A long story - chapter three Darkness He awoke. Darkness all around him. Deep, black, impenetrable darkness. For the first time in ages, K’aah smiled. Long had he waited, hidden deep inside the cavern where he had sought refuge. But then, when even he, the most trusted and faithful of all HIS servants, had toyed around with the thought of giving up, HE had returned. He had felt the call…at first faint, distant, almost dying, making him think it was some sort of trick that his mind was playing on him after all this time he had waited…but the call had gotten stronger…and stronger…until he knew that HE was walking the ground again, free of the chains the usurpers had laid him in. K’aah needed to take some time, to gather his strength. He did not want to fail HIM. No one wanted to fail HIM. After all, their mission was far too important. They had failed once, longer ago than he could remember now. They had failed and the whole world had paid the price. This time, they needed to do it right. K’aah had become stronger and stronger, as the moon grew and waned every night, until he sensed the time to exit his hide-out had come. He was well aware that at least two of the others were awake too. He was sensing them, just as he was able to sense HIM. But, unlike HIS presence, that was still faint and somehow weirdly distorted, the two others were glowing like lighthouses in the darkness of the ether, whenever he was reaching out to ‘see’. He sensed them tonight too. Unlife was there, moving his pawns around the forests, looking for the fugitive, and Blood was there too, lurking in his accursed castle and gathering the hordes of his frenzied and crazed followers. K’aah coughed, and he felt shivers crawling up his spine, chilling his twisted soul to the bones, remembering how they had last met, together with HIM, to set up this plan. He remembered how they all gathered in HIS once proud fortress, while the determined enemy was circling in on them, scattering whatever they had left in armies and crushing their followers wherever they found them, and he remembered how they made up the plan…The plan had worked, he knew it now, although he had doubted it all back then. He was positive that the others had doubted it too, but he had been the only one to speak up…he had realized now what a fool he had been. He recalled the pain when he had given up the worthless living shell that had housed his spirit. “It will hurt, K’aah”, HE had said to him, “are you sure you want to do this?”. “Aye, my lord, I will do whatever is needed, they are not allowed to prevail. And do not mourn for me, for I will not be undone, merely passing the threshold that I have been nearing so many times. And my power will grow once I rid myself of these bonds, and so your power will grow too.”, he had replied, proud of the faith that was put into his powers, proud of the chance to participate in the plan. K’aah flinched, shaking the memories off. There was no time for contemplation now, he had spent way too much time in hiding, contemplating. Relaxing, he started to concentrate, like HE had taught him. Focusing, he let his essence condensate. He called upon the shadows in the night, summoning them. And as he was lying there, on the forest ground, he sensed them all heed the call, rushing through the woods and the plains towards him. He felt his power grow again, and he accepted them all with open arms. And they came and came, and melted with his own essence, and as his shape was growing darker and darker, he felt his power returning, finally… “Go”, he said, “go out and seek him, and do not stop until you have found him!” he hissed at them. It was not fair to treat them like that, he knew that, for they were merely faithful servants, but time was growing short. The moon had been on the rise for a few hours now, and the morning was not that far away. With the morning, their power would suffer, and they would need to take refuge in the dark corners of the forest and wait for noon and bright daylight to pass. Grimacing, he remembered how it had been before he had taken up his place in the plan. Standing there in bright sunlight, letting the warm light shine upon his face, welcoming every new morning as the miracle of life that it was. “Regrets?” he laughed silently, shaking his head,”They will regret it, once the plan works out… It is a small price for serving HIM…”. He had taken up the seat of Darkness at HIS table, and he had not regretted it a single day since. All of a sudden, a call reaches him. Standing up, he summons forth the shadow that found him. Freezing in place, he starts to concentrate and use his powers. For the occasional observer, would there be one to behold the miracle, it would look as if a shadow stood up, out of the middle of nowhere, and then started to melt down into a pitch black patch on the ground. The process completed, he begins his run