for it to become yours.
Drake turned his head just far enough to see into the haze behind him. In his peripheral vision, a small, slender form slinked in and out of the crags between the rocks.
Ears pricked, sword arms flexed, but neither holster nor scabbard was disturbed.
Pyrate Rule Number the Tenth: “you don’t need to lure trouble out. When the Gods are craving discord it’ll find you all on its own, whether you want it or not.”
Drake didn’t need to ask or even check to see whether his foremost mates were on his page or not. The Deer and the Wolf were two of the best trackers on the FPA roster. If their inept tail had stumbled into his sensory field, well, to quote the great author, historian and playwright C.G. Roúgschild, “if the meager cup can catch a mottle of rainwater, how much so the more can the ampler bucket keep and the grander trough abide.”
Had Drake inherited even a modest quantity of his mother’s artistic sensibilities he might have seen the poetry in this line coming from a beast as famous for never wasting good printing space on simple ideas as for never saying in just five words what could be said in fifty.
But as such things were the provincial inheritance of his brother, the younger Drake was left to affect his intellect over the objective materium.
He communicated his findings to Hemlock for no particular reason other than her being the closer, through the language of simple, subtle gestures and common noises no Pyrate or pirate was ever taught but which all invariably learn to over due course in the trade. Knowing he needn’t tell her to say nothing to Bon Bon, or explain the reason as being their not needing a repeat of her earlier outbursts, he did anyway. If for no other reason than to check all their proverbial boxes, as he knew everyone would have expected.
She answered just as he’d expected. Bluntly and knowledgably. And they continued on in independent silent contemplation for some time without any sign of trouble. Their persistent tail for the time being notwithstanding.
Adrian pulled in tighter to Bon Bon, ready to pull his wistful companion to the side should the need for battle jump out at them. Her utter fixation never relaxing, and in fact only bolstering the libra scale they all had a vested interest in keeping at as near to straight level as possible.
They spent another half an hour glass’s sand tracing the monotonous spiral upwards before meeting any variation in the mold.
A deviance which, to the surprise of absolutely no beast, Crow was the first one to spot.
In his factitious way he directed their attention to a collection of gray buildings scaffolded straight into the walls and jutting off the vertical face of the path like domicile teeth a few turns higher up.
“Great,” Drake exclaimed once they were close enough for him to tell what he was looking at. “Maybe we’ll find a clue up there.”
“Or some help,” Adrian added. “Or some food,” Bon Bon chimed in.
Drake bobbled a nod. His heart raced ahead of them. His vision of their future, of Ellie’s beaming features, so close and crystal clear in his view he almost fatally forgot that the line his feet were walking was actually a circle.
A more prodigious mind would have regarded their sanctity for the false light emitted by the improbable as the poisonous fruit that it was. And it was perhaps fitting that the one mind present who fit such description was also the only one not affixed to a sound box, and thus unable to verbally affect such council.
Against all their training, his lifelong experience and his reason, he had begun to hope. A dangerous and faulty tripline so far from their proverbial X, going by the Twelfth axial Pyratical proverb.
Drake’s brain and his heart were at odds and the latter had the former in a vice lock. There was no turning back. Their only hope lay in the above settlement. One which grew dimmer and fainter the nearer they advanced on the outskirts of what they gradually understood to be a ramshackle quarter, the sort of which a den of orphaned youths might construct after only seeing a house once in a half burned sketch in a raggedy old book.
All five beasts shared conversational glances. All agreeing collectively on the point that if this grovelheim nest was their salvation, then the gods weren’t worth the clay and rock their idols were built from.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Their atheistic convictions hardened every yard they closed with the bedraggled settlement’s forlorn aperture.
The town, or what crude iconic models passed for, at distant glance seemed to have been cobbled from a combination of daub, twigs and tooth plaster.
Greater proximity, however, sutured these disparate fragments into a single cogent truth. That of the distinct, albeit broken, tapered shapes of yard arms, hull beams and waxed boards. The dull glint of steel butt caps, rivets, bolts, rings and fasteners accented many a ramshackle joist and façade. Whose vertical side and glacis planes also shimmered like translucent metallic bubbles.
There to greet them at the entrance stood a trio of small, albino creatures, each one about a foot tall. They were all dressed in rags. Their long jagged ears, dark Feline eyes and tight, fanged mouths gave Drake uncomfortably strong impressions of the goblins his mother had used to tell him lurked outside his window at night.
Even notwithstanding his waking experience with this island and its body populace, simpler intuition inclined him to severely doubt that these curious albino moppets would be repelled by the ambiguous magicks of tucked covers and happy dreams.
The head creature wore a crude wrap of copper around the base of its long faucet streak of jet-black hair.
A badge of office, Drake automatically assumed. Perhaps a basic interpretation of a crown. The rest of its clothes, if one could go so far as to call them that, looked like they had been woven out of the shredded remnants of an ancient Toramuun tunic.
Despite its cadaverous wardrobe it carried itself in the manner of one in possession of no meager amount of societal rank. Which, under normal circumstances, any Pyrate worthy of being addressed thus would have dismissed as a petty trifle. Their order had no use for kings or titles beyond the rank of Captain. And that mostly only for the sake of crew and resource cohesion during battle.
Here stood a creature unafraid, or otherwise so committed to his duty as leader, that he would step out personally to meet with the squad of large, armed creatures that had just manifested from out of the dark abyss below.
