Suzerain of the Beast (Vision Dream Series Book 3), page 62
With the young wizard lad gone and the girl named Felly distraught with grief, Dareldin wondered what he was going to do with this army.
Midnight of the night of the full moon would be… the last hour of this year’s Vissy Yule Day. Only a few weeks away.
Everyone watched as several of the knights of magic carried Lairchavion, wizard of Ardenon, and followed Lord Minegreisel to a nearby tent. The prince went to the tent and found Minegreisel emerging from it.
“He has no heartbeat, no breath, no color in his face, and yet the knights of this army of magic instructed me not to bury him until the proper time of mourning has passed,” said Lord Minegreisel. “It must be a tribute of respect or a ritual of these…constructs of magic.”
“Their lord told me that we have them with us until the very last hour of Vissy Yule Day. Then they will return to wherever it is they come from,” said Dareldin.
Both the prince and Lord Minegreisel were distracted by the swift approach of a rider. The rider pulled up short before the lord and quickly dismounted.
“My lord, the enemy is pulling everyone out of the capital,” said the rider.
“What? Yenwil, are you sure they are abandoning the city?” asked Lord Minegreisel in amazement.
“Yes, My Lord. I saw it with my own eyes,” said the rider. “The enemy is sending everyone south.”
“The Trozkur must be bypassing Darus and heading to Palzintine to join Gravloc’s forces,” said the prince. “And so will we. But first we shall take back the cities of Darus and Palzin.”
“Palzin, too?”
“We will use the old pass between those two cities,” said the prince
“But, Your Highness, that pass was destroyed hundreds of years ago.”
“Maybe even longer. So they will never expect us to go through the pass. We shall catch them by surprise,” said Dareldin.
“But the earthquake has made the center portion of the pass un…passible, Your Highness,” said Lord Minegreisel.
“My father told me of a secret area where the rubble is the thinnest,” said the prince. “It may take us weeks to tunnel through it, but I believe it can be done.”
❖ CHAPTER 62 ❖
“MORDENDRIA,” SAID GAZPRMUN, as he and Traydreal stood before a weather-beaten and rotted old sign announcing the name of a large collection of ruins in the small valley just below them. “Are you sure you want to stay in this place?”
“It feels much more like a home to me than the capital ever will,” replied Traydreal.
“This site always makes my skin crawl whenever I even draw near to it,” said Gazprmun. “No one wants to come close to this valley after hearing the stories about this old ruin.”
“Good! Keeps the king’s riffraff from nosing around,” said Traydreal. “Besides, while you go find out what happened to Celwencia, I shall poke around here a bit and see what has changed.”
“Are you sure you would not have a better time with me in the capital, then milling around here, rummaging through this unholy pile of rubble?” said Gazprmun. “I am sure all the kings and priests over the years have burned or purified anything wizardly that was left behind in this old wizard’s castle.”
“You have a lot to learn about where wizard’s feel the most comfortable,” said Traydreal. “And I am sure the king has not found all the secrets of this place.”
“Good luck to you then finding a comfortable spot to sleep in this pile of rocks, Wizard,” said Gazprmun. Then he turned his mount around and pointed it towards a side road that led to the capital. “I will return tomorrow with some intelligence on Celwencia’s whereabouts.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Traydreal slowly rode his horse down the main road that led right up to what had been the front gate of Mordendria, the once-glorious wizard’s castle of Prelandidar. He thought about how wonderful it must have been when this castle was whole and wizards used to practice and studied openly with the blessings of the king, the people, and even the church. Traydreal remembered the stories of a great, but horrible, sorcerer out of the East who invaded Prelandidar long, long ago. So many cities and villages were destroyed that the people begged the king of that time to banish all wizards, believing that it was the wizards who drew the sorcerer to Prelandidar and brought this calamity upon them. Yet, in reality, it was the wizards who had protected the people by luring the sorcerer and his army to this valley, allowing many villages and cities to be spared, saving thousands and thousands of lives. The sorcerer and his horde leveled the castle and killed nearly all the wizards living here. In the fight, the wizards were able to inflict enough damage to the sorcerer’s forces that he eventually withdrew from Prelandidar, never to return. But instead of congratulating the wizards who were left, fear clouded the people’s logic and that of the king, and so the remaining wizards were either jailed and tortured or banished. Traydreal was now the only living wizard in Prelandidar.