towards his minion. Moving at the speed of thought, traversing miles and miles of ground faster than the beasts of the forest and faster than the creatures of the night, only the occasional owl scurrying up in the trees a silent witness of the horror that passes over the land. “They must be near…I have to be cautious now, who knows what traps they might have set…” he reminds to himself. He stops, hovering one, two inches at most above the grass, and stretches his tentacles outwards, trying to grasp as much as he can of the sensations around him. And then, he sees him. Lying asleep on the ground. Next to him, a woman, and next to the woman, a wyrm, awake. He knows of the wyrms, creatures of legendary power of might, and he respects the wyrm. But the wyrm is of no concern now, for his magic is not of the essence that the wyrm would detect or understand. He could trample right under the eyes of the wyrm, it would never see him. The woman is a different story…circling them, he tries to assess her. “Enemy, definitely”, he concludes, “All the traits are there. I can sense the foul magic, I can identify the looks. Yet, she is not tainted yet, so most likely they did not claim her. A mere child, bah. They sent a child to find him, either they must be growing overly fond of themselves, or they did not recognize him. I won’t waste my time with her or the wyrm, I’ll take care of him first…”, as he turns towards the third figure asleep in the clearing. He spends the next few minutes in silence and total stillness, observing the man that lies asleep there in front of him. Tall and strong built, with long dark hair and a short beard, the man wears what seemed to be the scrap of once well-fashioned reinforced leather armor. The upper body armor has been torn apart by slashes and cut away to allow for his torso to be bandaged. His arm is bandaged also, some sort of leaves showing out under the bandages. As he lies there, asleep, he holds a sword in his grip, clutched onto his chest, and he seems to dream intensely, for his arms and feet twitch from time to time, and his head arcs from side to side. The sword glows with an eerie kind of magic; it must be one of their own swords, for he remembers this kind of glow. Must have belonged to one of the followers of Blood, and a high ranked one too, judging by the strength of its magic. “That could hurt”, he takes a mental notice, continuing to circle the sleeping man, “but we need him and we need his powers, before they get him. I’m not sure whether he will be hostile or not, he has been with the woman first and they do not seem enemies, so she might very well have told him their lies.” He pauses trying to remember, what HIS words were. “And then we will wait till the day when the one that bears the mark will arrive, and he will arrive in a powerful display of magic that will make him known to us and to the enemy as well. So it will be our duty to get to him first and to enlist him for our cause, for he is the one that we will need to complete the ritual”, HE had said to them, the six lords that were forming his innermost circle. They had all sat there, gathered at HIS table, bearing the names of the curses of old that the enemy had placed upon each of them, Unlife, Terror, Darkness, Fear, Corruption and Blood. And as the thundering blows of the enemy battering rams had brought the castle gates down, HE had risen from the table and bid them all follow him to the highest tower in the castle, where they had fulfilled the ritual that had fooled the enemy into believing them destroyed and HIM defeated. K’aah grinned, he did not think of himself by the name of his curse…he still called himself ‘K’aah’ after all this time, he had never got accustomed to ‘Darkness’…although he and the other lords used at times to call each other by those names, he still preferred his old name to the one that the enemy had given him… He shook all the memories away, for once again they were beginning to distract him from his task. “Not a good time for nostalgia, too much at stake here”, he straightened himself out, in the way that he remembered HE would have done, “time to approach him now…” He drew near to the man. Flowing all around the body in the grass, he adjusted his shape to surround him and then, slowly, closed in. Ever so slowly, the shadows in the grass began to crawl all over the man’s body, and soon he was all covered in cocoon of shadows, except for his fist gripping the hilt of the sword… It was the same dream, again. During the last few nights, Navarre had dreamed the same nightmare again and again. He was running for his life, chased by unearthly beings, and they were closing in on him and bringing him down. He did not know why he was running, he did not know who they were, and all he knew was that he had to avoid being caught by all costs. And night for night, they were getting him. Luckily for