Horns jutted out of the creature that bellowed out a roar. It turned its gaze towards the both of them with a lust for blood.
Kiran tightened his grasp on the sword given to him in preparation for this sudden attack. As they all contemplated their next moves, the owl kept itself perched on the wooden post to observe them. If he was able to use magic, he would’ve gladly tried to cast a spell towards them, but he lacked such abilities for whatever reason.
For now at least, he could only depend on the sword-fighting techniques he had been honing since joining the Human Familiar Coalition.
He readjusted his posture as the beast came rushing towards them. With a simple sidestep, he avoided their large hulking clawed arm from going through him. It instead landed in the dirt and swung backwards trying to knock off his head.
Kiran sent the sword down towards their arm grazing it slightly. They made a wretched noise from their mouth showing their enlarged canine teeth to him. Their head came towards him intending to bite his head off.
To prevent this, his arm sent the sword in an upward arc slicing their chin and cutting straight to their bottom lip. It recoiled back only for the robed man to drive their own sword into their back.
The fiend twisted their body and began to fall purposely backward to try to collapse over onto the robed man. However, the man stepped out of the way and backed up towards Kiran.
“Keep it up,” he said with a furious look on his face.
I will.
The hooting began again. The bloodied and injured creature stood up roaring towards the owl that kept hooting towards it.
It began to back away. At first Kiran thought it might run away from them having figured out that they weren’t so easy to defeat, but instead, it chose to grasp onto the wooden post and break it in half so it could wield the large piece of wood with one hand. The owl repositioned itself by flying away and standing on the edge of the upper fortress’s wall surrounding this area.
The wooden post came slamming down towards him in particular. He avoided it and felt dirt hit up against his body. The post came swiping horizontally towards him. Kiran jumped up as it motioned beneath his feet. If he had been any slower, it would’ve certainly hit him. But it didn’t, allowing him more of an opportunity to slay this thing.
As it prepared for another strike, Kiran rushed towards it since it wanted to keep distance between them. He struck at his bulky legs covered in black fur. The robed man followed up with a strike of his own causing the creature to bellow out in agony.
Preparing to attack right after his, Kiran suddenly felt something slam into him. The dark courtyard spun around him as he flew through the air briefly. He hit up against the ground with his sword flung several feet away from his position.
He immediately looked up only to see the creature grabbing the stranger from the ground with their large hand. Kiran stood up, grabbed his sword, and dashed forward.
The creature tried to slam their fist into him causing him to maneuver out of the way. Before they could squeeze the man in their grasp, Kiran drove his sword through the side of their skull causing bone to break, and blood to gush out freely like a roaring stream.
Kiran fell with the sword stuck in their head. It released its grasp of the man allowing them to fall over onto the ground.
The horned creature went to its knees and its eyes remained open as it made no further movements. It just sat there hunched over as blood ejected out of its horned skull.
Sweat ran down his face and down his back. His heartbeat felt fast enough that it’d pop out of his chest. Thankfully it did no such thing as he gained his bearings and took every breath he could take.
While his body calmed ever so slightly, he lent out a hand to the bald man who was noticeably dirtied since having landed on the dirt-covered ground.
He accepted his hand gripping it tightly and getting right on up to his two feet with the help of Kiran. “Thanks,” he said wiping away the dirt along his robed body. He walked up to the now-dead creature and yanked the sword out of its skull. And then out of nowhere, he swung the sword back behind his shoulder and sent it flying towards the owl as the sword spun in the air.
The owl moved out of the way and began to hoot towards them. It then began to fly away having no more desire to remain there with them.
“Come back here you coward!” Kiran wiped the sweat off his brow as the man began to face him again. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t think so.” He felt a bit bruised but he hadn’t sustained any nasty blows or injuries from the fight. He was certainly grateful for that. He didn’t have magic to use to enhance himself so it worked out well enough although he would’ve liked to not have ended up in a skirmish so early on with his arrival to the fourth domain. Some things never change, do they?
The man went to gather up the sword he had tossed at the owl. When he came back, he cleaned the blade off with a piece of fabric and sheathed it. “What’s your name?”
“Kiran.”
He put the sheathed sword over on his pile of things near the put-out fire rolling everything up in a bundle that could easily be carried over their back. “Well Kiran, my name is Felghan.”
“It’s nice to meet you Felghan.”
They clicked their tongue as they crouched near the bundle. “You’re quite unlucky to have run into that owl.”
“Am I?”
“Aye. They’ve been harassing me for days. I thought I had finally lost them but then here you come all the sudden rolling into this abandoned fortress leading them straight back to me.”
Kiran cracked a smile and began to scratch the back of his head. “Sorry about that.”
“No need to apologize. You couldn’t have known, especially if what you say is true about you having just arrived here in this domain. Which I still find a bit hard to believe. Which domain, if I may ask, did you come from?”
“The fifth one.”
Felghan began to grab the bundle and toss it over their back making minor adjustments with the straps that kept it bound to them. “Oh, that’s right. You did say that before we were rudely interrupted by that fowl owl.”
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“I wasn’t the only one that crossed over here,” Kiran continued to say. “I did however appear somewhere different than them so I’m pretty much lost out here and have no idea where to go to find them.” The man nodded his head as he heard him describe the troublesome situation he was in. “Would you be able to help me?”
With one of their free hands, they began to scratch their chin. “I prefer to travel alone given my profession. But I suppose I’d be willing to help you out a little by leading you to a nearby town that is safe from the banespawn. That’s all the help I’ll be able to do for you though.”
“I appreciate it,” he said, “but what is this banespawn you speak of? I’m not familiar with that term.”