In Drake’s book, this fact alone made him worthy of his crown. And under normal circumstances he might have considered commanding his crew to lower their arms as a token of friendship. But nothing about these circumstances met even the most approximal criteria for normalcy. So the Pyrates’ hands stayed.
The two creatures flanking him were slightly shorter and much more robust than their leader. They each wore shiny metal barrettes with fur and feathers inset seemingly at random and the one carried a miniature glaive while his partner wielded a halfling bardiche. Both of whose four foot shafts ended in long claws of curled crimson ahead of lashed sapphire and clear diamond starstones respectively.
‘Bodyguards,’ Drake mouthed to himself.
Silent though it may have been, and despite Crow’s back being to his Captain, this question somehow elicited from the silent Wolf a nigh imperceptible shrug.
They all knew better than to dismiss any creature outright solely by its stature. But it strained the bounds of their experiential logic to think that these two tiny creatures armed with crude polearms could possibly pose a viable threat to any beast besides themselves.
As their party drew nearer, the foremost creature motioned for its guards to stay and came forward alone to meet the strange aliens.
Secure in the knowledge that their weapons had longer reach, Drake signaled for his band to station themselves likewise and proceeded alone.
The two leaders met about twenty paces from the open gate. The creature nodded formally. Drake mirrored the gesture.
Then the creature spoke. “You … have … voice?”
Its voice was course and ragged as if comprised of notes blown through dry reeds. It reminded Drake of a retired Oreamnos sailor he'd met in Horntooth about a year earlier. The old tartar-jaw had developed such a copious dependence on the native spice Ryogant, known colloquially as “seeing grass”, in his silver and golden years that he'd been forced to use a converted intercom wired to a collar in place of his decayed organic vocal tract. Resulting in a voice like glass sand running through a rusty colander.
“Yes,” Drake answered carefully. “We speak.”
The creature paused a moment, studying them. Then it asked in broken Adamic, “You … not … dead?”
From the way it enunciated every first syllable, it sounded like the words were getting caught in its throat, almost as if it had trouble remembering what verbal speech sounded like or how to produce it. Drake wondered how a creature who used language so infrequently could have come to know it at all in the first place.
Drake hesitated a moment before allowing himself liberty to speak. The sacrosanct-ness of this last statement had struck him as such a poignant reminder of their present situation, that he nearly choked on his answer as he tried to refrain from laughing at its absurdity.
“No,” he spurted. He coughed and recovered some more before starting again more definitively. “No. We're not ghosts.”
The creature flashed a toothy grin. Whether it was in genuine pleasure or imitation of Drake's own expression, may forever remain known only to him.
“Then … you … welcome,” it said, gesturing to the two bodyguards and waving them all inside with the same fluid gesture. “My … name … Schlagalmuck. Pleasure.”
From behind, Bon Bon tried to parse out the unfamiliar syllables that landed on her keen Canid ears like wet mud being scraped off a boot. “Sklegal muck?” She screwed up her face as though the words tasted of peat. “What kind of weird-ass name is that?”
Having been gifted similar natural boons, Drake was not unaware of this. He just hoped Schlagalmuck wasn’t similarly endowed.
Without taking his eyes from the diminutive chief, he kept his voice and expression neutral when he said, “I am called Drake.”
Knowing Bon Bon’s tongue would not lay still of its own accord, Hemlock moved to take up the duty, only to find her effort blocked by Adrian, who smiled and took gentle hold of the Vixen’s arm.
To Hemlock’s annoyance and Crow’s mild bemusement, this had the predicted effect of locking her voice safely and securely behind her teeth.
Schlagalmuck smiled impishly. “Your … friends … strange.”
Drake let out a soft, knowing nasal breath.
Crow and Adrian shared a look that said, in effectual essence, you don’t know the half of it.
The terrestrial delegate smiled with as much warmth as his alien countenance could convey. “You … call … me … Schlag. Easier.”
“Schlag,” Drake repeated. As much feeling out the word as the moment. Feeling a smile blossom at its touch, deciding it right to dispense his tight political countenance, he nodded a bow and said, “it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
His mind heard his words and like a wanted outlaw fired back instantly. ‘No! No! No! Stupid! Stupid!’
Schlagalmuck said nothing. He mirrored Drake’s gesture then motioned for their group to follow him.
Drake didn’t waste energy debating the past. What was done was done. What would be they would handle. As was the Pyrate way.
He beckoned his crew on and Schlagalmuck led them all through the slipshod assortment of abject crates his people called home.
‘If these are supposed to be houses, then we’re houseplants’, was the general sentiment shared amidst the Pyrates. Even if none of them articulated it such a way.
Drake didn’t need to look back to know that his mates were thinking similarly. But, because it felt expected, his head and neck went through the motion anyway all on their own.
Meanwhile, his head was busy contending with a flash flood of questions. Their tides ebbing and swooning between the shores of this revelation’s glaring spatial and temporal infractions.
How long had these creatures been on Naarfynder? Why had he never seen or heard of them before?
Of course his father had been a beast of many secrets. A good deal of which Drake had only first caught ear of from tavern whispers after becoming a Pyrate. So, he supposed, it wasn’t inconceivable that the Barren Necromancer had also dabbled in a bit of sporting alchemy and Animancy in his wayward time.
But that didn’t explain how they had come to be living, if not free, at least unmolested, in the heart of the Black Dragon’s own Castle.
