Sword and Sorcery Box Set 3: Sword and Sorcery

Prologue

The Wizards

Theron knelt on the wooden deck of the Arasmas .

His father’s sword was in its scabbard, point to the ground, the bottom of the blade and hilt resting over his shoulder.

Your father’s sword is gone. You lost it in Dammar’s Black Cathedral, atop the banished mountain. Remember, Theron?

I remember, Theron said, and the sword became an axe. The head rested on the ground, the shaft over his shoulder.

Chayse, Theron’s beautiful, brave, and brutal sister, sat across the longboat’s deck, staring at him. She was here, alive, and he knew this was a dream. But he was deeply glad to see her, even if she was not real, just a conjuring of memories and regret.

Their eyes locked, and they smiled at each other as the same soft wind that stirred the ship’s sail caressed their hair so that their golden locks flowed like the easy waves ’neath the hull.

I love you, sister. I love you and I am sorry that I am no leader. I am sorry that I am blind, and that I am lame, Theron said, his voice deep and clear, like it used to be before the events of Brasov and the Black Cathedral.

And I love you, brother. Do not be sorry. Do not ever be sorry for the fights you fought. Do not be sorry for those you have inspired to fight alongside you. Chayse shook her head and tears welled in her eyes, then trickled down her cheeks and melted away into the sea breeze. You are not blind, Theron. You are looking in the wrong direction. You are not lame. You are climbing the wrong mountain.

Tell me, then, Theron pleaded. When had she become wiser than him? Where am I to be looking? Which mountain must I climb? I am lost, sister. I am lost. And I am weary of this waiting. I am wary of some coming war of a magnitude that I cannot comprehend. I hear its drums echoing up from the darkest halls of premonition. What is my part to be in this? What is my destiny in the coming chaos?

You know what it is. You know what you are. You are the wolf.

He heard her words through a sudden, stabbing pain in his eye. The agony toppled him forward so that he was on all fours, screaming.

You only have one eye now, remember, Theron?

Dark red blood spilled from Theron’s empty eye socket onto the deck of the Arasmas. His screaming turned to wolfish howling as invisible fire burned the wound shut.

You are the thing that culls, Chayse said. You are the creature that haunts the dark woods of worlds. You are a killer of monsters in whatever form they come, from whatever portal or pit they are spawned. You hunt them down and you take their heads. Chayse’s voice pulsed with fervor as she yelled her words over the sound of the now-growling wind and the rising waves, over the sounds of Theron and the wolf inside him howling.

Chayse got to her feet, put her arms to her sides, and tipped her face to the sky. The wind swirled and she ascended from the deck. Theron stretched his hand toward her, but she was already too far away. He recoiled as her face altered, melting and re-forming until she was Chayse no longer.

Now, she was Mother in a flowing white gown.

You take their heads, as they once tried to take yours. Remember? Remember, my son! The veins in Diana’s neck pulsed and swelled as she wailed the words.

More blood spilled onto the deck, this time from a slash freshly formed across Theron’s neck. His howling halted as he coughed and choked on his own blood. He was certain he would die, that even in this dream, even in this vision, he could afford to lose no more blood.

The prick of invisible stiches made him grit his teeth and the burn of invisible flame made him pant as unseen hands set to work repairing his sliced throat. Invisible drums set his heart to pounding and his soul to raging. He stumbled to his feet… Nay, he rose with strength and ease, once more the man he knew himself to be.

You are not the servant of the king or the peasants for whom you carry out your gruesome work. You are the servant of death, Mother said.

As she spoke, the ocean beneath the ship drained away, the Arasmas left sailing through open sky. A sky that changed color from a light blue spotted with white clouds to a sick and miasmic yellow blotched with drifting bodies of black smoke.

You are a servant of conflict, Mother roared, over the sounds of burning cities far, far below. "You are the servant of yourself! And so you shall remain until the fire takes you and you are no more than embers on the wind. Until a sun dies, and a new one rises and you hunt again." Her body grew translucent, then disappeared altogether, and her head fell tumbling back toward the deck.

Theron blinked. Mother was gone. In her place were Celta and Aldous and Ken. Butcher. The doctor. The child and her dog. Were they here in truth? This was a dream, was it not? He could not say. He felt certain of nothing.

To Theron’s left stood his man, always his left hand, Kendrick the Cold, the Dahkah now, with tattoos of black snakes running down his cheeks from the lower lids of his sharp, beady eyes. He held a curved knife that looked much like the curved tooth of some great saber-fanged beast. Ken’s left hand remained a stump, the Dahkah’s darkness dormant for the moment.

To Theron’s right was Celta, his wife, the woman he had been promised to when she was just a girl. Theron had thought himself a man then, but he had been just a boy. That boy had run away from her, broken his oaths to her. But she was here now, by his right hand, and he by her left. She held a small axe and a shield.

Across the deck from her stood a tall and lanky man, facial features sharp and intelligent, like some sinister bird.