Why me? Why was I born with the gift?
He thought of the people that raised him. He realized that he had not thought about them for a long time. He had wanted to push them from his memory. Traydreal was an orphan who was given to a stern farmer and his wife who had five children of their own. It was a hard life, for the other children never accepted him. Even as a young boy, the farmer worked Traydreal harder than the rest. Being raised in the beliefs of the Holy Sovereign sect, he learned to mistrust magic, and to hate the wizards of the East…or at least until that day which changed everything.
One early morning, he and the farmer went to the river near here to fish. Traydreal loved to fish. Even though the farmer never talked to him much, Traydreal felt closer to the man on these outings in the past. Traydreal desperately wanted to know the love of a father, and fishing together, even in silence, gave him a tiny touch of that. But when several of the fields failed, the farmer became extremely hard on Traydreal, calling him a lazy fool and practically blaming him for the bad yield. On that day, as the young Traydreal and the farmer walked through these very ruins on their way to the river, he suddenly felt something tugging at him. It was a power that he could not explain, and it called to him from somewhere within these ruins. He tried to ignore it, not wanting to seem odd to the farmer. All that day, Traydreal and the farmer fished at the river that ran behind the ruins, but they caught nothing. The young Traydreal, suddenly wanting to find a new place with better fishing, started to move farther down the river, but as soon as he took one step, he slipped upon a moss-covered rock and fell into the river, making a lot of noise as he splashed around trying to regain his footing.
“Are you an idiot, lad? You’re scarin’ away our supper!” growled the farmer. “Lazy and no sense.”
“I just wished to find a better spot with more fish, fath—Farmer Brower,” said the young Traydreal.
“Hush, boy!” said the farmer. “I thought fishin’ was the one thing you could do for the family. Clearly it is not. Without the fish you just chased away, we shall all go hungry.”
“I can fish for the family, Farmer Brower,” said Traydreal. “Truly I can. Farther up the river may be better.”
“This is the spot for fishin.’ It has always been the spot,” said Farmer Brower. “Now you have chased away the fish here with your idiotic scheme.”
“But I can feel the fish farther up the river,” countered Traydreal. “I can almost see them in my mind.”
“That’s devil talk, boy!” said the farmer. “What are you, a devil wizard?”
“But—”
“Hush your mouth!” yelled the farmer. “We should have never took you from that orphanage. I cannot feed my own flesh and blood, let alone a devil’s bastard.”
Traydreal remembered how his younger self exploded with anger at the farmer. Even now as a man, he could feel his face redden and his blood boil.
“You take that back!” demanded the younger Traydreal, with clenched fists.
“I said shut thy mouth, bastard child!” hollered the farmer. “I knew there was a curse on you that caused my fields to fail! Now I have my proof.”
Anger flared in the younger Traydreal. He closed his eyes and then he felt the power from the ruins running through his veins. It increased his anger beyond anything he had ever experienced. Traydreal’s mind suddenly became open. He could see every fish, every living creature in the river, and even in the woods all around him.
“If fish is all you want, then all the fish is what you’ll get!”
Traydreal opened his palms and lifted his hand and called all the fish to him. In moments the water surrounding his feet were teeming with dozens of squirming, flopping fish. Then he flicked his wrist and instantly all the fish were dead, and the waters of the river were thick with floating dead fish. Traydreal looked at the farmer and saw that the man’s eyes were wide…not with wonder, but with fear. The two of them scooped up as much fish as they could carry and headed back to the farmhouse in silence. Traydreal knew that the farmer did not see this as a bit of luck, or as a wonderful thing that blessed them. Traydreal could see in the farmer’s eyes that the man considered it further proof of the young Traydreal’s curse upon the family.