True, Sir Francis had tolerated things that would make most Boars spit up their stomachs. But nothing lived in or near his house that he didn’t have a plan, or at least a use for.
Squatters and failed experiments were both top rankers on his naughty list. Right above piratical raiding parties and righteous crusaders and just barely outbidding snoopy government agents.
Nowhere in his second son’s educational or developmental memory logs could he find any instances or references that so much as hinted at the unfettered existence of a tribe of hairless albino sentients in their cellar.
Had they always been here? Had they dwelled in the depths of the catacombs invaded after the island’s masters left? Or were they newly evolved?
This last thought brought his cerebral expedition around to smack his abstract cortical lobes upside their posterior.
He was no biologist, but he knew something of history. Ideas and thoughts could spawn and take root in a few generations, sure. But whole new species didn’t just sprout out of the ground wholesale in time for the semester holiday.
Schlagalmuck took them down the one de facto road that snaked through the auspicial dermal shell of a town proper. Often skirting the facial cliff, often finding themselves at clearly far shorter odds than had been initially rationed for by the builders.
Parts where the stepping stone had been worn to odd angle or had fallen away completely had been roughly built over with amalgams of loose debris that again had evidently not been placed with bodies on their order of displacement in mind.
The Pyrates had to pay extra mind to their footing on these precarious bridges. Their being built by and for creatures roughly a third the mass of the lightest surface beast present.
“This … Skalgag … home,” Schlagalmuck explained as they walked. “Schlag … chief. Dead … not … our … friends.”
Drake nodded sagely at Schlagalmuck’s back. “Nor ours.”
He made passive note of the haunting vacuum in this supposedly occupied town.
“Skalgags … hide,” Schlagalmuck said as they approached what was presumably, from their makers’ view, an ostentatiously wide flight of stairs. “They … not … trust … strangers.”
Drake said, “I understand.”
This was true.
Which made it particularly peculiar when he then, for no readily apparent reason, followed it up with, “that’s why we’re here.” Which was less true.
“Words aren’t weapons. No matter what the priests say. If it advances your cause, lying is your greatest weapon.”
Whether his second and last progeny liked to cede the credit point or not, Sir Francis had been right more often than not. Granted, it had been the cumulative stopping power of those rare latter occurrences that had made his life several decades shorter than he’d intended. But that was beside the point.
But why had he brandished his silver dagger here? Why now? What could he have possibly thought or hoped to gain from pointless, careless sideways talk?
If his life was any indication, he’d likely either never find out or the answer was about to literally jump out and bite him.
The stairs ended in, appropriately enough, the end of the long spiraling road they’d been on. At which a broad axe head of a cliff whose glassy gray surface was streaked red and violet overlooked a sheer drop into stark oblivion.
Opposite the steps, teetering on the very precipice, was a grandiose wooden structure. It looked to be much better maintained, and paradoxically much older, than all the others.
Still, to call it a mansion would be a gross miscarriage of language. Indeed, even thinking of it as a dwelling minded the boundaries of the term only by the meagerest of fractions.
That being so, however, this sardonic structure still held in its threadbare composure a simulacrum of prestige and status despite the rotting boards and overall ware.
Inside too, from the faded red of the roof and fraying welcome rug to the auburn stain of the wood and the phantasmic hints of inlaid gold and silver retained in the deepest crevices on the ablated buttressed columns and plaster busts that dotted the reception area.
Furniture from a hundred lands of a dozen centuries in as many gradient states of ruination lay strewn about. Drake wondered if some hadn’t been appropriated from the dungeon quarter. Or perhaps taken as a vandal trophy.
Either way, he didn’t begrudge them. Their need was undoubtedly greater than that of its previous owners.
“This … chief … home,” Schlagalmuck explained. “Traditional. Built … by … first … Skalgags.”
Drake rejected his brain’s first three proposed follow-up questions in favor of their fourth running mate. Which he still didn’t want to ask, but his body, compelled by an anomalous need to fill a perceived void, insisted that his mouth make noise now. And given that it was preferable to sounding like a traumatized pup, he asked like a neo pubescent working out what to say to his first crush, “if you don't mind my asking, how did your kind … or rather, your people … come to be … that is, in a place like this?”
This entire scenario struck Drake harder than if his head had been an anvil. Had his father also conjured these morose creatures out of the same formless void as he had the undead and Naarfynders themselves?
And if so, then for what purpose?
“Not … mind,” Schlagalmuck said without turning around. Had Drake seen their host’s eyes, he would have instantly recognized them as those of a being lost in another space and time, the dimensions of which would remain forever hidden to all but himself.
Schlagalmuck’s daydreaming reticence plunged the group into a long heartbeat of deathly silence. Which was then broken by the chief’s abrupt relapse into the conversation. “Once …, long … past …, we … served … black … one.”
The matter around the Pyrates suddenly seemed to tremble as what had been mere private suspicion as to their origins became a gravitationally binding fact.
The lake of bones lining the cells below could only begin to testify to the sheer quantity of life spent in erecting this hideous effigy of civilization.
Drake glanced back at his herd-mates. He could tell by their faces that at least sizable portions of his own revelations had occurred to them as well. Even Bon Bon, for all her admirable attempts to mask it, looked stricken.
Drake moved to press Schlagalmuck on this point, but the Skalgag chief was already too busy giving orders to his guards to pay Drake any notice.
At his command, the diminutive bodyguards dropped their spears and ran upstairs. A minute later, they returned with four others of like size dragging a quartet of comparably large stools.
