NagoyaHammer.com

PRELUDE




'Do not look for me. Do not think of me. Do not love me.' Those were her last words, colder and more bitter than the wind pulling at her hair. Though, it was what she didn't say that hurt me more. I suppose I had not really expected to hear her say it, not after all that had transpired in the days before I made my choice. Still, even a wolf will bring food to a trapped animal. Am I not trapped? I feel it, more so than ever before, caught in a gust, tumbling and falling towards...towards my doom and the doom of us all.
***

After she left, I made my way up to the highest eyrie to answer the summons I knew would come. As terrified as I know I should have been, I was still thinking of Aria. There had been so many lies, so much deception. I began to wonder if Aria too was false. It would not be beyond the witch to have somehow conjured Aria's love for me as well. Go to her. She had bidden me. Whisper sweet words. Show her bellflowers and snowbells. Fill her cup. Fill her mind with doubt and dreams. Make her love you. Make her yours. Make her ours. And I did. Ariel help me, I did. But to what end, to mine own, or to us both?

***

The two eternal guards stood as silent as ever, but even their ancient stoicism was no match for the howling wind that pushed and pulled at them like a stubborn child. There was no point announcing myself, for at this altitude the wind stole the words the moment they left your lips. Instead, I merely lifted my cowl to show my face. They knew me well. Once inside the walls of the mountain hall I stood still a moment in the silence trying to calm myself. As if to remind me of my sin, I was robbed of even this simple pleasure. You are late. I wanted to hurt him, anyone, everyone - such was my anger. She awaits you in the main hall. She? Main hall? Surely, the High Lord would not want to… No questions. Go. Now! Had I fallen so far that even the serving staff were above me? I grabbed the elf about the neck and drew his face close to mine. Mind yourself, I told him; the most dangerous creature is he who has nothing to lose. He smiled, which took me back. But my Lord, his mockery was clear even through the choked reply, she has everything to lose. I would not understand the weight of those words until much later, not until I would see Aria once more.

***

As I approached the hall, the giant doors opened from within. Stepping inside I gained my first glimpse at the true designs of she who had begun it all. There the witch stood, a delicate hand upon the High Lord’s arm, smiling down upon me. The dread and dismay froze me. Her vengeance went beyond those in the mountains, beyond the ones in the forest below, beyond the great seas. All elves, all men and all beasts would die. I cried out a warning to all the highborn that had been summoned as witness, telling them of her treachery and screaming my own part in it. At least I tried to. Roots from the pine trees that stood like gargantuan guardians along the sides of the hall burst from the rocky floor and wrapped themselves around me from mouth to foot. When calm had been restored, she spoke. The High Lord does not wish to taste anymore of the poison that comes from your lips. You will listen to our Lord in silence, and as you can see, I have made certain that you shall. I glared at her, believing as all those consumed by rage do, that somehow my will alone would break me free from my captor. The roots only squeezed me tighter. The High Lord rose from the Eagle Throne and descended the stairs down to the floor. His face was expressionless, but his eyes betrayed the horror of his hate for me. I could not look at him. I closed my eyes. Look at me. I could not. LOOK AT ME! The desperation in his voice and my last vestiges of pride compelled me. She has gone. My daughter is gone and taken the sun and the air with her. Only darkness remains in here. He beat violently upon his chest above his heart. You have done this to me. You have made our house the doom of the Asrai! You have filled her with poison and lies and so you shall be the one to remove them from her. If you do not bring her back to me and fill the dark void that remains of my heart and soul, I shall fill it with your blood and then Ariel help me, I shall have to fill it with hers also. She dooms herself. She dooms us all. We will take what remains of my kinband; all that Aria did not corrupt to her cause, and go. Go to this land beyond the sea and do what must be done. As I was dragged from the hall I heard the witch yell Ariel save us all!, yet none heard the contempt in her voice, but I.

***

We left that night, and so followed the dark heart of Athel Loren.

@ Koji: Well written story. A shade on the panzy-side, with the skipping and silly sentimentalism and not enough axe-wielding, oath-taking and wrong revenging for a Dwarf, but I will say it was very well written.

job wrote:@ Koji: Well written story. A shade on the panzy-side, with the skipping and silly sentimentalism and not enough axe-wielding, oath-taking and wrong revenging for a Dwarf, but I will say it was very well written.

Thanks Job

Note that I didn't include dwarves in the witch's fiendish plans! That could change....muhahahahahahahah

kojibear wrote:

job wrote:@ Koji: Well written story. A shade on the panzy-side, with the skipping and silly sentimentalism and not enough axe-wielding, oath-taking and wrong revenging for a Dwarf, but I will say it was very well written.

