What are we doing here Laura?” Trevor asked the Major in the small secluded room they had taken as their headquarters in the underground catacombs.
Connely's eyes darted over towards a letter she had stuffed into the corner of the room as she thought about his question. She wasn't quite sure what the right answer was anymore. Could she really say they were serving their kingdom, after the things they were doing here in a foreign land while supporting that thing that was running amok?
“Trevor. It's not that simple.” She needed to give him something to distract him. Something that would get his mind back on better things than the awkward situation they were stuck in right now.
“Laura, we've been stuck here guarding some gods’ forsaken evil lair for the past two months while doing nothing but stack boxes that come in from the smuggler boats. I need something to work with here. The men do too.”
Connely had started to doubt that. More and more of her line troops were starting to join in on the random raiding parties that the orange eyed freak kept leading to the nearby farms. It's not that she had prohibited them from taking part, but each time another soldier succumbed to their boredom and joined with the ‘Sword Lord’, it still felt like a bit of an abandonment to her.
Her orders had seemed simple enough when she first left the Golden Kingdom. Protect the death shard long enough to get her to the Princedom capital, set her loose, and notify the correct contacts depending on what happened. Only problem was that the girl took a far more systematic approach to the problem than anyone had expected, setting up a ground floor for her to stand on instead of just attacking the shard-bearer head on. It was probably a smart idea, if not for the fact that Connely had been relegated to a side job as a result of the plan, mostly due to her own reactions to the girl.
“We're observing a possible enemy before anything gets out of hand. That's what we’re doing.” She let her voice soften into a whisper with the words, even though they were the only people in the room.
“So we're just going to sit here as the ‘enemy’ grows right before our eyes? She's getting stronger Connely, every single day. And that Lord Xei skeleton? He's already bad news.”
Connely sat down at a table arranged near the middle of the room. Five different thoughts and considerations came to mind at once, though not a single one was strong enough, or pertinent enough to be worth speaking aloud. She'd been stuck in this conundrum for the last couple weeks. Instructed to wait and watch the death goddess do her thing, yet also instructed to try and hurry things along as the Monarch got impatient.
“What do you want from me, Trev?” She asked him.
“I want what our detachment wants Laura. We need to have a purpose. Whether its joining forces with this death cult, or fighting our way out of this labyrinth. The men are going stir crazy because we don't fully understand why we're here. Just what is our purpose?” He replied.
She stared down at the table in front of her as Trevor remained standing in the middle of the room. His hands were balled up into fists by his sides, green gemstone hanging from his neck over a thin set of leather armor. In comparison, Connely was merely wearing a set of casual clothes, as her armor rested in a bag over in the corner of the room.
Her head felt like it was the heaviest thing in the world as she propped it up with her hands. Trevor sighed heavily then left her alone to her thoughts.
Connely didn't even need to reach over for the letter to remember what it said. The last line felt like it was imprinted into her brain with a searing iron. One last command that she was sure would end their lives if she ever followed it. The time wasn't right.
‘Force the girl to make her attack on the eve of the winter solstice.’ It said, ‘If you don't, there's no reason for you to bother coming back.’ The words swam through her mind. The command that was so unreasonable, so impossible, that she knew she had already failed. Her fist slammed into the top of the table, the heavy blow leaving a noticeable mark in the thin parchment over the icon for Midton. Capital of the Princedoms.
—
Thin holes in the wall allowed Cody just enough of a view out from his prison that he didn't feel entirely alone. He couldn't tell how long he had been in here, no passing of the sun or stars to mark the end of each day spent in confinement. Instead, he had these holes, perfectly positioned to look out on something resembling a common room for the people that lived here.
At first he had rebelled against his enclosure, slapping against the walls of the chamber with such force that he nearly tore his own body apart. He tried pushing and pulling on every one of the massive stone blocks that formed this room, but he was no shard-bearer. He couldn't move boulders twice the size of his body, nor could he move the perfectly conjoined stone building blocks that surrounded him on every side. Even the wall with all the holes drilled through it was sturdy enough to thwart him, leaving his body with nothing but heavy bruising littered across his entire chest and arms.
He was used to the pain of force magic by this point. Feedback, they called it. Every push they sent out sent an equal weight in the opposite direction, aimed directly at the body of the person using the magic. They could lessen the blows considerably by keeping up a force bubble when they had time to focus on the attacks, but doing that during a time of battle? Well, it was hard enough to stay alive when you were fighting for your life, much less pushing in four or five different directions at once.
Cody had thrown everything he had against these walls, desperate for even the slimmest bit of a chance that he could break out of this prison and get back to his normal life. At the end of the day it had merely left him panting on the ground as he tried to ignore the dull throbbing pain across the entirety of his body. Slamming a force greater than his entire body weight into a solid object would hurt, with or without the passive defense he was able to conjure up.
Meals were the only thing that seemed to be a constant in his life now. He would hear a rumbling in the wall, followed by a small window of stone receding into the ground to reveal a small tray with stew and water on it. The inside of the cubby containing the food would be closed off from the outside in, confirming the fact that there must be some sort of earth mage opening and closing the walls off as they sent him his food.
He took the small tray of sustenance and pulled it over to plop down next to the wall with holes in it, eating woodenly as he savored that chance to do something other than waste time. Voices were audible through the peeping wall, dull and hard to understand as they were muted by the small holes but still audible enough if he put the effort in.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
“Gracie! I haven't seen you in a couple days. What cha been up to?” A man's voice spoke from the other side of the wall.
“Oh you know, we've just been settling in. Sean decided to bring half our house with us when we joined the movement, so it's been taking some time to get everything moved down here through that little hole.” A woman's voice responded.
“Oh-ho? You must have been brought in with one of Charity's groups then?”
