James Satan
12-07-2005, 17:53
ok, part one of the story, might be finished tomorrow, depends on how much time I can wrestle from work. hehe.
The Northern Wall. The last great bastion of defence unbroken by even the horrific destruction of the searing. It was of course weakened in some places, but even now the last battalions of Ascalon were patching the holes, fighting back the Charr as they built. As he stepped from the shadows of the gate, the warrior looked at the steps down to his right, then continued walking towards Warmaster Tydus who stood looking out over the barren desert.
The Princes' man smiled with his mouth, while his eyes locked onto the approaching figures' face to gauge his response. "Thank you for..." he began, but was rudely cut short:
"Go inside. I am here to remove your little problem"
Warmaster Tydus bowed his head briefly, and reached out his hand. The warrior stood like a metal plated statue, his platinum coloured armour shined and polished, yet soaking up the light like a reapers' aura. The band of gold around his greying temple gleaming dull in the deepening sunlight. Tydus dropped his gaze, and his hand, and strode past the man into the shadows of the keep. He briefly contemplated patting him on the shoulder as he passed, but thought better of it as he approached and saw the warrior stiffen.
----
The hot, dry wind flicked a strand of hair from his face as he walked towards the battlements. He blinked the grit from his right eye. Loud metal cogs screamed as though in agony, as they slowly fell into action, as the main gates slowly closed behind him. A rumbling clanking signalled that the portcullis was also dropping into place.
No way back now. Commitment to the crown of Ascalon meant that he would now inevitably die fighting.
As he looked down on the soldiers mobilizing below he felt a brief pain in his gut, and instinct told him to move. He stepped to the right, felt the thick warm air part along the edge of the blade flying through his grey hair, sliding like treacle past his face, only missing by millimetres. He raised one eyebrow almost comically. The old witch had actually given him something useful after all. A precog stone bound on a tight leather strap hanging from his neck, actually doing what he was told it would do. So this is how it warns him... with cramps! In the twenty years he had spent as a warrior, nothing other than his wits and skill had kept him alive, and recently, he felt the pressures of increasing numbers of assassins and increasing numbers of Charr supporters all out for his blood. His royal blood, long diluted by ale and whores' diseases, and healers purifications.
His right hand snapped like an iron shackle around the assassins' wrist now moving past his left shoulder, his body moving only slightly as his left elbow came back viciously towards the face of his attacker. As face met with metal plate, he heard each snap and crack, splintering of bone as the assassins' nose and teeth let go their fragile hold on structure. As he expanded his chest, brought his muscles into action and moved his arms apart further fuelled by a brief anger he felt the sudden lack of resistance, and the sickening vibration through his arm of a human spine breaking just below the skull.
His anger was at his own failure to hear, to know the approach was in progress; his anger was that his attention was slipping. He should have heard the extra weight on one side of the portcullis as it clanged down into position carrying the assassin with it. He should have heard the slipper clad feet as they shuffled through the dust. Or maybe, he thought... maybe he had heard, but didn't really want to do anything about it. Maybe his time was almost over. Maybe his body; in its laziness, was trying to avoid the ordeal to come.
Releasing his grip, and returning almost to attention, the body slumped in a pile around his legs, like a dog curling up around his feet by the fire. The low hiss of air escaping the dead mans' lungs distorted to a sick gurgle by the new route of escape.
The Warrior stepped to the battlements and looked down. Stone devourers, those damn pests, were trying to fight off four Ascalon pikemen, trying to get to their wounded comrades lying in agony under the feet of the animals. The fight was interesting to watch, as for each step towards the devourers’ prey the pikemen took, another devourer would climb from the earth, while the two attempting to drag the semi-conscious wounded soldiers under the loose shale kept stopping, and looking at their clan attacking and clack their stingers together as if to cheer them on.