A raven, I think. Yes, Gaige is one of Aldous’ ravens made into human flesh.

His eyes were an unnatural crimson and his hair was of the same color. In each of his hands he held a gleaming scalpel, the tools of his trade.

Beside the doctor stood the center of their adventure: Aldous Weaver, Theron’s ward, the boy Theron had saved those few years ago…those many, many years ago.

Time is relative to the space that one finds oneself in.

Aldous, who had loved Chayse. Aldous, who had been torn asunder by Dahlia the Dog Eater. Aldous, who had watched his own father burn alive, who had been locked away in a church basement when he received news of his mother’s suicide. The boy born to a twisted fate, Aldous, the young Red King.

He was a boy no longer. He was a killer of demons and a wielder of magic most terrible and magnificent. His long black hair was slicked back into a tight topknot, his shoulders wider than they had been. He smiled at Theron, a friendly smile, a brotherly smile, a loving smile. And Theron felt the muscles of his own face pull into the exact same expression.

The echo of drums punched through the yellow sky, the sound reverberating from the black sun moon that cast its shadow over this nightmare realm.

As the beat pulsed, so did that dark sphere in the sky, swelling and shrinking to the rhythm of those invisible and ethereal war drums.

Theron gripped tightened on the shaft of the long axe in his hands. He spat on the deck and looked to Aldous’ left, where stood a scarred mutant of a man. Butcher. He had his meat cleaver in hand.

Who are you, he who looks so much like a monster? He who brought us through the portal to this place? Theron had only uttered the question in his thoughts, but Butcher answered anyway.

I am but the Red King’s most trusted doorman, is all, said he, and although his already exposed teeth could not make a wider smile, a glint in his eyes indicated that he held a kind of pride in his position.

In the circle’s center was the little girl, Bruna, and her white dog. She was an orphan the group had taken in. She was clearly afraid, as was her dog, as they looked frantically between the monstrous mortals that made up her adoptive tribe. When Theron reached down and said, I am no beast, the girl whimpered, crawled backward like a crab and cried, Devil, monster…keep away!

Her little dog yapped and nipped at Theron’s hand. He pulled away and looked hopelessly to the others.

Is it even possible, I wonder, for the mighty to ever know how to nurture the meek? Again, Theron’s words were confined to his thoughts. Again, came a response to what had not been said.

The warrior’s way is not a path upon which to raise a child. And so, for better or worse, she is with us now, and like us she shall become, said the crimson-eyed doctor.

It was how my father raised me. Like a man, like a beast, and three husbands lie dead behind me on this road, Celta said in mournful agreement.

Aye, Kendrick said. But a broken, lonely lad, an orphan filled with fear and hate was I when the conscription was signed and I marched until the marsh was the sand and the fog was a dust storm, until west was east and a devil I became in a foreign land.

Pay attention! boomed a voice that did not belong to any in their group.

Theron turned and set eyes upon the man-giant, Stiggis. He had appeared from nothing, sitting now with his legs crossed and back upright against the ship’s mast in a meditative posture. His hair and beard of white gold swayed in the wind as the ship soared through open sky.

Something moved in the periphery of Theron’s vision. A white snake—

He spun.

The girl and her dog were there no longer.

Theron’s belly sank. The horror and guilt of losing the child so early in the quest nearly dropped him to his knees. But anger kept him upright, anger at the things that had taken the girl and her dog, the things that had followed through the hole in the sky.

Theron hacked through writhing white tentacles. Celta swung at a bulbous white head, an explosion of yellow gore spraying out over the lot of them. Kendrick summoned his phantom limb, the serpent arm of the Dahkah punching a hole through the creature’s squishy white chest.

The Friends of the Void, Theron said through heavy, panting breaths, chunks of white slopping off the edge of his axe and onto the deck.

They are here, said Stiggis. As he rose, a great deluge began to pour from the sky, the black sun moon turning azure blue before blinking crimson. With a flash of purple lightning, it went back to azure and back and forth, red to blue and red again. The torrential downpour put out the flames of the burning world below, and, in a manner only possible within the mad confines of a dream, the ship once again sailed over a raging, stormy sea.

The longboat rocked, and Theron spun around as white tentacles reached out from the waters and into the ship. Green-scaled claws by the scores gripped firm the rails and then heaved themselves over and onto the deck. They came, fiends of the sea: scaled Murlur with glowing yellow eyes, hulking with muscle, hopping forth on thick, froglike thighs. More of the bulbous-headed Friends mixed among the throng.

What if we never escaped Dentin? What if we still fight them there?

What if we never escaped the church when it burned in Baytown? What if you and I still lie therein? Celta asked through heavy breaths as she blocked an incoming spear thrust by one of the fish-men. She parried the blow, and her own one-handed axe sank through muscle and cracked through the green-scaled thing’s clavicle with a sound like splitting wood.

What if this is all just a dream? Aldous asked.