him, he was waking up as soon as they were getting him, so he never got to learn what would happen to him afterwards. This night though, something was different. It was his dream, and yet he was strangely aware of it being a dream. He remembered this sort of awareness settling in over the last few days, and he marveled at how clearly he could perceive it as a dream now. He was back in the eerie forests, and he had to run, that was all he remembered. He turns around, and there he sees them again. The tall, hooded wraiths, green eyes emanating their poisonous gleam towards him. He starts to run. Stumbles. Falls down. Gets up again. Continues running. Stumbles again. The forest, once his ally, is now definitely his foe, branches and roots protruding from anywhere on the soil, almost reaching up to his feet as if to consciously grab him and bring him to fall. Cursing them all, he gets up again and continues running. Too late, they have caught up, he can see them coming up from the side and getting ready to circle around him. He stops, drawing his sword. “This is not my sword”, he thinks, surprised, but then he reminds himself how he took the sword out of the grasp of the skeleton in the wood. The sword glows too, with a, strange enough, greenish glow that somehow reminds him of the eyes of the wraiths. He would like to let go of the sword, maybe it is the sword that draws them, maybe it is the sword that they want…but at the same time, gripping this sword gives him a strange sensation of comfort and safety, it is as if he were attuned somehow to the magic of the blade, and he cannot explain it to himself either, but he just would not want to let go of the blade. He stabs with the sword at the darkness ahead of him, trying to reach the wraiths…but there is something wrong with the night and the forest around him…he cannot exactly tell how, but they have changed tonight. It is so dark he can hardly see the glowing green eyes of the wraiths, and it is so dark ahead of him that he can hardly distinguish anything. Then, intuition strikes him. The darkness! The whole forest is getting darker and darker! But he does not move; it is as if some strange spell would slowly consume all the light that was left in the surroundings, letting the whole world become darker and darker. Ahead of him, all he can see is just pitch black darkness. A few steps ahead, then the world seems to end. And the shadowy wall ahead of him is advancing upon him! And to his left! And to his right! He turns around. Panic. Heart beating as if to explode, rushing streams of adrenaline through his body. Then, he awakens… Or so he thinks. Same darkness, just that this time, he is pretty much positive he is not dreaming anymore. He tries to yell out to Aneesh, but all he produces is some sort of muffing, suffocated sound. Trying to move, he notices he cannot. His whole body feels as if submerged into some sort of very thick fluid, he actually notices he can move, yet it feels as if working against very heavy resistance, as if the pressure of the liquid would be all around him. This is no ordinary liquid though, he can think of that much, or he would have been suffocated by now. This is something else. Finishing that thought, he feels a weird presence over himself, as if examining him, crawling all around his body, and slowly closing in to his head. Somehow, it is aiming for his head, and he can feel a wave of cold rushing where the presence moves, and he knows where it is going next. Tries to fight it, but there is no point in that. He is totally engulfed in darkness, not knowing where he is, not knowing what has become of Aneesh and Yshya, not knowing whether he is in the same world at all. “Maybe there is no point in fighting it, it must not necessarily mean harm to me…” he thinks, as resignation slowly sets in. The twitching and bulging of the muscles slowly calms down, and he gets ready to welcome the presence, whatever it may be. A few seconds and a blinding flash of light later, he regains his senses, the scent of burnt lying heavy in the air around him. Blinking, his vision still clouded by the flash of light, he sees Aneesh waving her hands around in the air, sparks of lightning at the tips of her fingers. She is reciting what seems to be an incantation and this, by all that he knows of magic, is definitely some sort of spell. He looks around, trying to identify what befell him, and stops, gasping. Right between them, hovering above the grass, is a dark form, waving tentacles at her and shrieking in a high pitched tone. It looks, for lack of a better term, like a pitch black puddle. But he would swear that, whatever it is, there is no water in that puddle. And he doesn’t want to find out what it is either. “Time to help the girl, but how?” Aneesh finishes casting her spell, whirling a bolt of lightning at the puddle. The puddle shrieks even louder, as