The old warrior bent down, and picked up the knife that had nearly separated his spinal cord from his head, and turned it over in his fingers. A Kryta blade, easy to see. The waves along the edges dripped a clear green fluid to the floor… Poison. Muttering, the old warrior flipped it over in his hand, reached back, and threw it hard into the throng below. Before it hit, he had already turned for the stairs, and as he took the first two, he heard the crack that told him it had hit its target, puncturing the spiny carapace at the only point it could, through one of the six beady little eyes at the front of the low-slung animal.
Forty steps in two seconds, thirty metres in three, and in three more, six devourers were removed from the trappings of their daily existence by his gleaming longsword. Once all fifteen were dispatched, the warrior stopped to listen, his head on one side… a strange fizzling, mixed with a kind of popping noise. He frowned, and indicated for all the remaining soldiers to step back. One devourer stood upright still, its limbs shaking, its’ dark green blood seeping from the base of a black hilt protruding from one of its many eye sockets. The Kryta blade. Its beady little black eyes roved left to right, up and down. The old man straightened, his eyes screwed up in the frown that took over his face and as the filthy carapace began to stretch as if the beast was sucking in all the air it could, he turned and ran.
One soldier was stupid enough to disobey the warrior, and had lingered quite close. The old man’s vision blurred at the edges with speed and as he rushed past the soldier he looked back briefly. A faint green glow had appeared around the upright devourer, moving slowly round and around like the belts of light circling the distant planets only ever visible at night, before the searing… Everything moved in slow motion, the soldier he passed looking at the expanding and crackling corpse, the change in his features as he realised that the warrior had left him, the slow landslide of his features as his brows knitted together and the opening of his mouth and eyes as his face twisted towards fear. The old warrior looked ahead once more, he knew what was coming…
*FOOOMPH*
Death Nova. He had seen the poison do its job only once before. That was the name his comrades had called it, the final effect of the horrific poison that the undead painted onto their weapons and arrows before the battle of Si’Kahn. Si’Kahn! Gods above and below, he had hoped that he would never remember that name once he had pushed it from his mind all those years ago… only to be remembered in the blackest night, on the nights when the wind howled in the trees and through the eaves and rattled the windows of the room in whatever inn he was in. When the screams of the dying and the already dead ripped through his whole blood and gore soaked body… and the nightmares woke him. Woke him from visions of the flurry of poison arrows raining down upon their lines, visions of the crowded lines of men scrambling in fear to escape the mutating twisted bodies of their own recently dead as they grew large and seeped green bubbling liquid from every orifice… Running before the inevitable explosive desecration of their friends and comrades bodies that would wound or kill anyone in its radius of effect.
The old man shook his head to clear it, but the screams were still there, ringing in his ears… He looked up; alarmed, and found that it was not the screams of the already dead that he heard, it was the screaming of the poor dying soldier caught within the blast. The other three soldiers were crouched around him, one trying to comfort, another trying to remember the healing spells they were all taught as children. His cracking voice stumbling over the words as if they were a shattered glass floor and his feet were bare. The warrior drew his sword as he approached, and the three soldiers each reached for their belt daggers, and stood up.
“Go back inside the wall. Go to the resurrection shrine and ask the healers to pray for him. Go now.”
As he spoke, he contemplated… he rarely spoke to others. Words were unnecessary when his family sword and the armour he wore spoke more to people than anything he could ever say. Only the idiots needed words to understand what he wanted them to do.
When the devourer had exploded, its carapace turned into deadly chunks and splinters of bone propelled through the air by boiling acidic poison. The man he stood over had been no more than two metres from the smoking slimy crater that existed where the disgusting creature had been. Half the injured mans skull had been removed by a particularly large chunk of carapace, all but one of his limbs were shredded, and the old man could see the green slime boiling up from within each of the horrific injuries the man had sustained. He waited for the three soldiers to get to a clear twenty feet away, then the tip of his sword came down and buried itself in the throat of the shattered man.. He sliced quickly across, noticing the green ooze that came away on his blade as well as the dark tacky smear of the man’s blood. If he decapitated the man completely, then the healers would not be able to resurrect him. He hoped that whatever enemy he fought that finally killed him for the first time would know this, and sever his head completely. The old man had no love of healers, or desire to return to life devoid of his own soul. “just a silly superstition” he had been told on numerous occasions, but he did not see why he should risk it. Instead he bore each of his old injuries and battle scars with pride, and the slight limp in his right leg after much exertion was a small price to pay for holding onto his shot at the afterlife.
