Jaleigh Johnson - Unbroken Chain

Ashok hesitated, his hands aching for his chain and dagger. The familiar weights were absent, held by Natan and the rest of his captors, but they’d given his bone scale armor and shirt back to him, along with his boots and cloak.

Natan had told him he was free to leave the tower. Did the cleric truly expect him to believe that they were going to let him walk freely out of his prison into the open air? His captors were playing with him, giving him a taste of freedom before they tightened his chains.

He would make them regret their foolishness.

Cautiously, Ashok approached the door. The guard stepped aside and opened the door for him herself. Momentarily stunned, Ashok recovered quickly and darted outside. The guard shut the door behind him. He stood alone in an unfamiliar courtyard, at the brink of a city for which he had only a name.

His black eyes transitioned without effort from the light of the tower to the lantern-lit expanse of an underground cavern. Roughly twenty feet ahead of him were the remnants of a stone dwelling. Two of its walls had collapsed, leaving a small space and plenty of shadows to conceal him. Ashok ran to the dwelling and crouched among the ruined stones.

From his hiding space he beheld a crescent-shaped guard wall in the distance, a thirty foot high stone barrier that abutted steep walls to the north and south. Shadows grew from the guard wall and moved-teleporting from one end to the other like ghosts.

He counted sixty guards, though it was impossible to get an accurate number from such a distance. He knew of only one other shadar-kai enclave that occupied such a defensible position in the Shadowfell.

Ashok reached inside his armor. Long ago, when he’d assembled the pieces of bone, he’d attached an extra strip of leather to the inside of the breast to form a pouch. Too small to hold a weapon, he used it instead to conceal secrets, anything he didn’t want his brothers to find. Now he removed a strip of soiled bandage he’d taken from the sickroom. Natan had left the cloth wadded up on the floor. He crouched and picked up a piece of blackened slate from the ground.

Clutching the slate in his hand, he slid his finger along the sharp edge. It opened a small wound that brought a familiar, welcome sense of focus. It was not enough pain to set his heart racing or cause a surge in his veins, but even the small wound was a pleasure. He smeared blood between his thumb and forefinger, and used the latter to ink the number of guards and the height of the wall onto the bandage.

If he could somehow lay his hands on parchment and true ink, he would be able to draw a map of the city. When he managed to escape, he could determine how far the city lay from his own lands, and how far down. The information would be useful to his enclave when determining how much of a threat Ikemmu posed. Once they had all the necessary intelligence, his people would gather, and together they would strike at Ikemmu with all the strength they possessed. Annihilating an enclave of Ikemmu’s size would be a triumph such as Ashok’s people had never known.

It would bring them back to life again.

He slid the bandage back into the pouch and cautiously ventured out of hiding. The guard wall embraced hundreds of the low, blocky stone buildings like the one in which he stood, some of which had been hollowed out or collapsed by fire. Others had been repaired and were now occupied. Smoke curled from chimneys askew, and torchlight brightened the narrow avenues between structures.

The torches made Ashok pause. With their light it was brighter down here than on the plains of the Shadowfell, where the shadar-kai were most at home. There should be no need of torches.

He saw figures moving between some of the dwellings. Ashok backed into the shadows and crouched down to observe them. A dozen or so were shadar-kai. Small figures moved beside them-dark ones, Ashok thought. The diminutive humanoids had ratlike faces and moved in quick, furtive spurts. They scuttled along behind the shadar-kai, watching for threats from the shadows and from each other. They dressed in black and carried long, curved daggers with black hilts. Some wore scimitars at their belts.

But not all of the figures Ashok beheld were small. He fixed his attention on the other creatures that moved in the torch light.

Warm-skinned, some dark and others light, they possessed strange eyes that were several colors at once in a face. They wore long beards, or none, and their flesh was smooth. Ashok tasted their scent on a sudden draft that blew down through the open end of the cavern-skin and hair redolent of wood smoke, food and sweat. But it was an odd, effusive smell-not the reek of a being native to shadow.

The shadar-kai walked among the strange ones with weapons sheathed, but many did not make eye contact with the warm-skinned beings.

Ashok remembered the lessons his father had taught him, about his own heritage and the races that existed in the world alongside the Shadowfell.

A world he’d never seen.

“Human, dwarf, tiefling.… ” Ashok whispered the names he could remember as his vision tried to adjust to their appearance. His prison was growing stranger and stranger.

As Ashok watched the different races mixing together, he slowly grew aware of the rest of the city. The shadows and torch light grudgingly resolved themselves into movement, voices, and life. Ashok turned at the sound of falling water, and as he moved from shadow to shadow, coming around the side of the prison tower, his world turned with him and became something very different from all he had experienced before.

Ashok looked up. His vision blurred in the smoke-filled draft, and when it cleared he could take in the truth.

Not one, but four immense obsidian towers scaled the western canyon wall, their tops nearly scraping the immense roof of the city.

The towers rose over a hundred feet and looked from his small vantage to be almost as wide. Ashok could not begin to guess their true girth, or take in the scores of lights shining through open archways up and down the structures. The light-filled portals begged entry into the various tower levels, but Ashok saw the guards standing at each doorway. Their masked, armored forms clutched barbed spears hung with black and red banners-Tempus’s sword and a crimson shield. They spiraled up the towers, snapping in the constant breeze.

“Gods,” Ashok said, and he laughed out loud in spite of himself. He stepped out of the shadows, spread his arms, and bowed deeply from the waist. “Magnificent!” he cried.

When he could think again, he considered the numbers in his head. He’d descended a spiral stair ten feet, no more, in the tower he’d just left. There had been a handful of clerics and wounded on that level, and he’d counted six doors leading to others rooms that might have been filled with shadar-kai. And those were just in the towers. More structures filled the landscape around them.

Ashok’s mind whirled as he considered the numbers. As many as ten thousand, he calculated, maybe more, but not many less. There was no knowing.

“So this is Ikemmu,” he said. “City of towers.”

He’d forgotten the sound of falling water. The tower in Ashok’s shadow was backed by a massive waterfall that slicked down the cavern wall, darkening the stones and ending in a large basin. The figures of dark ones, as well as the warm-skinned races, flitted about with jugs, collecting water and chattering at each other in the shadar-kai tongue.

Overcome by the grandeur of the city, Ashok put aside his instinct to hide, walked up to the water, and kneeled. The others cleared a path for him and kept their gazes averted. Ashok cupped his hands in the water. He raised the liquid to his lips and drank. It tasted glorious.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow slide onto the water.