Drake wasn’t stupid enough to ask why they had to get those particular items of furniture when they could have just had their pick of the pile.
Bon Bon was another story. Fortunately for all, Hemlock this time stepped in. Making up for last time by snipping her caniform companions social grenade’s fuse off by knocking her jawbones together with an underhand fist so hard it made her teeth rattle.
While Adrian intervened to shoo off the impending storm cloud, Drake moved his attention back to their hosts. Who had since last viewing proceeded to set the hall for banquet. Wrapping the table with festive cloth, which is to say cloth that had played host to many a wild moth party, and beset the seats with cushions that were approximately three parts down and feathers to every one part enmeshing fabric. With any further growth in the disparity having been somewhat shoddily stemmed by randomly colored yarn and ribbons.
All in all, notwithstanding the neighborhood, there was an almost whimsical charm about the whole setup. Like watching children play at setting house.
Schlagalmuck walked over, bowed, and waved a spindly hand at the arrangement.
“You … sit.”
Though his inflection and overall attitude implied a polite and genuine offer, the first and most fundamental rule of natural etiquette, and incidentally the Twelfth Rule in Misloff’s unofficial “Pyrate Primer” pamphlet, was “never disobey, disrespect or disregard the will of another beast under his own roof unless you’re prepared for war.”
The second, or Thirteenth depending on the source, rule was that a host “ought never to invite into his or her lair that which has not already proven itself a friend.”
Of course, the point the incorrigible entrepreneur failed to visit upon his impressionable readership was the instance of said host being in company of a host of armed, and from their looks quite fatalistic, bodyguards.
But then, rule three, or Fourteen in their world, was quite adamant that “tools of inhospitable trades should be left quietly at the stoop unless either expressly dictated otherwise, or at least not expressly forbade, by one or both parties’ codes of honor, social propriety or professional duty.”
Keeping their weapons at hand, at side, thigh and hip, the Pyrate crew laid the bulk of their gear by the door and politely adjourned around the table.
All, that is, except Bon Bon. Who flopped into her chosen seat as though it had always been hers by birthright.
Luckily, if Schlagalmuck had been of a mind to take note of her flagrant impropriety, he took it well in his minute stride. Or at least didn’t consider it worth the toil of bothering with.
Instead he said with a cock of the ears that made him look like an aborted kitten, “would … offer … beds. But … you … not … fit.”
The laughter this relatively simple joke brought out of beasts and Skalgags alike was of a kind only truly comprehensible to the minds of war veterans, disaster survivors and new parents of recently lost and even more recently found young.
The bodyguards retook their positions flanking their leader as the four smaller Skalgags hurriedly scuttled back and forth erecting a more proportional seat for him.
They then conspired to produce with a plank and four dowels something vaguely resembling a miniature dining table at the far end on top of the original.
Once their chief’s place had been properly erected a pair of lighter, nimbler Skalgags, one of whom looked to perhaps be a female, hopped up and began setting out place cloths and what a generous guest would call utensils but that a scientific observer would note were just variables of crude obsidian spades.
With the easy grace of an Anuran Schlagalmuck then leapt up onto the grander platform, and with his bodyguards in tow, took his own cobbled place on his cobbled throne.
Meanwhile, as if on cue, the second pair returned, bearing, and evidently struggling with, large steel platters laden with enough food and drink to supply probably fifty Skalgags for a month.
To a beast the Pyrates had an inkling to stand up and offer help, if only to help the food reach the table a bit faster. But this moment was quickly and superbly counteracted by its first progeny, wherein their eyes and minds saw and processed the contents of the accosting platters.
Among their imminent bounty was a colorful assortment of nuts and berries, disparate fruits and exotic floral specimens, some of which were known to be harbor toxins that would humble an Anuran.
Each platter also featured a stack of flat honeyed cakes as tall as the servants who carried them.
“Enjoy,” Schlagalmuck said as he cracked open a large nut using the blunt back of a medium obsidian wedge.
Bon Bon didn’t need telling. Hemlock and Crow looked sideways at each other, shrugged, and followed suit.
Adrian and Drake held their appetites back. Though the younger beast quickly caved, the Captain held fast to his feral guide post.
To fiddle while the world burns. To feast while the wretched starved around him. That was just the sort of callous, loathsome, pathological, myopic villainy they had each and all come to expect from the world’s aristocratic crust. Not from honest outlaws.
But pretty soon Drake’s own stomach curled over upon itself at the sight of the indulgent meal set out before them. Enough to feed five Pantheran kings. Surely just a small bite …
‘No!’ his higher mind snapped at his belligerent belly. ‘This isn’t right. We aren’t thieves. We fight and kill when we have to, yes. But we only take what is deserved from those who deserve to lose it. That’s our code. That’s what sets a Pyrate apart from brigands like Conshorta’s or the soulless tools in the Armada.’
“Who gave you the power to dispose what is or isn’t right?” Prokvert’s stinging nettle voice rattled in Drake’s third ear.
“I did,” came back Avlon’s stern overheard reply. “It is why I am Headmaster, and why you, little brother, are and have always been a simple stooge.”
The Headmaster’s words were angled like tilted lances in Drake’s recollection. Daring his sibling to advance his cause by another step.
Of course, Drake hadn’t actually seen the exchange. He’d just happened to overhear a heated fragment during his inaugural Quick Walk.
That was then. This was a different beast altogether. It went far beyond the realms of simple social etiquette or stately hierarchy.
