Morning near Gondwyn

Despite the noise they and the burning Trabbits had made, and despite that the Trabbits were still burning, though no longer running around or screaming, Hamfries was still asleep.  Mahaven kicked him in disgust as he stalked past to his own bedroll, and even then Hamfries barely stirred in his sleep.  Mojo had to go and shake him vigorously before his eyes finally opened and he yawned.  Mojo recoiled; Hamfries’s breath was bad at the best of times, but after most of a night’s sleep it was as bad as the stench in a charnel-house.

“Umph?” said Hamfries, trying to roll over and wrap himself tighter in his blanket.  Mojo kept a hand over his mouth and pulled Hamfries back towards him with the other. 

“Your watch,” he said, his words muffled.

“Mmmph.” said Hamfries.

It took nearly ten minutes to get Hamfries awake enough to understand what was going on, and then he settled down to watch with a slight smile on his face.  Mojo knew that he would keep himself awake by reciting the tales of the Acts to himself – he’d learned to fall asleep listening to Hamfries’s whispered soliloquies, and so wrapped himself in his own blanket – thicker than anyone else’s save Bulrug’s – in the anticipation of being asleep quickly.

“Why are there burning Trabbits out there?” asked Hamfries suddenly.

“Tell you in the morning,” said Mojo, and fell asleep.

*

Hamfries woke them at dawn, though it felt too early to Mojo.  He shrugged out of his blanket and flung it over the branch of a nearby tree to let the dew drip off it.  Then he looked around, wondering which of the waterfalls would have produced the closest tributary.  He tried to listen for the the giggle of running water, but the white noise of the many waterfalls around the gate drowned any such out.  He looked around, but the landscape offered no clues either, so with a sigh he realised that he’d have to just go and look for himself.

“I’ll find water,” he said.  He looked around again, but there was still no helpful signpost.  “I’ll try this way.”  He pointed.

“Wait,” said Bulrug.  He was sitting on his blanket still, massaging his calves.  “How do you know that there’s water that way?  And why don’t we have any already?”

“You drank it all last night,” said Mahaven.  “After it got dark.  You were saying something about the Brandy of the Narwhal, and that got Hamfries started on Act 17.  I’ve had better evenings, you know.”

“Bugger,” said Bulrug.  He looked down, which meant that his entire face disappeared into his beard and he looked more like a beaver than anything else.  “Right, hang on then.”

He got to his feet and stamped them a couple of times, wincing.  “Cramp,” he said.  “Dunno where it comes from really.”  Then he lifted his hands and looked up into the sky.  For a moment nothing happened, and then a wind arose from nowhere and darted around them, tugging at their clothes and making Mojo’s blanket swing and stream like a flag.  Then it dropped again.

“That way,” he said, pointing about ninety degrees off to where Mojo had pointed.  “The wind reckons that it should be about a five minute walk for you, once it understood what legs were.  You didn’t make a bad guess though.”

“Huh?” Mojo looked at Bulrug; he’d been rather hoping that the weather-mage would bring the water to them somehow.

“You’d have got to water a bit faster your way, but apparently it’s about eight hundred feet straight down.  Not sure what your plan was for getting back up again.”

Mahaven giggled, and Hamfries smiled; Mojo forced a smile on his face.  “Yeah, that’s quite a climb for first thing in the morning,” he said.  “Fine, I’ll go and get water then.  Someone want to get a fire started?  We’ve got a long way to go still and I could use something hot to get us started.”

Trabbits

Mahaven took the first watch.  According to the Acts, somewhere around Act 3 the Elves had developed acute night vision, an ability to see body heat as a colour, and colours that the others races could not.  He sat and stared out into the night while Hamfries and Mojo made themselves as comfortable as they could on the rocky ground and tried to go to sleep.  Above the stars shone brightly in constellations that the original Elves had spoken of as though they were friends, but the Schattenalfen had lived underground for more than six Acts now, and to him they were simply bright lights in the sky.  There were patterns, he would admit that, but those patterns were meaningless to him.  Midst them, like a pair of sightless eyes, two moons hung in the sky.  Other races claimed that magic powers derived from the moon, but again, the Schattenalfen had lived underground and away from the light of the moon for generations and they still threw up the odd magician.  They also had latent background powers, a residuum of what the ancient Elves could do, but still useful now and then.  His fingers twitched slightly and his whole body tingled for a moment.  Then his spear, laid on the ground ten feet away slithered quietly across the rock to his feet.

