Jeff Crook - The Rose and the Skull

Beside him, Valian ground his teeth and nodded in agreement as he bound his wrist. He'd been pinked by a draconian sword, and he only hoped the blade wasn't poisoned. Lady Michelle hadn't been so lucky. She lay a few feet away, her eyes glazing, a poisoned arrow still lodged in her shoulder.

"This way is no good," Meredith shouted. She and Jessica pressed their bodies against another door. It shook under a storm of blows.

There was a third exit from the kitchen, but in their urgency to hold the first two against the draconians, no one had yet had the opportunity to investigate it. In any case, it seemed their mission was near failure. They'd already lost Lady Gabrielle in the initial encounter, and now Lady Michelle was dying as well. With draconians attacking from two quarters, they could not hold out for long.

It all came from trusting a gully dwarf. They'd wandered in the dark for hours, it seemed, taking one wrong route after another in the endless caverns that honeycombed the mountain. They'd not seen one door or stair indicating habitation of any sort, and they would have doubted the existence of the castle entirely had they not seen it with their own eyes, perched atop the mountain two thousand feet above the sea. Occasionally they stumbled across the bones of a long-dead fish or the bleached white shell of a crab, in some of the darker, wetter caverns, where the air was stale as though it had indeed been there since the Cataclysm. Strands of glowing algae still clung to the walls, giving off a weird phosphorescence. Once, they stumbled into a rank and fetid pool of sea water, though by their best guess they were by then many hundreds of feet above the sea. The pool stretched away into echoing darkness, bespeaking great size and depth, and the Knights shuddered to think what ancient monsters of the sea might still be lurking in its depths.

Despite Glabella's misdirections, they nonetheless climbed steadily upward. The sounds of the crashing sea had steadily diminished, and at the far end of one cavern, they came upon narrow stairs delved into the wall. The stairs followed a fault in the stone, past narrow outcroppings of rock that forced the Knights to squeeze by. At one of these places, Valian found a bronze-colored draconian scale wedged in a crack in the wall. He showed it to the others, proof-positive that they were on the right track.

The stair eventually led to an iron door. The Knights had climbed to it, exhausted and out of breath, finding it curiously unguarded. Lady Meredith called a rest, while Sir Valian cautiously opened the door and peered inside. He reported an empty torchlit corridor beyond.

Glabella, now confident of where she was, led them through a maze of dark and twisting corridors. They passed doors and passages all along the way, but she strode forward with such assurance, they'd trusted they were being guided to the dungeons where Uhoh was sure to be kept, if he was still alive.

At last, she brought them to another iron door, lit by only a single smoky torch. It looked exactly like the entrance to a dungeon should look, huge and forbidding, with its ironwork rusted and hanging with dank growths of moss. Upon opening it, they found themselves thrust into the middle of a draconian barracks, with several dozen of the evil creatures caught by surprise, staring back at them. From then on, it was a fighting retreat, and with each moment that slipped by, the hope of rescuing Uhoh dwindled. They began to doubt their own chances for survival.

Valian had been stabbed, causing him to drop his weapon, and Lady Gabrielle sacrificed herself to pull him to safety. She was cut down from behind by draconian swords. As they reached the kitchen, the draconians brought up archers. The Knights had managed to shut the doors, but not quickly enough to save Lady Michelle.

Meredith shouted to Glabella, "We need a way out! Check out that other door."

The gully dwarf was paralyzed with fear. She cowered on the floor under a table, unable to move.

"I can't abide the thought that I am going to die here, for nothing," Ellinghad shouted. "This was a fool's mission."

"Look out!" Valian shouted as the third door swung open. Jessica prepared for the worst, while Glabella screamed.

A gully dwarf wearing a tall white hat entered the room carrying a pottery bowl nearly as big as himself, white gruel caked in his beard. At sight of the Knights spinning round with swords drawn, faces set to meet their death, the gully dwarf dropped the bowl of porridge, turned, and fled the way he'd come.

"Follow him!" Meredith shouted triumphantly. "Go, all of you. Run. I'll hold this door. The rest of you go. Jessica, don't forget Glabella."

"I'll not leave you," Ellinghad said. Valian sprinted through the open door. Jessica followed him, the gully dwarf tucked under her arm.

"You will," Meredith answered. "I'll hold them at this door for a moment, then follow you."

With a final look of mute protest, Ellinghad Beauseant, Knight of the Sword, dashed after his companions.

Meredith stepped away from the door, drawing her sword. In moments, the wooden planks cracked. The door burst inward, and draconians poured into the room. Lady Meredith backed into the door. The draconians licked their swords and advanced.

A shout from the corridor brought them up short. They backed away angrily, making way for the entrance of a huge silver draconian. He was heavily armored and stood a good foot taller than his fellows. He strode into the kitchen, a long, wickedly curved blade in his clawed fist. Seeing only Lady Meredith before him, he laughed.

"The Lord High Clerist!" he said with apparent delight. "My name is Zen. I wanted you to know that before you die."

She answered him with the Knight's salute to an enemy. Then, with a battle cry surprising for her small stature, she charged, her sword lancing the air before her, her red hair flying.

Valian slipped for perhaps the thirtieth time in the refuse and offal that littered the halls. It seemed more like the dark and dirty alleys of some ancient city than the halls of a castle only a few years old, but he was, after all, in the gully dwarf quarter.

He'd chased the surprised cook for a few hundred yards before losing both the gully dwarf and himself in the maze of twisting passages. The halls of this castle followed no recognizable pattern, and their strangeness and nightmarish quality reminded him of something. The memory fled whenever he tried to grasp it. He tried to backtrack to the kitchen, but the way only seemed to lead him deeper into the heart of a stinking nightmare.

Hoots and howls echoed through the corridors, and gibberish like the ravings of madmen. The walls narrowed and became more uneven in their spacing, until above him they meshed together, overarching the way like the branches of trees. Occasionally, some warm wet hole opened to the right or left, but as Valian stopped and looked into these, trying to decide his way, he felt eyes staring back at him from the darkness, eyes hungry and at the same time frightened. As his elven eyes grew adjusted to the darkness, he saw the warm, red outlines of their bodies, sitting in huddled groups, shifting nervously.

With a shock of horror, Valian remembered. Those days and nights and weeks of terror in the twisted and ancient depths of Silvanesti, years ago now. He'd fought his way through, avoiding legions of dragonarmies and patrols of elves, to a place where he knew no one ever ventured anymore. He'd hoped to find some lost or forgotten enclave of elves, some memory of the beauty he'd once belonged to, if only to stand at their fringes unseen, or to die there.

At last, he'd found them. Hope lifted Valian's heart at the sight of the village through the trees. The war didn't seem to have reached this place. Here no one was preparing for battle or escape. He'd approached slowly, warily, for despite everything, he still bore the stigma of being cast from the light. If seen, these elves still had the right to kill him.