This was personal. He felt unclean. To even think about eating while surrounded by the emaciated carcass of his father’s unconscionable heritage. To his mind it was the definition of evil.
“Is it so wrong to step on another’s back if he kneels and offers it of his own accord?” Sir Francis’s serpentus drawl slithered through Drake’s memorial lobes.
Seeing, or perhaps sensing, his guest’s moralistic dilemma, Schlagalmuck smiled kindly and added, “is... tradition,” the Skalgag chief continued. “Always … share … with … guests.”
This little creature had more brains than should have been able to fit into his tiny skull.
That, or he actually had telepathic powers.
Honestly, considering the circumstances, if Drake were foolish enough to discount either option he would never have been worthy of his heralder rank, let alone his crew’s loyalty and trust.
“You … need … it … more.” Schlagalmuck assured him. “Skalgags … not … big … like … you. Not … fight.”
He spoke like a father explaining the concept of death to a small child.
Drake clenched his fists and sighed. Then he relented, bowed his head in apologetic thanks and yielded to his father’s blasted wisdom once again.
As per the way of most moral zygotes, at no point during his little caecilian disentanglement did Drake ever consider the three most obvious and relevant questions.
First: it didn’t take much brainpower to notice that Naarfynder wasn’t exactly an Edenic paradise. So where had the Skalgags gotten this garden selection feast from in the first place?
Second: why had they stuffed it all away in the chief’s attic? Did the Skalgags not need to eat? If not, then why keep it at all?
If so …
Third: why were they so willing, nay eager, to dole it out to the first bundle of strangers who happened across their threshold?
****
“Sir?” Drake asked upon clearing his first platter.
“Schlag … please,” Schlagalmuck corrected without looking up from his own meal.
“Schlag, I need to ask you something. Have any of you by chance seen a girl …?”
“Seen … many,” Schlagalmuck answered flatly. “But … none … your … type. Size.”
Drake couldn't tell whether this was meant to be a joke or an insult. In the interest of both time and not alienating the only ally they'd met on this gods-damned mission, he elected to take it on the chin and press on.
“She's like me. That is, she’s of my kind. But more like a campfire. Or the suns. That is … I mean … Ugh … I’m sorry. Let me start again. She’s about my height, golden coat, big pillowy ears, long golden plait down her back. Voice like a summer morning.”
He paused for thought, then added, “she’d also have been armed, armored and probably very grumpy.”
The other Pyrates grinned and smirked, though all signs hid behind hands or food or food in hands.
Schlagalmuck stopped eating. He stared at Drake for a long moment, then stroked his hairless chin as if pondering on a riddle.
A flash in his dark eye signaled the birth of a conclusion. He then snapped those same spindly fingers, which summoned one of the servants huddled patiently beneath the table up to his leader’s side.
The chief muttered something into his subordinate’s ear in what Drake et co. were left to assume was their native tongue.
The servant nodded, bowed, then bolted upstairs like he’d smelled the acrid nascence of a fire. Reappearing moments later with a sandy brown something pinched delicately between his vampirine incisors.
He hopped back up on the table and on bended knee held it out to Schlagalmuck like a headhunter presenting a war prize.
The Skalgag chief pointed at Drake without looking at the package. The servant obediently stepped over and knelt instead in front of Drake’s cleansed platter.
The Pyrate Captain slowly unwrapped it as though it might turn out to be a finger.
Schlagalmuck studied him over the burgundy spines of a fist-sized desert fruit. “That … your … girl?” he asked in the tone of a judge about to levy a capital verdict.
Drake picked open the canvas wrapping as though expecting it to lash out with viperous stingers.
What the folds revealed was not and had never been alive. But it was hauntingly familiar.
An ornament of jade, scarcely the size of an egg. Modest yet elegant. Pleasant yet deceptively deadly in the right circumstances.
That was Ellie to a tee. Which, he had no doubt, one or more of her abductors had learned the hard way. Hence its unceremonious abandonment.
At its touch a familiar stony dread quietly began calcifying his heartstrings, but was halted by a trickle of soothing flame from the stone tucked safely above his breast.
“Hey! That’s … !”
Bon Bon’s shrill voice blasted into Drake’s head like fire into a driving hammer piston. The force flew along his spine and into his legs, blasting him to his feet and rocketing the stool and cushion clear out onto the mansion’s front deck.
In the progenitive moment a train of mental images flickered past his inner eye like rolling camera slides as his brain caught present up with past. Then his eyes blinked, shuttering the precedential performance, as his mind reluctantly pivoted to the nearest future time slide.
His crew were staring at him like he’d just stepped out of his own coffin, while the Skalgags, minus Schlagalmuck, were watching him like bank tellers eyeing a drawn pistol.
Drake pulled in a long breath and held it, praying to whatever gods or powers might hold any amount of sway here that his voice wouldn’t shake.
His eyes played with every patch and parcel of light as though some secret shred of clairvoyance may lay bound within their mosaic patterns.
Meanwhile his tongue independently composed an answer to Schlagalmuck’s question.
Like as many whisps of desert sand, syllables assembled in loose formative semblance of the words “that's her” left his throat.
Drake didn’t hear them. Nor did he hear Schlagalmuck’s reply. But the motif sounds still washed something pathetic and toxic, corrupt and wretched out with them. Freeing him of the encumbering miasma which had haunted his mental and emotional shadows since before landing on his old home front.