And what if the dream is mine? said Butcher, his cleaver sinking into a foe, sending blue and yellow blood spraying in all directions.

Lightning cracked the sky as Ken pointed his blade backward toward the ship’s mast and the one that stood before it. Worse yet, what if the dream is his?

All eyes went to Stiggis. The blue runic tattoos that covered the man-giant’s body pulsed with a blue glow along with the alternating colors of the moon.

Not his, came a voice from the sea and the sky.

Stiggis squinted and, with a glower, raised his axe high. Snow fell from its ice-enchanted tip as he pointed. Turning once more, Theron looked up to where the sea was rising before the ship, up, up, up like a monolithic tower of black water. Standing atop it, with arms outstretched and palms upright like a monk praying to the Luminescent, was a man.

Not a dream, he said. A nightmare…

More and more fiends of the sea crawled their way out of the waves and onto the Arasmas’ deck. Stiggis joined his companions in hewing down the foes, but when one fell, another slid into its place.

It is the nightmare of the one who sleeps, said the man atop the tower of water. It is that terrible terror that sits in the mind of the one who dwells so far in the fathomless deeps!

Once more, lightning tore the sky asunder. For that horrible and doomed instant, Theron saw beneath the surface of the rising tower of water. He saw the one the deeps held within, the one he had seen before in Dammar’s vision, too horrible to look upon, as tall as a mountain, a mountain of scaled flesh and cold blood, of fin and tentacle and claw, of many hydra heads and a single visage that resembled the gigantic face of a humanoid babe, with sharp fangs as tall as ancient oak trees. The dreamer of this nightmare.

It cried out, a sky-splitting, mountain-cracking call, like the whole world was folding in on itself. The sound clawed at Theron’s mind and his head felt like it would explode. He fell to his knees, and around him, his companions did the same. Blood ran from their eyes and noses and ears.

The tentacled and scaled creatures on the deck were unaffected, perhaps even spurred onward by the cataclysmic sound.

Rise! The man-giant’s mouth moved as he shouted the command, but Theron could not hear him over the call.

Theron was shoved down, monsters piling atop him. He called for Celta and Ken and Aldous. They could no more hear him than he could hear Stiggis. He could do naught but flail and fight a futile battle as all were overwhelmed, even the man-giant. All Theron’s strength and fury, all his rage and skill, were not enough, not near enough to break free.

He fought for breath.

A scaled elbow rammed into his face and pressed against his jaw, pinning his head between monster and deck. That same elbow exerted pressure until Theron’s jaw hinged open against his will. He tried to scream, to squirm, to get an inch of space, but he could not move. He could only look on in horror as the white eel slithered across the gore-spattered deck toward his pried-open mouth.

He prayed then to his mother, to Dammar, to any god or demon that could intervene. But alas, no one and nothing did as the pale white thing wormed its way in and the wizard atop the tower of the sea that was Leviathan roared.

"This is his nightmare, oh great Leviathan, and I am his light. I am the light! I am the sun in the sea. I am the Father of the Arcane Church of the Great Dark! I come from the great below, and the worlds of men shall reap what they have sown. I will take your souls. I will make you mine. I will break you all at the Tower of Aldrone!"

Part I

The King Is Dead

If these be the demon days,

I bid thee, shake hands

With your devil.

If this were the age of a golden god,

I’d bid ye, kneel

In the shallows.

Yet a sneaking suspicion

Hath bid me to feel,

The God, the Devil

They are naught

But the same fellow.

The monster in your mind,

In the chair, in the corner.

The dark, the shadow.

Silently screaming,

Eyes like embers

Burning yellow.

Chapter One

The Man-Giant’s Path

Lykke ran on all fours.

You will not question the words of Bodan’s son, Celta had said when Theron ordered Lykke to run. And so she had run.

She ran in the form of the wolf. Her tongue dangled from her mouth and her heart beat like the drums of war, pounding so hard in her chest that she thought it might burst. Her lungs swelled so large that they risked skewering on a rib.

What had she seen? What was that thing that had opened in the sky?

That demon…that demon had spawned right out of Theron’s eye.

And yet Theron lived; Bodan’s son lived.

But he was in danger, and Stiggis Halfjotun had to be warned. Therick had to be warned. There was an enemy here in this country far worse than the Brynthians.

She did stop to eat or drink; she just ran and ran until she reached Baytown. She followed Stiggis’ scent to the great hall, and only then did she return to her human form. She threw open the oaken doors and was about to yell at the nearest warrior or maiden to hurry the hells up and get the man-giant from quarters.

But to Lykke’s shock, he was already there. In the center of the hall.

It was not the sight of Stiggis, her master, that stunned her. It was whom he was with.

Thirteen Shahidi monks stood with the man-giant. Men from all races, all wearing black robes and black turbans. They looked at her, not just with the eyes she could see. She felt them watching her with eyes hidden behind the black cloth of their headdresses.

Stiggis stood with his back to her.

Stiggis! Lykke gasped for air and fell to her knees.