Thanks Job

Note that I didn't include dwarves in the witch's fiendish plans! That could change....muhahahahahahahah

The Thurids are an honest and noble folk. They would never sink to such devices such as Elvish scheming. So, in all fairness let the kin of the woods know that Lord Thurid has never forgotten the slaughter of his Hammerers, the kin and creme of the Thurid host, at the battle of Stone Daemon Fords! There will be elvish blood spilt to clean this insult to the Thurid clan!

job wrote:

kojibear wrote:

job wrote:@ Koji: Well written story. A shade on the panzy-side, with the skipping and silly sentimentalism and not enough axe-wielding, oath-taking and wrong revenging for a Dwarf, but I will say it was very well written.

Thanks Job

Note that I didn't include dwarves in the witch's fiendish plans! That could change....muhahahahahahahah

The Thurids are an honest and noble folk. They would never sink to such devices such as Elvish scheming. So, in all fairness let the kin of the woods know that Lord Thurid has never forgotten the slaughter of his Hammers, the kin and cream of the Thurid host, at the battle of Stone Daemon Fords! There will be elvish blood spilt to clean this insult to the Thurid clan!

Would you believe it if we said the trees told us to do it... Hmm...maybe they ARE! Those pesky trees. Then again smoking the ground up wings of hairy fairies doesn't help either

Look forward to the next installment of my tale when our hero (or anti-hero) tells of Aria's battle with the Druchii!

Stuck between the vile elf-things and the dwarf-things while they fight it out. I've been betrayed yet again!

PART 1

I arrived on the shores of this new land cuffed, caged and carried. If I could, I would have stepped proudly and purposefully onto the shores of this new land filled with the primal fury only the Asrai can personify. Instead I could only watch as my brothers and sisters did exactly that.
Even from the limited view my cage offered me, there could be no denying the wonder of this new land, the land the human discoverers had wrongly named Isla de los Meurtos – the Isle of the Dead. Dead? The name could not have been further from the truth. There was life here. So much so that every elf I looked upon had either fallen to their knees howling oaths to Kurunous or were singing praise to Lady Ariel.
Athel Loren was old, unimaginably so, its spirit was oft heavy and its message clouded by its great primordial intelligence, but not here. Here, the trees had still the unrestrained vitality of youth. The forest’s message was being spoken through all of its avatars, the rustling leaves, the singing birds, the humming and buzzing insects, the call of a great stag, the challenging growl of some unseen predator. Again and again the message was forced upon us, overwhelming all else. Welcome children of the great mother, sons and daughters of Kurunous. Welcome. Stay. Come rest. Come sing. Come hunt. Come play beneath us. Come kill for us. When the howling and singing about me stopped in sudden synchrony, I realsied I was not the only one who had heard the forests final invitation.

***


By night fall, the Waywatcher scouts the High Lord had sent to pursue Aria’s Kinband finally returned. I called out to them as they passed my cage, even managing to grab a fistful of one’s cloak. Aria! I pleaded, What of Aria? The scout whipped around and bared his teeth at me and growled. Such was the savagery of the response that I let go his cloak and scrambled backwards. The Waywatcher kindred were a feral caste, but this one was different, more brutal and more hostile.

The leader, Chief Awei, strode unannounced into the High Lord’s tent sending the Lord’s aids into a flurry of ineffectual fretting and panic. Within moments, I could hear the sounds of things breaking and smashing from within the High Lord’s tent. Unlike the still frantic aids, I knew the outrage had nothing to do with breached protocol. Chief Awei’s report had obviously not been well received by the High Lord. My guts twisted for fear that Aria had been found dead, until two more Waywatchers passed my cage carrying a dismembered head. There was no denying it was an elf, but it was also no Asrai. I had never laid eyes on one of its kind, but I instantly new it for what is was, Druchii, the dark ones. The Waywatcher held the head by its long black hair, and even now, after death, the female’s face wore the wickedness it had shown in life. The blood that caked what remained of the Druchii female’s neck was well dry and I guessed her death had not come from the long daggers of the Waywatchers. Well, there was also the arrow that protruded from the middle of woman’s forehead. It was an arrow I knew well; I had made it, for Aria.