However, the magick sunfire gem in his pocket could not substitute what had been lost, and so could do nothing to abate the oblique shades of night which grew in its place.
He couldn't allow himself to become emotional. Not in front of his herd and definitely not in front of allies.
But without Ellie, without his Iradyl, his star duet, he felt that a crucial load-bearing hem in his core was, with growing momentum, coming unraveled.
Schlagalmuck waited stoically for his guest’s reality to properly coagulate. The underground chief made deliberately heavy tracks as he waded across the longitudinal table span.
His gait and posture were those of a single body bearing the weight of many generations. Something only a beast far wiser than those present would have understood or recognized.
He stood nearly at eye level with Drake and laid a fist to the young Captain's heart.
“I … know.”
He then hopped down and marched determinately past Drake. Beckoning them after he’d reached the door, saying, “you … come. I … show … where … find.”
Drake followed in his host’s wake like a foundling child, as did the bodyguards and servants. All of whom, in as many bounds as he took steps, overtook the young Pyrate and retook their place alongside Schlagalmuck.
The other Pyrates looked crossways at each other, frowned, shrugged, gulped down the last of their allotted portions, grabbed some of what was left for later per old habits, and fell into train with their leader.
Schlagalmuck took them around the side of his residence to look out from the overhanging ledge. He pointed down across the void at a barely visible spot of orange light on the other side of the abyssal rift.
Roughly a hundred yards below on the opposite wall, was the faintly shimmering shape of what might have been construed as a ship, docked near an outcrop.
Drake’s heart leapt. He squinted hard for confirmation. But any further detail was impossible to discern from this distance.
“My eyes aren't as good as yours,” he admitted.
Schlagalmuck was silent. He snapped his fingers and a servant scampered forward with a weather-beaten wood and brass tube.
His chief took it, inspected it, put it to his eye, then, apparently satisfied, handed it off to Drake. Who raised it gratefully to his own eye and trained it on the distant alcove.
If he’d expected to be handed a magick mirror, he was due a sore disappointment.
Its once reliable frame was now pitted, cracked and dented. Its once polished lenses bore the scars of countless tumbles and one too many turn overs with the jagged end of a rock. Its focal alignment sections had been so well fused with aged grime that Drake dared not try to loosen them lest he risk breaking the thing clear in two.
True, the thing was old, abused and at least a good ten years ahead of its functional lifespan. But it was still good enough for this one last job.
Drake aimed it by Schlagalmuck’s errant pointer digit. What he saw there set a fire burning through his brain more powerful than any Abyssal gale ever registered and more rampant than any revolution ever fought.
On the deck of a ship with no engines or sails, whose waist spanned nearly half the Iron Maiden’s entire length, bound to the foot of the center mast by her wrists and ankles was a golden lass whose signature long braid was unmistakable even from this impure vantage.
So close and yet so unbearably far.
A lesson was hidden here somewhere. An obscure piece of fundamental truth. Buried as many steps away from common view as shades separated gold from fire.
Drake’s heart ignited. In that stupid moment he wanted nothing more than to throw himself over to her. All the contrarian physics and logic of such a move be damned to the lowest, most impregnable spheres of oblivion.
Luckily for him his brain still held enough faculty cards to restrain his more dramatic locomotive drivers. But it couldn’t slay every rogue dragon that his volcanic cauldron of a heart produced.
One of these hegemonic daemons slithered up from the depths of its infernal prison into his throat, seized his vocal organs and wrung from them a forceful, desperate cry whose monosyllabic cord was spun of braided hope, relief and pleading.
“Ellie!”
He didn’t have to reprimand himself for his impulsive stupidity. That role this time was fulfilled by Schlagalmuck.
“Shhhh!” the chief hissed. His face was as stern as the black blood cliff, but the rest of him gave away his keen displeasure and aggravation, reined in only by his understanding of the circumstances.
“They … heard.”
Before Drake could ask a foolish question, a streamer of clear noon sky caught his Pyratical attention by the periphery.
A dense, hauntingly bizarro tide of armed specters were flying up from out of the untoward depths to meet them.
Perhaps there could be a poetic metaphor buried here. Something about a roiling pillar of day sky rose out of a curtain of black instead of the accustomed reverse.
A more artistic mind might have stopped to consider it. Drake’s was not that mind. In that instant he was a not a lover, not a male, not even a beast. He was a Pyrate.
More, he was their Captain.
In that profound light he turned back to his herd and barked, “Pyrates, ready arms!”
From here there could be no uncertainty. Years and decades of training took over and purged their minds of everything but the job. Matters up to and including basic survival became as small and inconsequential as thoughts of their last meal.
Here there was truth. Absolute, unassailable clarity.
There was no fear, just the next step.
There was no pain, just the next breath.
There was no desire, just action.
There was no ‘if’, there was just ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’.
Weapons and hands found each other in a moment. In the next Crow and Hemlock leapt into forward horn position, rifles at shoulders. Ready to funnel the enemy towards the grinding center and pick off any who got any creative ideas about their approach vectors.
Adrian and Bon Bon crouched a few paces behind their Captain. Their parts as the coiled serpent’s fangs set as plainly in their minds as the rules of a child’s tarot or board game.
Drake stood stalwartly alone in the role he and Ellie usually played together as the Lion’s feral teeth and claws.
To help compensate for their group’s amputated numbers, Bon Bon selected a small, black and steel object from one of several sealed belt pouches.