Lykke, Stiggis said, sounding like he was expecting her, and whatever the reason for the expectation, it wasn’t good.

I saw them disappear. Lykke got the words out between laboured breaths.

Stiggis shook his head. The drape of white-gold hair swayed on his tattooed back.

No, Lykke, you did not see a thing, Stiggis said, icy calm.

A shiver ran through Lykke, straight to her bones.

She stayed there, on her knees, as a symbol emerged upon the stone floor of the hall, a five-pointed star, as if invisible phantoms drew with thick blocks of crimson chalk. A circle appeared around the star, and then two primitively drawn wolf heads on either side. The form of a woman covered in scars appeared at the top. When the drawing was done, crimson mist swelled up from the lines.

Lykke surged to her feet and stumbled back. She was no stranger to rituals, for as a lycan in the Coven of the Fang, she had participated in many. But while she recognized this as a ritual, it was not one she knew.

Her gaze flicked around the room at the strange men who stood so close to the master she so dearly loved. She did not want to speak in front of them, but Stiggis appeared in no hurry to leave them, and her information was urgent.

Stiggis, I saw the very fabric of reality tear in the sky and pull Theron and the one you call the Red King, and Princess Celta and that whole fucking little town of Dentin, up and into it. Lykke’s words tumbled one against the next. I have failed. I have failed the others, my brothers that you sent with me to protect Theron. They too are gone from this world, their bodies left behind. They were slaughtered by creatures the like of which I have never seen. What were those things, Stiggis?

It matters not, Lykke, sweet Lykke, who has failed me. Stiggis’ calm was touched with sadness, and that sadness turned Lykke’s unease to genuine fear. Something told her to turn back into the wolf. Something told her to run from this place, to find some woods and hunt there and stay there and never again say the name Stiggis. But terror held her rooted in place.

Because all at once she understood. It wasn’t just that she had lost Theron—it was that Theron was lost, and she was not lost with him.

And whatever she had just seen, she had seen too much.

Stiggis, she whispered. I’m sorry. I saw nothing. I shall ask no questions. What is it you need me to do? Only ask.

Lykke, said Stiggis, and then he finally turned, and her fear turned to horror.

She recognized that stare, the stare he had worn so many times into battle, so many times before he killed. A steady rage, a fury, burned in his gaze, not at his victim, but at the gods themselves, a fury for his fate, a fury for his purpose, and a fury for the path from which, for whatever reason, he could never wander.

It is I who am sorry.

Don’t be sorry, Stiggis, she said. Don’t do what you feel compelled to do.

I need what is in your head. Stiggis strode toward her, his hand extended, palm open, fingers outstretched. Something rattled and clanged like a storm inside the structure on the upper floors.

Lykke glanced up, fighting every wolfish compulsion to flee, succumbing to every bit of doglike loyalty that made her stay.

The monks… They need to know what you saw.

She nodded frantically. I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them everything.

The telling is not enough. They must see for themselves.

Lykke choked on her fear. The ceiling exploded. Splinters of timber and chips of stone tile showered the hall. Stiggis’ mighty axe soared through the air into his grasp at the beckoning of magical call.

The man-giant’s massive muscles tensed as woe and sorrow fought their hardest to show themselves from behind dead, frozen eyes. The glimmering axe head came barreling down.

And Lykke closed her eyes.

Stiggis’ hand did not shake as he tossed his dear Lykke’s brain into the center of the sorcerous sigil. The brain sizzled.

There is your key. Now open my door, Stiggis said to the gathered monks. He looked at each and every one of them, his stare of disdain lingering.

Stiggis felt contempt for all of them, and they all seemed to take great joy in his disdain. But they obeyed the man-giant nonetheless, for they were bound to him. The Shahidi were to help Stiggis, and Stiggis was to support the Shahidi in keeping their seat in the Black House of the Deadmen, to help them destroy the brood of Afrit, those demon worshippers who had attacked and desecrated the already near-ruined Shahidi temple in Keldesh.

And so, the dark meditations began.

The Shahidi gathered in a circle around the sigil of crimson chalk drawn on the stone tiles of the great hall floor. In the center of the mark, the now-smouldering brain was completely subsumed in blood-red flame.

The Shahidi chanted and the sigil grew hotter still, until one of the Shahidi—it was Fitza—vomited blood, laughed for a moment, then fell over dead as a stone. He too began to burn on the sigil. His robes smoked and a small fire started. The other monks stopped chanting for a moment, and they each had a chuckle as they watched Gulgrim pull Fitza’s corpse from the circle.

That is how he wanted to go, Gulgrim said sarcastically. Digging through a wolf-bitch’s mind until the madness in it suffocated him and his lungs and heart popped. That is exactly how he wanted to go into the Great Dark.

Wolf-bitch? Stiggis let his rage pour free.