For most of us, it was the first time to lay eyes on one of our dark cousins, and it took the desperate cry of the Lord’s lady to break us out of our fascination for the gory trophy. The High Lord burst from his tent, sword in hand. Chief Awei followed almost immediately with the string of his mystical bow drawn taut. Within moments a dozen other of the Lord’s Eternal retainers had appeared to defend their Lord. Yet, as the Lady’s cries grew louder, the Eternal Guards’ spear staves were lowered in perfect succession. Eventually, the High Lord’s lady emerged from the path the retainers had made for her, clutching her head in obvious agony. WHERE? She screamed. WHERE IS IT? The High Lord recovered quickly from his shock and rushed to his wife’s side. She was on her knees now, but when she heard her husband’s worry she swiftly rose and took a hold of the front of his jerkin. We must be rid of it! Please, Talonveriel! PLEASE! For whatever faults High Lord Talonveriel could be accused of, ignorance was not one of them. A moment of searching was all it took before his eyes locked on to the Druchii head. Leaving his wife in the arms of Chief Awei, Talonveriel marched over to the stunned Waywatcher and battered the head to the ground. The High Lord then swung his sword in a long arc over his head and cleaved the Druchii’s head in two. To mine own relief and for those near me, the Lady’s cries thankfully stopped.
In all the excitement, no one thought to even wonder how Lady Arlaen came to be there; she had not been on any of the ships.

***



I was fortunate, well relative to my situation, to have my cage placed near to one of the fires. Not only did it provide warmth, but it also provided me with news. It had not taken long for the Waywatchers’ findings to spread throughout the camp. The news brought me mixed feelings. I was glad Aria was alive, but the fact that she was moving closer to the witch’s goal left me with no appetite; not that the food I had been given was particularly enticing.

According to the Waywatchers, the battle had been brutal and bloody. The young glade riders that had succumbed to Aria’s fervor and zeal had been the first to die, having fallen to what was described as small arrows of iron – though what manner of bow could be strong enough to launch them, I could not fathom. Strange, some rightly pointed out, that the Glade Riders had allowed themselves to get into such a position of vulnerability, for it was not just the rider’s will that dictated their movements, but the horse’s as well. Surely, the horses would not have allowed themselves or their riders to charge so recklessly at the enemy. Perhaps, I thought, their youth and wish to please Aria had overcome their good sense, but I quickly dismissed that notion. The horses would not have fallen to the same hubris. I would have voiced my conclusion if I thought any would have listened. Our dark cousins were obviously more skilled and quicker with bows than our arrogance would have let us believe.

Aria’s kinband had returned the Druchii’s violence in a similar showing of deadly expertise and strength; the product of which was another reason I had lost my appetite; I had been served a part of the carcass for dinner. To call the creature grotesque would have been too kind. I could only liken it to the horned dragon lizards that rested at the highest perches of the mountain pines, though one would have to imagine one that was ten times as large. This creature was larger than a horse and the cruel harness attached to its neck and body clearly meant for it to be ridden. The state the giant lizard was in now though, as my dinner, also clearly meant that the Druchii had underestimated the Asrai archers. According to the Waywatchers, there were a lot more of the beasts and not all of them had been killed as their tracks and the remains of their meals had been found not far from the battle. The most disturbing part of the Waywatcher’s report was that the beasts that had survived had eaten their riders.





The tide of battle, the current storyteller revealed, had been turned by magic, both Asrai and the forest’s. All knew Salamandar to be a powerful if not slightly outlandish wizard; none were too surprised that he had followed Aria to this peculiar land. No, that was not surprising. What was unusual was the consequence of his magic. According to the scouts’ reports, ghostly, skeletal appendages had more than once tried to drag them down into the earth. If this were true, I pondered, it meant that magic did not dissipate as quickly here. I also wondered if the witch knew this, though I was almost certain she would.
The forest had also risen up to fight with Aria kinband. The broken and shattered remains of some dryads had been the scouts’ first proof. What they had found next had apparently brought the scouts to their knees in supplication. The forest had born a Treeman, and the slaughter it and its dryad underlings had wreaked upon the Druchii said much of the forest’s magic and power. A spirit of such might this far from Athel Loren, could only confirm what all in the camp had already suspected – the forest in this land was not only sentient, but was very very angry.



No wonder, I thought, that the witch walked about the camp smiling.

wow, great stuff kojibear. Good reading material between classes. Adding pictures in there is also a touch o' class.

Do you want that game you played with Mike to count?

jus wrote:wow, great stuff kojibear. Good reading material between classes. Adding pictures in there is also a touch o' class.

Do you want that game you played with Mike to count?

Yes, please

So who won the battle. I read the whole thing and I can't make out a winner.