Hamfries turned over, possibly disturbed by the faint noise of the spear, but then he settled down again.  Mojo was breathing heavily now, either meditating or asleep, and Bulrug was snoring again.  Mahaven concentrated on his own breathing for a moment and waited while the rising irritation subsided.  Schattenalfen lived solitary lives even within their sporadic communities and travelling with companions for so long now was getting heavily on Mahaven’s nerves.

Nothing disturbed his watch, and he was even slightly disappointed when Mojo woke some hours later and took over from him.

Mojo had no heat-vision, or particularly good night-vision, or even the highly-adapted sense of smell that the Gnolls had (at least, those that survived the near-genocide of Act 10).  He looked out into the night hopefully, wishing that he didn’t feel like the night was looking back.

It was nearly time to change watches when the first Trabbit hopped close enough for him to spot the movement in the night.  At first it was just a hyperactive shadow, and Mojo squinted out into the night trying to pinpoint what had moved.  Then he glanced around several times, keeping track of the shadow but looking for other movements, from things that might have set a diversion.  Only when he was satisfied that the shadow was the only thing that was moving did he stir up the fire a little and lay the end of a un-used firewood branch into the newly glowing embers.  When the shadow next jumped he seized the stick and thrust it at it.

The Trabbit, as revealed by the flames chewing around the end of the stick, was smoky in colour and had fur that puffed out around it like a dandelion clock.  Four feet on long spindly legs clawed at the ground, chewing up mud and soil but gripping firmly to rock.  Two eyes, slightly too far apart for good binocular vision, were wetly huge in its head, and its body was a plump but short attachment.  Trabbits looked at though they were entirely heads on legs when you first saw them.

“Trabbit!  Wake!  Wake!” cried Mojo thrusting the burning stick at it.  The Trabbit hissed, a mouth opening in the ball of fluff that was dark-red inside and lined with small, triangular teeth.  It recoiled from the fire, but then another one appeared beside it.  “Trabbit!” yelled Mojo again.

Mahaven sat up almost immediately, and picked his spear up.  Bulrug remained asleep, and Hamfries rolled over and muttered something that Mojo couldn’t clearly hear.

“Hamfries!” yelled Mojo, jabbing at the Trabbit again.  He didn’t want to wake Bulrug at the moment, just in case he couldn’t remember what side he was supposed to be on.

There was a sudden squeak, and Mahaven was crouching next to Mojo.  Mojo started, sure that he’d never seen Mahaven move, and then Mahaven pulled his spear back and revealed a Trabbit impaled on it.  Its huge eyes glistened for a moment, then glazed over.  Mahaven reached down and pulled the Trabbit to the end of the spear where it started to droop off, then he poked it into the fire.  For a moment the fire smoked as though it was going out, and then the Trabbit caught fire.  In one quick movement Mahaven launched it into the darkness in the general direction that Mojo was flailing with his stick, and the burning Trabbit described a trajectory like a comet.  It landed with a small thump and light flared up around it.  A nest of Trabbits was revealed, scattering away from their burning comrade, but some on them had been too close and had also caught light.  As they ran they set up an eerie ululating cry of pain, and then they started colliding with other Trabbits.  Steadily light from the burning Trabbits grew and the tableau beyond the campsite became easier to see.  Mojo watched it, his mouth hanging open in shock; Mahaven was wearing a slightly cruel smile instead.

“What the hell?” asked Mojo, closing his mouth with an effort and looking at Mojo.

“You should do that trick for weddings,” said a gruff voice behind them, and they both turned to see that Bulrug was awake.  He shrugged.  “It’d go down a treat,” he said.  “I’m going back to sleep.”

The Gate of Gondwyn

“Gondwyn was a seat of the ancient Dragon-lords in the third Act, when Men were just starting to explore the world, the power of the Elves was reaching its apex, and the Dwarves, Orcs, Gnolls and other burrowing-races were expanding their dominions through the mountains.  The immortal spider Herchuck was spinning webs in the peaks of the Mantua mountains, and the smith of undetermined ancestry was forging the Frostblades, swords that drew on power from crystals harvested from the coldest places on the earth to bring that bone-shattering chill to a length of metal that could be wielded by any hand.  Eventually, Jake, a Dragon-lord’s third-born son would take up a Frostblade and carve himself a new demesne, whose creation would usher in the fourth Act, but there is a lot more history to tell before we get that far.”