He turned and walked briskly away from the gate, away from the corpses, away from the sound of a retching soldier, and into the Breach. After he had picked up the path and walked no more than a hundred metres, he heard the muffled whooshing pop that signalled the final effect of the poison on the man whose soul he had released to the ether.
----
The dust caught in his throat, walking in this midday heat was pure torture in full plate armour. Luckily the armour was manufactured from rare elements and finest dwarven steel, so although heavy, it was surprisingly flexible, and it was as cold as glass against his skin even in this sweltering heat. Likewise, in the freezing, clammy sub-shiverpeak temperatures of the underworld, it trapped all the heat it possibly could. Clever dwarves. He even wished for a matching helm, if it would protect his head from the rays of the sun, but alas, he had run short of gold in recent years, and fought with his wits, not his armour. At least, that was the reason he gave for fighting bareheaded. He knew there was a certain amount of pride involved to fight with his mark of office clearly showing. Not many people even noticed the difference between his dull gold band, and the standard brass band that many of his clansmen wore. It afforded him both anonymity and recognition in the places where it truly mattered.
After what seemed like an eternity, he reached a huge rotting gate, suspended in a gigantic stone arch. He walked to his right a bit and suppressed a quick laugh. Whatever huge beast this gate was supposed to allow or to stop had obviously ignored the gate entirely, and ploughed clean through the wall beside it. Looking to the east, and then to the west the ancient wall was virtually non-existent apart from the occasional archway, where the stone was laid by master craftsmen at twice the thickness of the rest of the wall, over fifteen centuries earlier.
It was the original northern wall, created immediately after the first uprising of the Charr. Back when they were used as slaves and pack-animals, used to fetch and carry the masonry and other materials for their masters, the self-called “native” Ascalonians… Teachings of the slavery of the Charr; their bloody uprising, near extinction and ultimate banishment to the far north, and of course the construction of the first wall, was outlawed under King Athelron the Cruel, a mere four centuries ago when a new war was started. Although the beasts had learnt to live in harmony with nature once more, and had even started trading with the Ascalonians, a thousand years ago, King Athelron did not like the beasts living in such close proximity of the city of Ascalon, and one night, ordered his troops to filter through the battlements, into their camps and to burn it all to the ground. Three powerful elementalists from the council of elders stood amongst the battlements raining fire and lightning down upon the poor beasts, and together they conjured black demons from the rift to crush the beasts as quickly as they could.
Over three thousand peaceful Charr were killed that night, and the land was blasted to ash. Not even the dark stains of Charr blood that covered the grasslands were enough to quell the flames, and in the four centuries that followed, nothing seemed to want to grow in the wasteland. Pushed into the deserts of the north, the remaining Charr learnt to adapt; and so began the Charr’s appreciation of the fire gods that had decimated their population once more. Such black energy was used to summon the demons from the rift, the three elementalists were consumed by the magic that they used and were trapped on the walls as their summoned spawn destroyed much of the north sector of Ascalon city, and nearly the entire first great wall. The spell was only broken when a lone stranger fired three arrows at the three spellcasters and ended their lives along with the demons they had summoned. For this great and selfless act that saved Ascalon once more, the stranger was tortured and executed under the direct supervision of King Athelron, and his ruined body displayed at the gates of the city for the remainder of the cruel kings’ reign.
The lone Warrior shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The construction of the second wall had been build straight through the city of Ascalon, in great haste, so that the Ascalonians could feel safe from the risk of Charr invasion in such a time of ruin, rebuilding and bad monarchy. It was why the city was now so small, being trapped between the wall, the lakes and the nearby hills. It could never grow to rival even the medium sized city of Shi-ConTaa, the city named “little town on the sea” a small coastal dwelling on the home shores of Cantha.