And may he die this way a thousand times! he shouted. Unoffended, the Shahidi laughed. Stiggis scowled, heart heavy. Lykke had failed to keep Theron safe. She had seen too much, and Stiggis needed every small detail of what she had seen in order for the Shahidi to replicate the portal. There had been no way for her but death. He knew that. But he didn’t have to like it. Get back to it. I don’t have all day to waste.

Give us a moment, Winter Wizard, a monk whom Stiggis did not know by name said. Or we will all end up like Fitza and the poor young wolf-woman whose brain sits burning inside the sigil.

I am anxious to get this done, Stiggis said.

The Shahidi stopped laughing at this display of honesty. They separated into small groups and partook of the hookahs and jugs of beer, mead, and wine they had brought with them. The monk who had spoken earlier offered Stiggis a goblet. He shook his head, unwilling to draw closer in either the physical or psychic manner.

As much as the Shahidi aggravated Stiggis and stirred his dislike, he could not help but be endlessly intrigued by them. In some ways, he greatly admired them, for he had been taught by the great, many-eyed monk, Allain, Dammar’s father himself. And although Stiggis had never managed to grow additional eyes, he had learned much from the monk. He had learned that a cynic, a villain, a vagabond, and a hermit could still have purpose. They could still have reason and they could still have drive. Stiggis was the vagabond and the hermit. He was the cynic and the villain. But he saw beyond the image of himself. He saw his ambition. And ambition was not a thing just of the self; it was a thing inherited from the gods.

The Shahidi formed a solitary line, and in silence each stepped forward, poured a chug of spirits onto Fitza’s corpse, and blew hookah herb smoke into his dead face. Then, in silence, they re-formed the circle around Lykke’s still-burning brain.

The Shahidi once again picked up the chant. Time passed in a flicker, though Stiggis knew it had been hours, even days, and with a hiss and a pop, Lykke’s brain burst into chunks.

We have found the world! the monk who had spoken earlier said in a voice strained with effort. Winter Wizard, get inside the sigil.

Stiggis stepped inside. He looked into one of the monk’s many eyes as he passed, and in them he caught glimpses of reflections of other worlds, alien jungles, deep-sea labyrinths and caverns, burning cities and yellow-poison skies.

The glowing mark burned the callused souls of Stiggis’ bare feet. The smell was wretched, sulfur and rot and dying lilies. He reacted not at all. He was in a zone of his own then, bracing himself for the portal. He had been through many, and he knew he would be through many more, but it was an unsettling experience each time.

When you see the crack, use your magic and make it bigger, said Gulgrim, a tall, thin monk with a mad smile. In our current depleted numbers, we are not strong enough to do this alone. When you are ready to return, reach out to our brothers. You know the ritual. Find one of our agents; drink his blood from the skull bowl. Consume the talisman. We will open a gate for you then. All his eyes were focused on Stiggis, and as Stiggis stared back at them, the tiny images in their reflections projected into his own mind.

A battle at sea, a sinking ship, a man-giant upon its deck battling many lesser men in purple military coats, a massive winter-enchanted axe in his hands. The giant man was Stiggis himself, older, weathered, with a filthy braided beard. But it was he.

The Stiggis of that new world went down with the ship on which he battled, hewing purple-coated foes as he was shot and stabbed by them.

Thoughts swirled through Stiggis’ mind, too quick to grab hold of:

A deafening noise blared in through the confines of Baytown’s great hall.

A gleaming black light made a jagged line in the air, in the ozone, in the very fabrics of reality above the mark.

Stiggis smelled fire and brimstone, and the sweet, unnaturally clean scent of a world coming apart and opening up.

Now! the monk whose name Stiggis did not know shouted, then he roared as he continued to use all his energies to open the rift in space-time. One of the many eyes atop his bald scalp swelled and exploded. Go to Aldrone, he shouted. Go to the Tower of Aldrone. The Friends of the Void pursue your kin. The monk’s temples pulsed and swelled, his face distorting until his head exploded entirely, splattering chunks of brain matter and skull over the wall, bits reaching as high as the ceiling.

And as the monks had laughed earlier at their comrade’s death, Stiggis laughed now, the sound booming in the chamber. He took a deep breath, for he understood what Gulgrim’s eyes had just shown him. The ship…the battle…the portal that was about to open was going to be in the sea. This would not be the first time he had risen from the abyss.

With all his physical strength and wizard’s will, he swung his axe at the crack of gleaming shadow that hung in the air above the sigil.

It opened, a wound in the cosmos, and torrents of seawater bled through into the great hall. He stood firm as the gallons assailed him and engulfed the Shahidi, picking them up like insects in a flood. Recruiting all the might his muscles could muster, Stiggis dove into the onrush of abyssal blue and into the deep sea of another world.

The maelstrom created by the portal came to an end just as Stiggis passed through, for the crack in the worlds was now closed, and here—wherever here was—Stiggis would remain until he found a way to make another crack and get back. But first he would find the children of his sister, the Golden Wolves and the Red King. Even under all those fathoms of ocean, he could feel their presence in this world. It was the certainty of this presence that gave him the resolve to swim ever upward to the light.