The devil wizard boy.
A bird cawed at him, snapping Traydreal out of his reverie. He kicked his mount and road on past the broken entrance of the wizard’s castle, past great blocks of gray granite scattered about from a tumbled section of the castle’s curtain wall. He headed towards a small wooden shack that was hidden on the outskirts of the castle’s grounds. A shack he had built with his own hands after he had run away from the farmer and his family. Now he noticed that the thatch roof was in need of repair. Then he caught sight of the front door and saw that it was hanging open about half way. The door looked as if it had been left open like that for a long time. The wizard frowned. It was going to be a mess, and there may even be animals squatting in his home.
Inside, he found a puddle of water by the entrance. Someday he would have to patch that leaky roof, Traydreal told himself before he realized that he could never really live here ever again. So the leak would remain. In the main room, he saw that all his cupboard doors were ripped from their hinges and all of his things were dumped on the hard stone floor. He had prided himself on pilfering enough flat flagstones from the old castle to pave his own tiny floor. Now his floor served as an unforgiving surface against which most of his things were broken or smashed. He realized that his copper candleholders were all missing and his favorite pewter plate and cup were also gone.
Who had done this? The king of Prelandidar?
Then he rejected that idea. The king had better things to do then to bust up his meager belongings. Besides, the only person in Prelandidar who knew about the location of his shack was….
Celwencia.
Perhaps Kazzbeird and his men had stumbled across it, while searching for Traydreal’s cooking stone. This looks more like Kazzbeird’s clumsy work.
Traydreal stepped over several piles of broken things as he surveyed the damage. To the casual viewer there looked to be nothing worth salvaging in the shack. But he knew better. He went to the fifth floor stone from the entrance and tapped it with his bone dragon staff. The flag stone dissolved away revealing a small box which he retrieved before leaving his shack behind. He mounted and kicked his mount into a trot towards what was left of the old castle.
In the former courtyard, Traydreal dismounted and went to where the castle’s keep had once stood. Now only one wall was left to testify to the height and magnificence that was the wizard’s keep. He went through the empty doorway. The door was gone long, long ago. There, not far inside, he came across a spiral stairs leading deep under the keep. Traydreal willed a fire to appear at the end of his bone dragon staff. A trick he and Altirdron had learned from the book of spells in the Hermit of Hardabinia’s cave. Traydreal sort of missed the younger wizard and wondered if his leg had healed.
The young wizard would no doubt survive the broken leg, but could Altirdron survive the twin Hardabinian healers? That Traydreal was not sure of.
The stairs went on and on, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the castle’s keep. The first time Traydreal had walked down these same stairs he had been drawn here. His younger self was frightened by all the stories about the castle being haunted or having some kind of evil curse. At first his younger self thought that perhaps he had been cursed. And instead of fighting against the idea, he decided to find out if it were true. Like Traydreal was doing now, his younger self descended the spiral stairs. At the time, he had no idea that he was about to find something or that that discovery would change his life forever.
Traydreal reached the last stair of the spiral staircase which then opened out to a narrow passageway. Holding his staff before him like a giant torch, he made his way along the long passageway. Several rooms opened up on either side, but he knew to ignore them. When he was younger he had explored every inch of every small room that opened up into this passageway. But today he walked with purpose towards the end of the passageway, which terminated in a rough-hewn wall of solid bedrock. Looking down, he made sure that his feet were comfortably at the center of an unpolished brass disk that was embedded and flush in the stone floor of the passageway. After a moment, the disk began to glow and a tingling energy emanated from it. He remembered the first time he had stepped onto the metal disk as a lad. It was the day after he had called forth all the fish from the river. The castle ruins continued to call to him all night and the next day, so he snuck out. The energy of the castle guided him to this very spot like a beacon. And when, as a lad, he stepped upon the brass disk, it was activated by his presence, just as it did now.