----
He gripped the lever in one hand and decided to try it. With some gentle persuasion, the lever made a crunching noise, and deep underground the rumblings of the gears and counterweights slowly came to life. The huge wooden doors swung open to reveal nothing but more heat blasted dusty landscape.
The distant sound of battle came to his ears. A fizzling noise, followed by the unmistakeable acrid smell of burnt air; a sure sign of a spellcaster, followed by animal squeals, grunts and grinding of stone one stone.
The warrior had been in these parts before, and knew all too well of the hatred that the Grawl and the Gargoyles had for one another. Their animosity was well documented in all the towns and cities. It was almost humorous that they continued to live in such close proximity to one another throughout the lands, yet failed to wipe each other out, even in their constant skirmishes… each simply being a problem for humans in different areas wherever you went. Their natural hatred of one another meant that the creatures kept their own numbers under control without too much human intervention though, which was always a good thing.
The blackened sludge yielded like soft feathers to his feet, when he first stepped into the dark river, yet clung to him like glue whenever he tried to move forward. It was hard to approach the skirmish from the rear and in silence when every step he took made a squelching, sucking noise. A few tacky bubbles floated to the surface only a few feet in front of him, and instinctively the old warrior’s sword flashed out and down. He felt it slip from what it hit, and felt the shifting of the beast under the sludge as it reared to attack him. Taking one step back, he raised his heavy sword and swung with all his force into the slime. Black gunk splashed up to cover his gleaming armour as he sliced through the tar-pit and his sword bit deep into the back of the creature under the slimy layer. The force of the blow pushed the creature to the rock bottom of the river, and the momentum drove the old man to topple forward, his full weight going through the sword, finally splitting through the hard flesh of the thing and impaling it. A few seconds of thrashing later, and it lay still. A sticky bubble rose slowly to the surface and popped unceremoniously as he drew his sword from its new sheath below the sludge, and approached the skirmish once more.
to be continued...
The Northern Wall. The last great bastion of defence unbroken by even the horrific destruction of the searing. It was of course weakened in some places, but even now the last battalions of Ascalon were patching the holes, fighting back the Charr as they built. As he stepped from the shadows of the gate, the warrior looked at the steps down to his right, then continued walking towards Warmaster Tydus who stood looking out over the barren desert.
The Princes' man smiled with his mouth, while his eyes locked onto the approaching figures' face to gauge his response. "Thank you for..." he began, but was rudely cut short:
"Go inside. I am here to remove your little problem"
Warmaster Tydus bowed his head briefly, and reached out his hand. The warrior stood like a metal plated statue, his platinum coloured armour shined and polished, yet soaking up the light like a reapers' aura. The band of gold around his greying temple gleaming dull in the deepening sunlight. Tydus dropped his gaze, and his hand, and strode past the man into the shadows of the keep. He briefly contemplated patting him on the shoulder as he passed, but thought better of it as he approached and saw the warrior stiffen.
----
The hot, dry wind flicked a strand of hair from his face as he walked towards the battlements. He blinked the grit from his right eye. Loud metal cogs screamed as though in agony, as they slowly fell into action, as the main gates slowly closed behind him. A rumbling clanking signalled that the portcullis was also dropping into place.
No way back now. Commitment to the crown of Ascalon meant that he would now inevitably die fighting.
As he looked down on the soldiers mobilizing below he felt a brief pain in his gut, and instinct told him to move. He stepped to the right, felt the thick warm air part along the edge of the blade flying through his grey hair, sliding like treacle past his face, only missing by millimetres. He raised one eyebrow almost comically. The old witch had actually given him something useful after all. A precog stone bound on a tight leather strap hanging from his neck, actually doing what he was told it would do. So this is how it warns him... with cramps! In the twenty years he had spent as a warrior, nothing other than his wits and skill had kept him alive, and recently, he felt the pressures of increasing numbers of assassins and increasing numbers of Charr supporters all out for his blood. His royal blood, long diluted by ale and whores' diseases, and healers purifications.