“That thing over there,” he said pointing towards the dead creature. “That’s the name we’ve given to these kinds of beasts. This one’s a feral banespawn. They lack the intelligence like a regular banespawn possesses. You won’t find any intelligent ones in this territory except for feral ones for the most part.”
So monsters plague this domain as well. Hopefully they’re not as prevalent as the ones in the fifth domain.
“We should probably go before that owl decides to return. Hopefully we can lose it and make it to town. I fear that if we remain here, it may come back and lure another feral banespawn over to us.”
“What’s their problem anyways?”
“You’d have to ask that cretin of a familiar yourself and hope they’d even bother to respond. They only ever seem intent on hooting towards me and anyone else they can find foolish enough to travel these lands unaccompanied. But anyhow, let us leave this location.”
Kiran was glad that this person was willing to let him tag along. He was quite skeptical of him at first, but proving his worth by killing the feral banespawn worked towards his favor in earning some level of trust.
They both began to walk underneath the portcullis exiting out of the ruined fortress. His sight was still enhanced from the potion he had drank earlier. He could only see so far ahead however.
“I have a question,” Kiran said.
“I imagine you have many questions.”
You don’t know the least of it! Kiran would try not to ask a million and one questions even though he always wanted them answered immediately. “I’ve noticed something odd since my arrival here. I seem to not be able to cast magic when I normally am able to.”
“You’d better get used to that. Magic has by and large been absent from this domain for a decade or more.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
That’s certainly inconvenient. “Do you know why that is?”
Before he answered his question, he carefully stepped over a fissure in the ground and lent Kiran a hand to help him get more easily over to the other side. “Many have come to believe it has something to do with the miasma.” The man’s brows lifted briefly. “Judging by the look on your face, this too is another anomaly you’re unaware of. There is a presence or force which surrounds this domain. I imagine the same thing exists in the other domains, although I would not know if that’s the case since I’ve only ever been here. In this domain however, we refer to this phenomenon as a miasma.”
“Oh, I know what you’re talking about. It’s just referred to differently from where I just came from.” In the fifth domain, the people there referred to this phenomenon as the distorted reality. Whether it was called a miasma or a distorted reality did little to change the fact that it referred to the same exact thing.
Since The Great Fracturing, the world was covered in a strange presence or force from what he came to learn during his travels with Lar before they ever reached Liall together. This force was what kept the five domains separated from one another and made travel between them practically impossible without a guide to traverse the distorted reality, or by having someone like Yorais who could create portals to act as a gateway bypassing the miasma entirely.
This miasma, as Felghan referred to it, was strange in other ways it seemed at least to him. If it’s also responsible for preventing me from casting magic, that would imply it can do other things quite possibly and those things may very well differ from domain to domain.
“The bad news doesn’t stop there I’m afraid,” Felghan said grimly.
Kiran’s eyebrows went up as they walked together across the barren landscape.
“Before I elaborate further however, may I ask you, a particular question first?”
“Of course.”
“In the fifth domain, does the sun still shine there?”
“Sure it does.” Liall might be swarming with monsters and the rest of the domain empty of human or familiar life practically speaking, but the sun did still shine there. It had that going for it at the very least.
“Then as I’ve feared, our domain may be the exception. The reality Kiran is that not only are we unable to use magic here, we are also bound to an eternal night and it has been this way for many years now.”
The more I learn about this domain, the more I think we should’ve taken our chances in the fifth domain instead. Without seriously believing that, he resigned himself away to the reality, that this domain was not going to be their salvation as they had all hoped. At least not immediately. It had its own hosts of issues that may or may not be solvable.
Regardless of the troubled state of this domain, Kiran at least felt it necessary to find everyone he cared about, especially his companion Lar. He was immensely worried about all of them and how they’d all been managing since his absence.
I can only imagine what they’re all thinking with me not coming through with them. I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do if I can ever find them.
“How, uh, exactly, have you all managed to survive without the sun being present?”
“Very poorly as you can imagine.” Felghan began to chuckle slightly. “Our populations are small enough that the few methods we use to cultivate food have worked and continue to work. Every day is a struggle however and for someone such as I, I am forced to wander these lands to ensure every community is doing alright.”
It was at least good to see that even with the perpetual darkness plaguing this domain, life could still somehow make things work. He also imagined that if anyone would tolerate this environment well, it would be Frederek since he primarily resided in the depths beneath Liall. That life of living down there has perhaps prepared him the best out of all of us and the members of his faction.
Kiran began to find it harder to walk. His sight grew poorer and Felghan had to stop every now and then to allow him to catch up.
“Having trouble seeing?”
He nodded his head. “I think whatever that substance you gave me earlier is wearing off.”
They began to crouch and pull their bundle hanging off their back down to the ground. “We’ll settle here then and try to get some rest. You do look like you’re quite tired.”
A yawn escaped his lips. “Maybe just a little. I haven’t had any quantifiable rest in over a day at least.”
Thankfully it didn’t appear any danger was around them. Felghan could apparently still see to observe and keep a watch out as well.
Hardly a thing stirred or made noise as he lay there with one of the blankets Felghan kept normally bundled up. He gazed up at the eternally dark sky finding it not so different than the one in the fifth domain. This one was different simply because it was always this way.
Soon he figured, he’d be as pale as Frederek and Felghan as the days go on by. The thought of having to get used to there not being a sun to shine down upon him was a fair bit depressing to him. At the same time, he saw little point in bickering over it. Things are the way they are whether I bemoan it or not.
For now at least, he knew he had to take things a day at a time and be even more careful knowing that he wasn’t in any position to use magic. In the meantime, as long as he did his due diligence, he believed it possible to find everyone he accidentally abandoned and achieve his long-stated goals.