Like the beast herself, the device had an unmistakable twinge of intelligentsiac mischief about it. Though unlike the former, comparatively straightforward instrument, this device had the distinction of being the one tool in her arsenal having neither been directly conceived nor constructed nor modified in any way by its present owner.
Like all the most dangerous quantities in nature, were it not for the novelty of its form factor it would be wholly unremarkable. Being the size and approximal shape of a saber or cutlass hilt with an unusually large pommel and a sharp phallic hook where conventional weapon design dictated a blade should be.
This was her trusty “baby snatcher”. The rationale behind its name was self-evident to her and could be readily inferred by anyone privy to her favored employment strategy. Whether by proxy or, more commonly, by wholly unwise provocation.
Then one of her equally infamous spontaneous inspirational spurs drove her other hand into a neighboring pouch, from which was drawn and tossed Adrian’s way a longer, ridged hilt with a flattened javelin head for a pommel.
Under ordinary circumstances she would have reveled in watching him fight to reconcile what he knew this object was with what his imprudent adolescent eyes took it for. And while any professional swashbuckler would be hard pressed to think of a better occasion for a spot of juvenile humor than under the looming specter of battle, many of those same souls would probably have just as soon cut out and eaten their own tongues if it meant not having to stand barring the underworld’s parted gates.
He tapped the toggle switch and a flash of telescopic titanium shot out. At its head a thousand hairline piezoelectric spines lay embedded. Waiting for the moment they felt the press of an uncouth body to activate and gorge their Ouroboros parent circuits.
Precisely what good these mechanical tricks would do against ghosts, she knew not. She suspected not very much. It was, after all, just a fancy stick when one got right down to it. Still, it was better than using her bare fists.
Schlagalmuck turned and issued a set of commands to his posse, who nodded and ran off in different directions. The guards taking flight for the house while the servants made alary tracks into the town.
Though the Skalgag’s intent was masked beneath the scratchy alien notes, his overarching tone and compunction made clear his words were those of a general ordering his troops.
Drake offered his host back the spyglass, but the Skalgag chief waved it away, saying, “not … need. Junk.”
Drake nodded and tossed the decrepit thing over the cliff. The abstract form of the word ‘appropriate’ flittered about in his mind like a trapped moth.
Why was a matter he had neither the time nor the interest to pursue just then. Though, on further involuntary reflection, it struck him a strangely appropriate burial site for the dull golden instrument.
Again the why he could not, nor would he have bothered under ordinary conditions,
He afforded it the meager blunt courtesy of the thought ‘strange’ before returning to his preeminent occupation.
Never realizing, at least consciously, the truth of the matter was that in a Pyrate’s life, chaos was the natural order.
Or, as Misloff put it, “Rule Fourteen: the stranger the better. For it is those rare moments when things appear to be exactly as one supposes they ought to that the wisest and most experienced Pyrates know are the best times to worry.”
Drake was not worried. Though he couldn’t fathom why or how, save but for a strange fireside warmth rousing his indolent spirit like a drop of bootleg Ly’ Loryanthi “breach thorn” elixir.
He looked to his herd. They were staring off at something with haunted eyes.
He followed the trail of their collective gaze. There lay all of his answers. His fear and his doubt were his now. Not by the might of a mystical stone, but by the surety born of a mind that has found its own path through the impregnable night. Seen by a heart as the sole star of light in that midnight apocalypse realm.
From a dull but venerable castlelike spark his emberal truth waged a fraught but subtle war of its own until the moment it had swallowed all his material self in a coalescing furnace and therein, like the iron fists of gravity crafting a new light for the pre-dawn firmament, fused them into a singular florid destiny ingot.
Whereupon, to the great shock and horror of his herd and what number of Skalgags were there to witness, sheathed his sword and strode towards the cliff.
There, looking down on the ascending Nihil army, for reasons he was wise enough to know he may never comprehend, he drew the stone blindly from its resting place and raised it high over the umbral well like a lighthouse lantern.
In the words of the great 3rd Era Mephistolean prophet Zarathustros, “verily in that house of horrors a new star is kindled. Betwixt the hours of death and dawn a third Sun rises. There in the dark heart’s eldritch bosom the name of Lucifer shall be etched in dread and terror. To those whose nature is foul, whose deeds cruel, whose minds wicked and perverse, know ye all wretched Abyssal spawn that this hour belongs to the Lord of Thorns! The Black Eye of Zion! The Prince of the Nihil! The immortal pyre of night shall rue every moment it chose to seep its infernal tendrils o’er the morning lip of the Abyss!”
Lalitha opened like a lidless eye. Flames of a kind not wrought since the universe’s founding flew across the astral bridge into the mortal world.
The ghosts that were nearest took the brunt of the perditious energy. Their vaporous forms, bounded by knots of pure bridled chaos, erupted in showers of entropic fire and vanished back into the argil ether.
Far below, onboard the Giant, Ellie could only conclude this was the work of the Mother Goddess herself. And, in a sense, she wasn’t entirely wrong.
But Saedel knew better.
He knew what was meant by the capital noun Conduit as it pertained to magickal science. This one was the most powerful he'd encountered in three Eras.
With a wave of his Hermetic scepter he conjured his remaining horde and in the fashion of all tyrants across time to eradicate its source.
Their own thoughts on the matter were nothing. Their fears, their pain, meaningless.