His right hand snapped like an iron shackle around the assassins' wrist now moving past his left shoulder, his body moving only slightly as his left elbow came back viciously towards the face of his attacker. As face met with metal plate, he heard each snap and crack, splintering of bone as the assassins' nose and teeth let go their fragile hold on structure. As he expanded his chest, brought his muscles into action and moved his arms apart further fuelled by a brief anger he felt the sudden lack of resistance, and the sickening vibration through his arm of a human spine breaking just below the skull.
His anger was at his own failure to hear, to know the approach was in progress; his anger was that his attention was slipping. He should have heard the extra weight on one side of the portcullis as it clanged down into position carrying the assassin with it. He should have heard the slipper clad feet as they shuffled through the dust. Or maybe, he thought... maybe he had heard, but didn't really want to do anything about it. Maybe his time was almost over. Maybe his body; in its laziness, was trying to avoid the ordeal to come.
Releasing his grip, and returning almost to attention, the body slumped in a pile around his legs, like a dog curling up around his feet by the fire. The low hiss of air escaping the dead mans' lungs distorted to a sick gurgle by the new route of escape.
The Warrior stepped to the battlements and looked down. Stone devourers, those damn pests, were trying to fight off four Ascalon pikemen, trying to get to their wounded comrades lying in agony under the feet of the animals. The fight was interesting to watch, as for each step towards the devourers’ prey the pikemen took, another devourer would climb from the earth, while the two attempting to drag the semi-conscious wounded soldiers under the loose shale kept stopping, and looking at their clan attacking and clack their stingers together as if to cheer them on.
The old warrior bent down, and picked up the knife that had nearly separated his spinal cord from his head, and turned it over in his fingers. A Kryta blade, easy to see. The waves along the edges dripped a clear green fluid to the floor… Poison. Muttering, the old warrior flipped it over in his hand, reached back, and threw it hard into the throng below. Before it hit, he had already turned for the stairs, and as he took the first two, he heard the crack that told him it had hit its target, puncturing the spiny carapace at the only point it could, through one of the six beady little eyes at the front of the low-slung animal.
Forty steps in two seconds, thirty metres in three, and in three more, six devourers were removed from the trappings of their daily existence by his gleaming longsword. Once all fifteen were dispatched, the warrior stopped to listen, his head on one side… a strange fizzling, mixed with a kind of popping noise. He frowned, and indicated for all the remaining soldiers to step back. One devourer stood upright still, its limbs shaking, its’ dark green blood seeping from the base of a black hilt protruding from one of its many eye sockets. The Kryta blade. Its beady little black eyes roved left to right, up and down. The old man straightened, his eyes screwed up in the frown that took over his face and as the filthy carapace began to stretch as if the beast was sucking in all the air it could, he turned and ran.
One soldier was stupid enough to disobey the warrior, and had lingered quite close. The old man’s vision blurred at the edges with speed and as he rushed past the soldier he looked back briefly. A faint green glow had appeared around the upright devourer, moving slowly round and around like the belts of light circling the distant planets only ever visible at night, before the searing… Everything moved in slow motion, the soldier he passed looking at the expanding and crackling corpse, the change in his features as he realised that the warrior had left him, the slow landslide of his features as his brows knitted together and the opening of his mouth and eyes as his face twisted towards fear. The old warrior looked ahead once more, he knew what was coming…
*FOOOMPH*
Death Nova. He had seen the poison do its job only once before. That was the name his comrades had called it, the final effect of the horrific poison that the undead painted onto their weapons and arrows before the battle of Si’Kahn. Si’Kahn! Gods above and below, he had hoped that he would never remember that name once he had pushed it from his mind all those years ago… only to be remembered in the blackest night, on the nights when the wind howled in the trees and through the eaves and rattled the windows of the room in whatever inn he was in. When the screams of the dying and the already dead ripped through his whole blood and gore soaked body… and the nightmares woke him. Woke him from visions of the flurry of poison arrows raining down upon their lines, visions of the crowded lines of men scrambling in fear to escape the mutating twisted bodies of their own recently dead as they grew large and seeped green bubbling liquid from every orifice… Running before the inevitable explosive desecration of their friends and comrades bodies that would wound or kill anyone in its radius of effect.