The shape of a man drifted down toward him as he swam, and suddenly he was facing himself, this world’s version of himself, the older Stiggis who had gone down with the sinking ship after battling atop its deck against the purple coats.

One ascending and one descending, they gazed into each other’s eyes. He was still alive, wounded but alive, this other self, and Stiggis reached for him on instinct. He could likely save this version of himself.

But there could only be one. There must be only one to ensure success.

And he could not risk his other self surviving the sea.

So Stiggis reached out, grabbed hold of the wounded one’s face, and stuck his thumbs into his doppelganger’s eyes. He pressed until he reached brain, and when he did, he felt the agony in his own skull. This did not stop him; he dug his thumbs in deeper and deeper until his grip was good, then there, beneath the sea, he wrapped his legs around his dying self’s waist and ripped open his skull before swimming the rest of the distance to the surface.

The conjured wind drawn from the forces gusted into the sail as if Bodan himself had drawn in a deep breath and screamed out the command, Forward, Stiggis! Forward to Aldrone! And all that hot air blasted the longboat forward, splitting tide and making the air scream as the ship moved at speeds only achievable by sorcery.

Stiggis’ hair and beard billowed as the vessel soared across the sea. He did not move from where he had sat meditating for the past days against the mast of the ship that he and his summoned crew of draugar had built shortly after Stiggis had arrived in this world.

He had arrived alone, but when he had washed up on a shore, others had washed up, too. Many corpses. Some survivors. Pirates and Brynthian navy, by the looks and sound of them. Stiggis had seen to those survivors.

When he was done, their blood was cold like the north, their eyes dead and their skulls chattering like a terrible frost was on their skin and worse dread inside their souls.

Stiggis, it is there on the horizon, the cursed Tower of Aldrone, a draugr shouted.

In the distance was a tall tower that looked down upon the mighty trees of the Werewood and speared the clouds above.

I am aware. I can hear the tower talking to me. And I can sense the Red King…little Aldous. And I can sense Theron and Chayse. A family reunion is on the horizon, Stiggis said.

This was not the first time he had been here; he was sure of that. The mystery waiting to be unfolded, waiting to be remembered, was an exciting prospect. When one was as old as Stiggis, and so keenly aware of one’s other lives, it was a rarity to meet uncertainty. And so, when uncertainty came, the dark unknown was beyond tantalizing.

The excitement of it all set Stiggis’ blood to boiling like it used to when he was still a young boy himself, all of fifty or sixty years of age. Hardly eight feet tall and four feet wide he had been at the time. But even though he’d been small, he’d been strong and nimble for his age and size. Yes, back in that golden age when so much still lay hidden in the wonders of the dark.

He thought of his parents’ great hall deep in the heart of the mountain.

He thought of his sister Diana, named Skjilla then.

He thought of his half-brother Dammar.

He thought of Dammar’s father, the Shahidi monk whose company Stiggis had come to enjoy more than that of his own father. But in the end, they had both been weak—his own father and his brother’s—and they had both screamed like they were but ordinary mortals when Stiggis had crushed their skulls with his bare hands.

The sea spray hit him now atop the deck of his ship, and he remembered the feeling of Dammar’s father’s many eyes exploding and spraying their juice into Stiggis’ face. And he recalled Dammar’s own smile upon first hearing the news, when Stiggis had set him free from his prison beneath the mountain.

You will always be my favourite, Stiggis, my sweet, curious, dear little brother, Dammar had said.

And you mine, elder brother, Stiggis had replied.

Then the two brothers had gone their separate ways, Dammar in the form of the many-eyed stag to Romaria to reign for centuries. Stiggis to the Northern Isles of Ygdrasst and Blodjord.

But not before Stiggis killed Mother and her soldiers. And her handmaids. And arcanists, alchemists, cooks, and…and not before Stiggis killed everything in the mountain.

Except Skjilla. He had let his sister live that day. She had renamed herself Diana and gone to hide in the world of men in the country of Brynth, where she would do much ruling and disputing with other great powers in the shadows.

She had been angry with Stiggis. She had cried and Stiggis had laughed.

Tell me why? she had pleaded. Why? she had begged.

It is how Mother wanted it to be. It was my test. Our test. Now we are free. Now we are demons and gods unleashed. Our days in the mountain are done. Now go, sister. Go and wreak your havoc, go and make children, as I and Dammar will, so that when the time is right, we too will have someone to fight us; we too will have someone to destroy us. When the time is right.

I hadn’t seen the fellow in years. The black dog, I mean. When I did, I knew all was not well. Twelve years it had been, and another decade before that.

When I was a boy, he visited me often. He came wandering to the old house at the edge of the woods where no house belonged, where only hateful things survived and so only a hateful home could thrive.