Traydreal braced himself, for he knew what was coming next.
The brass disk suddenly dropped away, and Traydreal dropped with it. Straight down a tube of stone he flew downward at a dizzying speed. The tongue of fire at the end of his staff did not waver as a stale wind rushed passed him. The first time this happened; his younger self had been caught off guard. And he nearly fell into the swiftly receding walls all around him. Fear had petrified him enough on that first downward ride, so he never really lost his balance. Now he calmly rode the disk as he had done hundreds of times after that first ride. Then, right on queue, the plummeting disk first slowed, then gently came to a stop. The smooth stonewalls around him suddenly vanished, and he found himself in the lower chamber that he had nicknamed the winery, because it was filled with rows and rows of casks of aging wine. Most of these casks were now hundreds of years old. It seemed that the ancient wizards valued their wine just as much as they valued their spell secrets. Everything looked exactly how Traydreal had left it over a year ago, just before his banishment when the king had discovered his relationship with Celwencia.
He walked along a narrow aisle between two rows of casks until he came to the far wall. There stood a small underground spring-fed fountain. The fountain had a marble figure of a very old bearded man with a staff in his left hand and holding out his right palm. Water flowed out below his feet and fell into a basin formed into the shape of a cloud.
“Hello, old friend,” he said to the statue.
Traydreal opened the small box he had been carrying and extracted from it a perfect, transparent crystal sphere. One that was small enough to fit in the palm of the statue’s hand. And that was just were he placed the sphere. He remembered how his younger self had found the box sticking up out of the mud in the courtyard. It must have been buried there hundreds of years before, and one of its edges had finally been revealed by a hard rain. His discovery of the sphere’s purpose came quite by accident. When he and the box found themselves down in the winery, the young Traydreal, on a whim, placed the sphere in the old statue’s hand, after his younger self recalled a scary story about a half-crazed wizard who always carried around a crystal ball. And how that maddened wizard went on a terrible rampage, burning down buildings, terrorizing villagers, and even eating children when he discovered that someone stole his crystal ball. His younger self did not want to take any chances with the wizard statue, so he offered to let the statue hold the crystal sphere he had found for a while. As soon as his younger self placed the sphere in the statue’s outstretched palm, a large section of the back wall swung inward, revealing a secret second chamber. And as it had always done as soon as the crystal of the sphere touched the stone of the stature’s hand, the wall started its slow grinding movement inward. When it stopped, Traydreal could just make out in the shadow of the second chamber, bits of scrolls. When he stepped inside the second chamber, he willed the tongue of fire on the end of his staff to brighten even more.
The second chamber was long and narrow. Along both walls were built wooden shelves filled with small cubby holes. Each of the cubbies were stuffed to explosion with scrolls. This was the collective wisdom of the wizard’s castle of Mordendria, and now he was its sole guardian. He spent years going over the scrolls in what he learned was called the Scrollitorium, the secret library vault of Mordendria. Many nights he would sleep in the scrollitorium, sometimes for weeks at a time. He found it easier to sleep here then to drag himself back to his tiny shack after late night bouts of reading and studying. Traydreal looked down the center of the room and saw his old cot just as he had left it, with its quilt all balled up, and there was a half-opened scroll lying on the floor next to the cot. He went over, bent down, and retrieved the scroll. He smiled when it he looked at it. This was exactly what he needed. Strange that the last thing he read the last time he was here before his exile was the first thing he needed upon his return. Though he would have liked to stay here and to just forget the world above him, he knew he could not afford such a luxury, especially with Celwencia being held captive. It did not matter that she loved Gazprmun now.
After all, I love Angelterra.
Traydreal could not believe his own admission.
How could he love a woman that he had no chance of being with?