The old man shook his head to clear it, but the screams were still there, ringing in his ears… He looked up; alarmed, and found that it was not the screams of the already dead that he heard, it was the screaming of the poor dying soldier caught within the blast. The other three soldiers were crouched around him, one trying to comfort, another trying to remember the healing spells they were all taught as children. His cracking voice stumbling over the words as if they were a shattered glass floor and his feet were bare. The warrior drew his sword as he approached, and the three soldiers each reached for their belt daggers, and stood up.
“Go back inside the wall. Go to the resurrection shrine and ask the healers to pray for him. Go now.”
As he spoke, he contemplated… he rarely spoke to others. Words were unnecessary when his family sword and the armour he wore spoke more to people than anything he could ever say. Only the idiots needed words to understand what he wanted them to do.
When the devourer had exploded, its carapace turned into deadly chunks and splinters of bone propelled through the air by boiling acidic poison. The man he stood over had been no more than two metres from the smoking slimy crater that existed where the disgusting creature had been. Half the injured mans skull had been removed by a particularly large chunk of carapace, all but one of his limbs were shredded, and the old man could see the green slime boiling up from within each of the horrific injuries the man had sustained. He waited for the three soldiers to get to a clear twenty feet away, then the tip of his sword came down and buried itself in the throat of the shattered man.. He sliced quickly across, noticing the green ooze that came away on his blade as well as the dark tacky smear of the man’s blood. If he decapitated the man completely, then the healers would not be able to resurrect him. He hoped that whatever enemy he fought that finally killed him for the first time would know this, and sever his head completely. The old man had no love of healers, or desire to return to life devoid of his own soul. “just a silly superstition” he had been told on numerous occasions, but he did not see why he should risk it. Instead he bore each of his old injuries and battle scars with pride, and the slight limp in his right leg after much exertion was a small price to pay for holding onto his shot at the afterlife.
He turned and walked briskly away from the gate, away from the corpses, away from the sound of a retching soldier, and into the Breach. After he had picked up the path and walked no more than a hundred metres, he heard the muffled whooshing pop that signalled the final effect of the poison on the man whose soul he had released to the ether.
----
The dust caught in his throat, walking in this midday heat was pure torture in full plate armour. Luckily the armour was manufactured from rare elements and finest dwarven steel, so although heavy, it was surprisingly flexible, and it was as cold as glass against his skin even in this sweltering heat. Likewise, in the freezing, clammy sub-shiverpeak temperatures of the underworld, it trapped all the heat it possibly could. Clever dwarves. He even wished for a matching helm, if it would protect his head from the rays of the sun, but alas, he had run short of gold in recent years, and fought with his wits, not his armour. At least, that was the reason he gave for fighting bareheaded. He knew there was a certain amount of pride involved to fight with his mark of office clearly showing. Not many people even noticed the difference between his dull gold band, and the standard brass band that many of his clansmen wore. It afforded him both anonymity and recognition in the places where it truly mattered.
After what seemed like an eternity, he reached a huge rotting gate, suspended in a gigantic stone arch. He walked to his right a bit and suppressed a quick laugh. Whatever huge beast this gate was supposed to allow or to stop had obviously ignored the gate entirely, and ploughed clean through the wall beside it. Looking to the east, and then to the west the ancient wall was virtually non-existent apart from the occasional archway, where the stone was laid by master craftsmen at twice the thickness of the rest of the wall, over fifteen centuries earlier.