Every night that Father beat Mother, the black dog would come. He would walk right through the door, sometimes right through the walls. His glowing crimson eyes and big, panting blue tongue is what I remember most. His fur was fluffy darkness, and when he crawled under my bed where I hid while Father yelled and Mother screamed and begged and whimpered, and the sounds of fist bones hitting skull bones and thudding on rib bones echoed through the big house of hate… In those years, I always thought the black dog was my friend. Such a dear friend.

As I grew older, as the black dog and I started to venture out from underneath the soft darkness beneath my bed, he and I started to do bad things. Terrible things in the night, by the house that was built with hate at its heart and disdain in its mind.

Yes, even as years went on and Mother and Father got older, Father still found the energy to beat her. And although I was getting bigger and stronger and the black dog and I had already killed three travelers wandering too close to my woods—to my shadows in the forest ’neath the Tower of Aldrone—I still found the cowardice in myself to fear Father. So, when the frenzy of violence began at home and Father found new skin to scar and bones to break, the black dog and I would enter the night.

I remember when I first saw her. I’ll never forget her song’s tone. When she set eyes upon me, she whispered my name in the softest moan. I wished then to kill her, to cut from her shoulders her perfect golden-haired head. But when I drew my long knife and whispered to the black dog, I’ll bathe in this woman’s blood tonight. Bite down on her neck, black dog, so her screams fall silent as I slash and cut.

But the black dog had left me and gone to the woman’s side. And as his fur rose upon his neck, as his crimson eyes began to glow and his legs and skull began to grow, I knew it was not she but I who needed to hide. I knew this whole time that my sanity was being taken for a ride. The woman smiled and asked me, My child, why do you wait? Why are they still alive?

I needed to ask no questions. And so, I stayed no longer. I walked back to the house of hate that had forgone being a home. In the night, against the blackness of the forest, ’neath the shadow of Aldrone, with her eyes upon me, the monster that called the Werewood home drew the meat knife and entered with silent steps.

Mother, she was weeping in the corner, bloody and bruised. Father, he was standing just before her, smiling and amused.

Even in spite of it all, she screamed out to warn him as I closed in behind. The knife went in and his agony freed my mind. He choked as he died, and I tossed him aside as the knife came back up to upon blood sup again. I bore down my thrust with vengeance’s lust, and she made not a sound as the knife point it found…

Her eye.

I skewered her brain. It left me insane, and when I walked from the house, there they stood, my new family.

The golden-haired goddess who wandered robed all in darkness. And the black dog, my black dog.

Fur and flesh from his bones fell away, and then he was whole.

Towering beside her in obsidian armor, with the face of a snarling dog crested upon his helm, was a twelve-foot bone-giant whose eyes gleamed crimson red. And in his hands dangled shackles with which he locked me, before he brought me to stay forever here in my cell in hell in Aldrone.

I still hear her laughter, her sensual, lustrous laughter. It echoes inside. Here the monster lies, here the monster lies, in here the monster lies…

~Writing etched into a black stone wall, in a deep cell in the Cursed Tower of Aldrone.

Before it lies a skeleton, its skull bashed open, a stone clutched tight in its own bone hand

Chapter Two

Slumbering in the Burning Bed

Baldo Corvina’s legs felt like sacks of wet earth as he walked the crowded Baytown docks, not as the man he had become but as the boy he had been. Faces stared in his direction as he passed them—faces without eyes or mouths or noses, featureless, blank slabs of flesh.

They spoke to each other in words Baldo could not understand, for he could not hear them. The only sounds that banged against the drums of his ears were the sounds of water and wind. White river rapids. Symphonies of ocean waves. Swirling maelstroms. Deluges pouring down onto jungle floors. Hurricanes of wind and rain ripping apart barn doors.

Baldo heard all that, but no words. No, there were no words and there were no faces. There were no human beings, just illusions, for this place was not real.

Keep telling yourself that.

Those words Baldo heard, coming from inside himself. But they were not his own. Instead, they were the words of the wizard. That handsome, hazel-haired wizard, with eyes so dark they were black in all but the brightest of lights and the blackest of nights. In such darkness, they would appear as rings of golden brown. The wizard’s accent was one of no land and every land, the accent of the sea. It was like water, impossible to place, subtly shifting, always shifting.

Baldo often felt as if the wizard was not one man, but many.

Again, the wizard spoke inside this dream that dwelt inside another. Keep telling yourself that this is just a dream. Keep telling yourself that you will one day wake from it all to see that there is something greater, something beyond. But the beyond is just right here. It is just right now. You’re just not looking for it. You’re just not listening for it. Open your eyes, boy, open your mind, and let it all flood in. Stare into the haze, summoned up from your torments’ blaze and finally see. Trust in yourself and trust in me.

Once upon a time, Baldo had thought it was chance, luck, and the machinations of lady fate that had sent him into those Fracian caverns where the wizard held his dark court. Then, for a time, Baldo had convinced himself it was not fate and luck that had seen him safely from the home where he had stared into the black eyes of his parents’ killer, that had taken him all the way to the house of the wizard in his cavernous court. Baldo had convinced himself it was his own fortitude, skill, and wit that had seen him through the ordeal.