Ordinal shackles made his infernal will theirs, albeit by proxy. By his art they were bound and by his fell command they swarmed to the attack with zealous fervor. Only to be consumed by the solar warrior’s epic blaze like necrose floral droppings in a bonfire.
Seeing his forces obliterated so utterly, Saedel didn’t waste a moment conjure another host of spirits from the core of the paramount Abyss. Weaving with scepter, hand and voice the complex arcane trigrams and sigils like a demagogic reincarnated Wagner.
All the while Ellie watched with her distending heart bellowing her deflated spirit.
The moment the supernal wave’s lashes from above touched her, the very instant its rays caressed her frigid flesh, she knew its heartful source had to be her beloved.
Though the entire martialed might of all her sane and rational faculty legions couldn’t construct a diction equal to the task of equating hope to reality.
In blatant defiance of all her reason she dared to hope, as this was all she had left to bind her sanity.
Meanwhile, when the crystal cooled, and its radiance settled down to its usual gentle smolder, Drake cautiously put the stone, back into his pocket, laboring momentarily under the fear that its residual heat might set his cloak on fire.
Schlagalmuck waited a long count of three wracking moments before speaking.
When, on the fourth temporal slice, he extended his thoughts, he did so with evident care and conviction.
“You … found … Heart … Stone. Lalitha … named. Said … shine … only … for … one … knows … true … love.”
Drake successfully repressed the impulse to deride this notion with a snort only because it didn’t occur to him to do so.
If there could be said to be any advantage to growing up in a land beyond normal sight and thought it would be that it offered insight and perspective on matters most ordinary beasts found so trivial as to scarcely be worth the time or energy to investigate.
Love, for example.
Attachment made sense in Drake’s native world. Possession too. In fact it was a virtue, not just in the traditional pirate fashion, but in all forms of social order not hemmed by the frail thread of ideality, not excluding their present loathed though they were to admit it.
But love was an anomaly. A figment of an atonal rhapsody parroted by common, mediocre minds too steeped in their primitive ways to so much as bother considering the real nature of the world they but inhabited. Or so Sir Francis had taken to believing.
And, in all fairness, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Objectively speaking. The base walks of bestial kind only sometimes had the wherewithal to think past their immediate carnal prospects. Those few savvy souls whose learning and cognitive prowess could potentially allow for deeper, more profound exploration of their own destinies tended to run screaming, bleating or mewing for the prenatal safety of their favored parental doctrine’s loincloths at the very prospect.
“Most fear to understand,” quoth the great Allseer to his young apprentices. “For to know is to unravel. In the shadow of mystery lies dream. And in dream there hides sanctuary. To look upon and grieve or to cut out one’s eyes and live as prey. That is the choice I offer you both.”
To accurately assess and to wisely address the myriad fractal layers of the hyperplanar, operatic symphony of the cosmos was, by the Sire Drake’s own estimation, “a mission of too vital import to be left to simpletons. It is, after all, the natural Destiny of dragons to rule over everything their eyes fall upon.”
Drake retroflected on how many of his earliest lessons were actually councils on the importance of breeding, of stature, of elementary disposition. That positioning of oneself ahead of their natural inferiors was not only the definition of right, but was the truest expression of the natural order.
He wondered now if Nikodontus and Flint had ever met and swapped thoughts.
Emotions many could understand if taught with simple language and guided with patient hand. But transcendental experiences, the term, never mind the subject, were so far beyond the grasp of the arterial masses that to even imagine the two things in proportion was tantamount to picturing a Mouse maid wearing an Ursine bridal train.
But whether through magickal or divine persuasion or intervention, or perhaps a bit of all the above, Drake’s tarnished heart and mind felt like polished mirrors.
Not spotless. But guileless. Clear enough to serve for what mundane eyes and ears failed to provide.
Which they did presently.
The short, simple truth as Drake understood it was this: all the deep magicks involved, their prescient mission, their dwindling sands, the very exigent threat that there would still be battle, all the worry and strife that knowledge entailed, and all the metaphysical convolutions of this whole saarding ordeal notwithstanding, his unprecedented actions just now and the transformative resonance they had on all bearing witnesses still paled in the light of the sublime reality that once more love had come to his rescue.
That unassailable fact was as true here and now in this unhappy mansion as it had been those years back whence he’d first landed onto his new life’s shore.
And for once it was lost on precisely nobody.
Adrian beamed up at his Captain the way a child does upon learning they are to have a sibling.
Hemlock gave a nod in salute, as did Crow.
“So when's the wedding?” Bon Bon chirped, positively giddy at the thought of the splash this little gossip stone was going to make.
This all coaxed from Drake an abashed smile.
Drake let his eyes fall onto his hands, where he was surprised to see he was holding, nay caressing, Lalitha the way a newborn suckles up to its mother’s breast.
He didn’t know why he was surprised at this. But that was quickly out shown by the appreciation of the object’s newly discovered worth.
Schlagalmuck cackled, interrupting Drake's reverie.
“Come … friends,” he said, sidling back towards the dwelling. “Time … is … short. We … must … prepare.”
Drake and Crow swapped a grievous grimace.
Bon Bon and Hemlock did likewise.
“For what?” Adrian asked for the sake of hitting that mark.
Schlagalmuck stopped in his tracks and stared out at the artificial starlight for a protracted moment.
Then a masque of grim resolution set itself over his already morose frame. For the first time since their arrival it occurred to them all in their ways to wonder just how old this creature was.
Without turning around, the chief gave a chilling answer.
“For … war.”