It was the original northern wall, created immediately after the first uprising of the Charr. Back when they were used as slaves and pack-animals, used to fetch and carry the masonry and other materials for their masters, the self-called “native” Ascalonians… Teachings of the slavery of the Charr; their bloody uprising, near extinction and ultimate banishment to the far north, and of course the construction of the first wall, was outlawed under King Athelron the Cruel, a mere four centuries ago when a new war was started. Although the beasts had learnt to live in harmony with nature once more, and had even started trading with the Ascalonians, a thousand years ago, King Athelron did not like the beasts living in such close proximity of the city of Ascalon, and one night, ordered his troops to filter through the battlements, into their camps and to burn it all to the ground. Three powerful elementalists from the council of elders stood amongst the battlements raining fire and lightning down upon the poor beasts, and together they conjured black demons from the rift to crush the beasts as quickly as they could.
Over three thousand peaceful Charr were killed that night, and the land was blasted to ash. Not even the dark stains of Charr blood that covered the grasslands were enough to quell the flames, and in the four centuries that followed, nothing seemed to want to grow in the wasteland. Pushed into the deserts of the north, the remaining Charr learnt to adapt; and so began the Charr’s appreciation of the fire gods that had decimated their population once more. Such black energy was used to summon the demons from the rift, the three elementalists were consumed by the magic that they used and were trapped on the walls as their summoned spawn destroyed much of the north sector of Ascalon city, and nearly the entire first great wall. The spell was only broken when a lone stranger fired three arrows at the three spellcasters and ended their lives along with the demons they had summoned. For this great and selfless act that saved Ascalon once more, the stranger was tortured and executed under the direct supervision of King Athelron, and his ruined body displayed at the gates of the city for the remainder of the cruel kings’ reign.
The lone Warrior shook his head and rubbed his eyes. The construction of the second wall had been build straight through the city of Ascalon, in great haste, so that the Ascalonians could feel safe from the risk of Charr invasion in such a time of ruin, rebuilding and bad monarchy. It was why the city was now so small, being trapped between the wall, the lakes and the nearby hills. It could never grow to rival even the medium sized city of Shi-ConTaa, the city named “little town on the sea” a small coastal dwelling on the home shores of Cantha.
----
He gripped the lever in one hand and decided to try it. With some gentle persuasion, the lever made a crunching noise, and deep underground the rumblings of the gears and counterweights slowly came to life. The huge wooden doors swung open to reveal nothing but more heat blasted dusty landscape.
The distant sound of battle came to his ears. A fizzling noise, followed by the unmistakeable acrid smell of burnt air; a sure sign of a spellcaster, followed by animal squeals, grunts and grinding of stone one stone.
The warrior had been in these parts before, and knew all too well of the hatred that the Grawl and the Gargoyles had for one another. Their animosity was well documented in all the towns and cities. It was almost humorous that they continued to live in such close proximity to one another throughout the lands, yet failed to wipe each other out, even in their constant skirmishes… each simply being a problem for humans in different areas wherever you went. Their natural hatred of one another meant that the creatures kept their own numbers under control without too much human intervention though, which was always a good thing.
The blackened sludge yielded like soft feathers to his feet, when he first stepped into the dark river, yet clung to him like glue whenever he tried to move forward. It was hard to approach the skirmish from the rear and in silence when every step he took made a squelching, sucking noise. A few tacky bubbles floated to the surface only a few feet in front of him, and instinctively the old warrior’s sword flashed out and down. He felt it slip from what it hit, and felt the shifting of the beast under the sludge as it reared to attack him. Taking one step back, he raised his heavy sword and swung with all his force into the slime. Black gunk splashed up to cover his gleaming armour as he sliced through the tar-pit and his sword bit deep into the back of the creature under the slimy layer. The force of the blow pushed the creature to the rock bottom of the river, and the momentum drove the old man to topple forward, his full weight going through the sword, finally splitting through the hard flesh of the thing and impaling it. A few seconds of thrashing later, and it lay still. A sticky bubble rose slowly to the surface and popped unceremoniously as he drew his sword from its new sheath below the sludge, and approached the skirmish once more.
to be continued...