Now, as he dreamed of the Baytown docks, Baldo could not shake the feeling that he had not been saved by luck, or fate, and especially not by himself. He began to think that he was not saved at all. That, indeed, he was captured. That the Dahkah who had murdered his parents and the wizard in his cavern were somehow working together, that he had been corralled and apprehended and then broken and tamed.

This thought spurred Baldo forward along the docks. He grew taller and stronger with every step, until he became the height of the man in the bed in which he now slept. The bed that he himself had made that morning. Even though he had a hundred and a hundred more servants to do it for him, he still made his own bed so that when it finally caught flame, he could be damn sure he was the only one to blame. That was something they had taught him at the academy in his life before. It had followed him, because even if the wizard was running the show, Baldo was still playing the game. He had been promised the prize he coveted most: revenge.

With heavy hands, swollen-boned from scores upon scores of breaks, he shoved the faceless masses on the docks aside and quickened his pace to his destination. He was going home. He was going to see his father and mother; he was going to see the servants who had raised him. He was going to face the Dahkah. He was going to defeat him at this encounter. He was going to punish the demon for his crime.

Then Baldo was at the Baytown docks no longer, closing in on his revenge no longer. In but a ration of a moment he was warped into the cavernous court of the wizard, clutching a blood-soaked sword in one hand and a splintered, mud-covered shield in the other. Torches that blazed deep blue glowed ominously from the stone walls.

The wizard sat naked but for the blue paint that marked his body with swirls and waves. His face had a blue streak running vertically from hairline to chin over each eyelid. He smiled his wry smile, snapped his fingers, and tapped his foot while leaning back in his savage throne, crudely sculpted from black wicker and bleached human bones.

Why must you always do this? Baldo asked.

"You know why, High…Patriarch…Barroth… You know why," the wizard said, slow and distinct, as if he were talking to an idiot. For by his standards, he was.

That is not my name. Why must you, who knows me, who knows that I am Baldo Corvina, call me that name? Baldo tried to shout, but the words came out on a whisper no matter how hard his belly and chest strained.

It was part of the deal, the wizard said with vehemence. Or are you forgetting that, too? I need you to focus, Barroth. I need you to blink, and when you’re done, I need you to be right here, right now, answering the rooster’s call and getting out of bed. Because you have a mob to rouse, you have a Lord Regent turned heretic to hang and gut, and then you have a rebellion to quell! The wizard clenched his fist and gritted his teeth in a snarl. "My enemies’ power grows. Our enemies’ power grows, and for this we must deal them some great blow, for I fear even now they have reached that black prison, that shadow domain that belongs not yet to me. Oh, the mighty tower. The wicked, cursed Tower of Aldrone."

What is this to me? Baldo demanded. Where sits my revenge at the banquette table of all your ambitions? He squeezed the hilt of his sword so tight that his hand went numb even in the dream.

It sits front and center, the wizard said from his throne. Our foes are the same, friend. The Red King must die, and then, I assure you, he will return. He will be at the tower. He will be with your Dahkah. My forces go to confirm it even now. They march to Aldrone, under the cover of blackest shadow, the only light they know the moon at night.

How can you know this? What prophecy did you see and choose to hide? Baldo asked.

"I have not just seen it, I have lived it in other lives. l must go as I plan or it will mean not their demise but mine," the wizard answered.

Well, what then is your plan? You, the Wizard of Light, who lives in the dark, who reels me along like a fish on a hook baited with my vengeance. You are a contradiction, Lucian. In all these years, you have illuminated nothing for me. You have only drowned me deeper and deeper in your Church of the Great Dark.

My friend, my sweet friend. I will show you. I will show all. I will take you home, back to that place, back to that time so that you may finally put it all to rest. You will get to smell the pork, beef, fish, and spices and sweets on every dish. Baked bread and baked ham, onions, garlic, and legs of lamb. Breasts of chicken. Turkey and duck. Boiled goose perfectly plucked. With wine and mead…

Baldo could see the dining hall. He could smell the food.

And all the death, you will smell that, too. The wizard yawned. And then you will finally get to face him and win your little spat. You will get to take his life.

Baldo saw his mother, his father, in pieces blended together with the mutilated servants. The Dahkah standing amidst it all, a black snake with ruby-red eyes where his arm ought to be. Blood dripping from a curved blade in his other hand.

Lucian continued speaking, and the sound of his words pulled Baldo out of the dining hall and back into the cavernous court.

"Though, after all I have shown you, it makes me feel quite an idiot that my student of three decades, three decades your time, is still hellbent on something as mundane as revenge. The wizard shrugged and frowned. But perhaps some are just cursed…and blessed with mundanity."

Baldo was close to certain he and the wizard had had this conversation before. He was entirely certain they would have it again and that the very same insults to the foundations of his character would