the crackles of the electricity light and douse off on the pitch black surface. In response, the puddle wavers around and creates something resembling closely to a whip, lashing out at Aneesh. She tries to duck and avoid the slash, but being still busy casting her spell, the maneuver somehow fails, and the tentacle slashes her forearm. Then, something strange and horrible starts to happen. Where the whip lashed and wounded her, a dark patch of black color appears on her forearm, and from the patch, in what seems like a pattern of black threads bursting out and weaving itself around her body, a myriad of these strings start flowing out, until Aneesh is entirely covered in a dark, cocoon-like pattern. He can see her eyes wide open with terror as the strings circle her body and tie her up, and he can literally feel the silent cry for help as she gags while the tissue covers and obscures her beautiful face. Gripping his sword tight, he takes a leap forward, stabbing at the dark puddle on the ground, despair and anxiety for the new-found companion totally overtaking him. A quick stab at the puddle later, the tentacles lash out at him. Duck, feign, stab. Duck again, just busy to avoid the tentacles. No time to think of anything else, but Aneesh and her eyes wide open as she desperately was choking for breath are still on his mind. “Focus, swing the sword, evade”, things he has done a thousand times before come to his mind. Instincts take over again. He has been a survivor for too long in the harsh woods of his homelands to be afraid now, unknown horror or not. He stumbles. Falls to the ground, turns around and looks at what he stumbled over. The dark form of Yshya’s tail, stretched motionless and still across the ground. “Dead? Did they get her too?” he wonders, “I’ll worry about her later, need to get to Aneesh first.” The sword feels weird in his grasp, almost vibrating and pulsating, and he could swear that, were he to look at it closer, he would see a faint greenish glow surrounding the blade. A quick lash from the puddle, he is back out of contemplation. Swing back at it, turn, roll to the side, enshroud it in a hail of fast blows from all sides. The sword feels good in his palm, almost like a natural extension of his sword arm. It has been long since he last held a sword as well-fashioned as this one. Blow after blow, the puddle retreats, and he gets nearer and nearer to the black cocoon that is twitching on the ground. He wonders whether he can hear her scream for help from the inside, or is it only his mind playing tricks on him? The patch gives in, backs off, wavers around. Swing after swing, he is pushing it back. And then, in an unexpected jest of fate, the tides turn. “What…?” is all he can think as he senses something grab his ankle. Just a quick glance, he got caught in one of the branches of the underwood. A quick glance and a moment of distraction is all that the puddle needed though, and, with speed and determination that he would never have thought it capable of, it thrusts himself forward at him in an unbelievable leap, tentacles frenetically twisting and lashing out towards him. In a last, desperate reflex, faster than the blink of an eye, he raises his sword in front of him, more of a protective shield than a weapon this time. And then, lo and behold, the horror is surprised by the response and, driven forward by the unstoppable might of its attack, it impales itself on his blade with a high pitched shriek. The moments the blade penetrates the dark mass, it seems as if the greenish glow grows stronger and brighter, starting to dissipate the darkness. A few seconds later, the dark mass falls, flows would be a more appropriate term, to the ground, dissipating. He could swear that, a few seconds before disappearing, the puddle has taken the form and the outline of a human body on the ground. But just as he tries to observe it more closely, the mass dissolves, leaving no visible trace behind. “Aneesh!” he reminds himself, looking around for the cocoon. He sees her, completely covered in the black web-like tissue, just a few steps to his right. The twitching has stopped, and the wrapping lies there, motionless. “No!” he yells, stumbling forward towards her location. Just a few steps more, but they seem like an eternity, and he can bend forward and examine her. The cocoon seems to dissipate as well, and he can see the outline of her slim body starting to show through in places. He grabs her, holding her tight in his arms, frantically struggling to wipe the threads away from her face, so she can breathe again. And then, finally, the cocoon is gone, and he at last holds her in his arms. “Breathe, damn it, BREATHE!” he cries, trying desperately to get any life signs out of her. But, serene and calm, wide-open eyes gazing right through him towards the starlit sky up above, Aneesh lies here in his arms…dead.