Ross Lawhead - A Hero's throne

As he neared, he realised that his depth perception was off-here, everything seemed compacted and yet expanded at the same time. What had seemed from the sky to be nearly a mile, was mile upon mile. Perhaps as much as twenty or thirty. He finally reached ground and materialised in the centre, surrounded by sooty blackness. He could walk for a day on ash and charred wood.

It must have been a siege, he thought. The Elves in Exile, some of them at least, had been tracked here and trapped. The enemy had then razed the ground around them to prevent their escape under cover.

Daniel looked up at the finger of rock, larger than a skyscraper, and only bearing the black patina of soot on the lower quarter of its length. The flames had not even reached halfway. Had they survived?

Was the siege still in progress?

An odd sort of pattern caught his eye. Midway between him and the start of the rock spire was a sort of cobweb construction. It took him a little while to focus, since at first he thought it was a spider’s web, but it was far away, not small. He neared it.

Two large posts, several storeys in height, had been inserted, somehow, into the ground, and strung between them, in a concentric pattern, was a gruesome lattice work of elfin bodies. They were splayed, spread-eagled and tied hand to foot, where their arms and legs were still attached. Some of them were warriors, but not all of them-not most of them. There were women in hard-wearing elfin gowns and farmwives, as well as labourers, dressed much like K?yle. With a start, he thought that one of them might be his friend, but none of the twisted faces, already starting to blacken from decay, seemed to be his. Looking across, he could see that other webs had been erected as well and looked to encircle the whole of the spire.

Looking up at the stark, grey rock form, he resolved that it was time to investigate properly now. He dissipated and started gliding upward. His mind was adjusting to the new way of travel, and he was now able to move more smoothly and not simply leap from place to place. He was glad of this on one hand, but also terrified of having this strange state seem anything like natural to him.

It was only as he neared the top that he saw how exactly anyone could stay on the rock for any amount of time. The entire top fifth was honeycombed with holes, some of which were open, some covered by glass windows or wooden shutters. The holes gave the appearance of being natural, but they seemed orderly, evenly spaced and of the same size. He circled slowly and saw movement in one of the windows. Instantly he was drawn into it.

The room was oblong, hewn from the stone but nonetheless furnished comfortably with carpeting and tapestries that blended one into the other, hung or nailed somehow against the curved walls, making it cocoon-like in its cosiness. There was a wooden table that was polished so well it reflected like a mirror. Three elves were sitting around this table, sitting upright in stone chairs, their hands resting on the table in front of them. They were pale and wasted to such an extent that Daniel could almost believe that they were shadows, apparitions. Two of them, bearded and coarse, looked despondently over the table and its many papers and maps as well as a good number of empty bottles and jars. One had hair as black as raven’s feathers, and the other’s was red.

The third, who seemed younger, but Daniel had found you never could tell with them, was clean shaven, or naturally hairless, and hunched forward, hands clenched together and held beneath his nose, his eyes dull in their sunken sockets.

Daniel thought they were all in a trance, hypnotised perhaps, until one of the bearded elves stood up and declared, “There’s someone else here.”

The other two looked up at him.

“Can’t you feel it? It’s in the air. Floating around us.” He waved a hand vaguely, heavily.

“Your mind is fevered,” the man opposite him said. “Sit back down.”

“No, I. . I could swear. .” He lowered himself back into his chair with shaking legs. “If there be any spirit, sprite, fetch, or sending here, I demand and invoke it to show itself!” he cried, listing from side to side. “Out of common decency, if by no other power.”

Daniel considered and then, holding a sort of breath that he wasn’t breathing, reincorporated himself at the end of the table opposite the younger elf.

All of them sprang back in shock, even the raven-haired elf who had demanded he show himself.

“Who or what are you?” the red-haired elf gasped.

“My name is Daniel Tully. You helped me out once by sending Kay Marrey to meet me. He saved my life. I’ve come to return the favour.”

Daniel walked around the interior of the deserted mountain outpost.

It had been an incredibly eventful and extremely long day-even by Elfland standards. Luckily, he didn’t seem to get tired in this new form. He had found that the younger looking elf of the three in the Spindle had been Prince Filliu, the leader of the Elves in Exile. After proper introductions had been made between him and the two generals he was with, they showed Daniel the rest of their trapped war band, which was in as poor and anaemic state as they were, lying listlessly in side rooms and storerooms that had been converted into barracks. They were in a bad way. They had had no form of sustenance-their odd liquids they lived on in this land-for a very long time, and they were, literally, he found, fading. They didn’t starve to death, it turned out, but just became thin, in an existential sense. They stopped moving, lying as still as statues until revived.

Daniel was then introduced to a group of warrior wizards, who toiled over dispelling the enchantments that the enemy had cast around them. The grotesque web of elves was one of the enemy’s many sieging enchantments; if removed, it would potentially allow the war wizards opportunity to unravel the rest of the oppressive charms.

So Daniel studied magical charts and maps of the area and then did some reconnaissance. He floated down into the forests and hills that surrounded the burned-out crater that ringed the Spindle. There he spied on enemy soldiers-snipers, warlocks, and warliches-and reported back to the prince and his wizards on their positions. They then decided which webs were tactfully best to dismantle. After that, Daniel descended again and started taking one of them apart.

His actions were not unnoticed, he realised, when elfish arrows started raining down on him. His invulnerability proved itself again when he found the arrows-which were shot with stunning accuracy at the distance of over a mile-simply glancing off of him. He used their heads, which were long, thin, and made of bronze, to cut through the ropes that tied the dead elves together. Then he moved on to the other sections. As soon as he started working on the fourth-a deliberate tactical feint-the Elves in Exile made their escape.

Daniel watched them from the sky as they flooded out of the base of the tower under heavy fire. Even weak and wasted, they rallied in an impressive, united effort. The wizards created reflective planes around the tower that masked the true path of the elves’ egress, so it looked like five times more than their actual number were escaping. Some were lost in the dash from the tower to the start of the forest. There was an enemy outpost there that the escaping elves quickly overran, being caught ill-prepared. Taking only a short moment to plunder the storehouse of its provisions, the elves retreated back into the forest.

They went for miles, pausing just once, in order to divide and consume the plundered drink stores and give themselves the energy they so desperately needed to continue their flight. Daniel reappeared to Filliu and the generals again at that point, and they thanked him for his help. They agreed to meet again when they were free from the wrongful princes’ forces, at one of the places that they had agreed upon.