“Yeah, didn't everyone?”
“Far from it! My family got all but plucked off the Jurn family farm we were assigned to work. Took me a good couple of weeks to come to terms with the place.”
“Really? You didn't even come here willingly?”
“Well no. But it's kind of hard to complain. The food’s good, the people are fair, and there's plenty of work to be done. Its just a little hard to get used to the uh, guards, you know?”
Cody turned around in between mouthfuls of stew to look through the holes. He spotted the burly man facing away from him at the table in the next room, pointing over his shoulder at one of the skeletons standing to the side of the room. It was just one of four skeletal warriors picked clean of any flesh and skin, then left to stand rigidly against the side of the room. Were they there to actually protect the people here, or were they placed there as a reminder of the powerful forces watching over them? Probably both.
“And after the sermon's the soldiers give each day? Well, I suppose I realized that living in here isn't so different from my life out there anyways. Put things into perspective, you know?” The man continued.
Gracie didn't seem to be as comfortable with that answer, squirming in her seat across from the man at the table. He felt like he was right there with her on this one, after all, it sounded like they were prisoners in a way just like him. Just with a marginal amount of more freedom. He was about to yell through the holes, to try and get someone's attention when the cubby that his food came in closed up. Another cubby opened further down the wall shortly after, depositing a small pile of bones into the room.
Cody stood up, meal and conversation forgotten as he prepared himself for an attack. The skeleton started shifting in place, pulling itself up and out of the cubby with both hands held up above its head. Was it trying to act innocent?
He took the time to split his mind, forging a small barrier over his already bruised muscles, then pushed heavily on both the skeleton and the wall behind him. The bones fell apart as he forced them into the wall, glowing with orange light as they somehow managed not to break. Cody released the push as his body struggled against the pressure.
Bones clacked into place once again from the other side of the room, seemingly only inconvenienced by his attack. They formed back together so quickly it was like an unseen hand was placing them into the correct formation as the skeleton wiggled around trying to reach for the last couple bones that had fallen off of it.
Cody waited just long enough for the skeleton to stand up this time, before pulling it slightly towards him and into the center of the room. The skeleton kept its hands above its head like it was trying to plead its innocence or something, but he simply used the skeleton's new position to build up speed. When the outward pressure hit the skeleton this time, it blasted it across the room so quickly that bones outright shattered when they impacted with the wall. The same orange glow suffused the bones again as they scattered around the room, but it wasn't enough to stop the attack entirely.
His satisfaction at his work only lasted a moment, as the separate parts started moving themselves through the sand. A torn off arm pulled itself with its hand back towards the rib cage, while the skull seemed to warp the very structure of its head to allow it to roll back towards the rest of the body. Whatever was controlling this skeleton was far stronger than the guards he had destroyed the night in the woods. It wasn't natural. Then again, nothing about this place was natural.
A minute later the skeleton had put itself back together once again, and continued to walk into the center of the room. It had no weapons or armor on it, so Cody wasn't quite sure whether it was dangerous or not and kept his eyes locked on the strange monster as it stood there, five paces away from him. The orange light was now coming from the skeleton's eyes, burning like small torches in the middle of the room. It slowly crouched with its hands above its head, then reached down to touch the sand. The skeletal creature traced something in the sand, first a symbol of a cross, then a half broken archway, then-. Was it writing?
A few moments later the word, “Train?” was written in the sand.
“Train? You mean, you want me to teach you something?” Cody asked.
The skeleton nodded its head, still crouched by the sandy ground.
“You want Me, to train you? Why would I ever do that?”
The skeleton scribbled something into the ground again, “Food.”
Cody looked down on the forgotten tray by his feet and realized that the bowl of stew had tipped over and rolled across the sandy floor towards the wall. It must have been pushed away as he attacked the skeleton earlier. His belly grumbled, and he suddenly remembered the strange weight that still lay in the bottom of his stomach. None of which made him feel very lucky right now.
“You'll give me more food if I train with you? You mean fighting?”
The skeleton nodded at him.
“For how long?”
“15” The skeleton wrote out.
“Fifteen minutes for a meal huh?” Cody shook his head as he asked the question. This was insane. Was he really about to spar with a skeleton for food?
Laughter echoed into the room from the half forgotten holes behind him. The sounds of other prisoners having fun despite the awkward circumstances. Meanwhile Cody was facing off with an un-killable skeleton that wanted to fight him. Perfect, just perfect.
Cody felt himself settling into a fighting stance once again, and the skeleton stood up to match his pose. The bout was started as Cody used a slight push to send the empty tray flying towards the skeleton's body, catching it square in the chest and sending it crashing into the wall behind it. The skeleton bounced off the wall with a flash of orange light, and started running at the man as soon as it touched the floor. In return, Cody coated himself in a thin barrier and started pushing off of the walls without using any counter pushes, helping him move out of the way of the skeleton with small hops across the room.
If this monster wanted to fight him for minutes at a time, he certainly wasn't going to use his full force against it with every push. Especially not when his body was already hurting so much. As such, the pair ended up trailing around the room as Cody careened through the air up and above the skeletal body that twisted around, back and forth, trying to catch him for the next several minutes.
The light pushes weren't quite as harsh on his body as they were when he was trapped between objects with a counter push, but he still started to grunt with the effort of keeping away from the creature below him. One circle around the room, cross over head, slide across the outside wall, dart past the creature while he parried mid-air. It was like playing with a child. And yet. Some small part of the man was glad to have someone else in the room with him. A creature that wasn't quite human, but it could speak in a way. It had wants, and desires. Maybe he could work with that?
The two fighters continued to spin around the room as both lost their sense of time and another meal appeared without notice in the corner of the room.