Mojo sighed.  He’d heard Hamfries’s stories of the creation of the world and the many Acts it contained many times before.  Hamfries had been his nurse when he was a child and he could remember the mildewed smell of the nursery, the clammy touch of the blankets, and Hamfries’ steady, droning voice as he explained how the Dragon-lords had risen in the second Act, dominated the world until Act 6 when the Orc-mage Buntrone had banished the dragons at the cost of the lives of every female Orc.  By that point though, the short-lived, fast-reproducing Gnolls were overrunning everything, which meant that the next three Acts were primarily taken up with the attempts of all the other races to stamp them out, or at least confine them to somewhere with insufficient resources for them to breed.  Act 10 was probably his favourite, when the Dwarf-lords used the crystals they’d extracted from the Frostblades to herd an entire generation of Gnolls into Herchuck’s webs.  Act 11 just gave him nightmares as Herchuck, sated for the first time since the beginning of the world, gave birth to millions of giant spiders.

“Why are you telling us this?” Mahaven’s voice was whiny and shrill, and entirely fitting for a Shattenalf, one of the many fragmented races of Elves that had survived the Sundering of the Elves in Act 33.  He was rake-thin, albino-pale, and had a faint luminance in the dark that he claimed was residual radiance from the days of Elven glory.  Mojo knew for a fact though that it was a side-effect of the dried-fungus that the Shattenalfen ate as their primary food.  “Who cares about the Dragon-lords?  They lived Acts and Acts ago.”

“Because,” said Hamfries, “we are camped here at the Gate of Gondwyn.”  Hamfries was short and round and reminded Mojo of a pig, not least because of his name.  He was also pink, mostly hairless, and prone to getting sunburned.  Not, reflected Mojo, that there was much chance of seeing enough sun for that up here at the Gate of Gondwyn.

Around them high cliffs of black basalt towered up.  Straggly trees clung here and there to the edges of the cliffs, but the number of waterfalls that cascaded over the edges tended to keep the cliffs clean and sheer.  The water that fed them was melt-water from the Gondwyn glacier that stretched over two hundred miles north and, despite the melt-water, appeared to be growing slowly.  They were camped on a tongue of land that rose up from the plains at the bottom and was surrounded on all sides by the Sea of Gondwyn, which was freshwater and maintained entirely by the waterfalls they could see and hear around them.  The steady roar of white-noise meant that they’d had to be extra vigilant for their entire journey, for the usual noises of bird-song and animal movements was drowned out.

Ahead of them, visible now but probably not reachable for another day’s hard marching, was the Gate itself.  Originally a natural feature, two gigantic black opal pillars rose up over a thousand feet and supported a lintel of granite.  Somewhere in Act 16 or 17 – Mojo wasn’t entirely sure and didn’t want to ask Hamfries lest he set him off again – the resurgent Dragon-lords (now riding giant spiders that they’d learned how to tame) had constructed stairs inside on the towers and then built an entire town on top of the granite ridge.  This had become the Gate of Gondwyn, with the city itself being built two days spider-trek further inside.  Travellers, and indeed armies, approaching Gondwyn had no choice but to pass through the Gate, and the people dwelling atop it could drop whatever they liked on them.  It was a highly effective defensive strategy, and Gondwyn still stood even now, which made it the oldest city in the whole of the Earth.

Mahaven snorted, a strange, high-pitched sound that sounded almost like a whistle.  “It’s Gondwyn,” he said.  “It’s not like we’ve found lost Galahaven.  Now there would be a prize worth claiming!”

“Galahaven was destroyed, not lost,” said Hamfries, just a little testily.  “In Act 20, when the Elves attempted to lay siege to–“

“Nah nah nah nah nah nah!” shouted Mahaven.  “I can’t hear you!”

“Hush!”  Mojo felt compelled to speak at last, and his whisper carried across both voices.  “You’ll wake Bulrug.”

All three of them looked at their fourth companion, the dwarven mage Bulrug.  He was sleeping on his back, his mouth open and his beard matted and tangled.  He was wrapped in his cloak, which was the blue-and-silver of the weather-mages, but there was a red-and-black stole around his shoulders that was supposed only to be worn by the necromancers.  They’d not seen him do any magic so far on this journey, but they had seen him viciously and brutally slay every thing they’d encountered that wasn’t clearly surrendering or begging for mercy.  He was a veteran of the Sporeonic War, and Mojo suspected that he was suffering from Gulf Battle syndrome.  The Gulf Battle was officially the last battle of the war, and both sides had launched magical attacks of staggering power and atrocity.  Being caught anywhere near the battle had caused physical and psychological effects that continued to manifest years later, often to the detriment of the people who knew the victims.

“Yeah ok,” said Mahaven more quietly now.  “Let’s not wake him up until it’s time to move on.”