He replied, "Yes this is so."
I continued, "The trap door had a vine growing out of it?"
"Yes 'Mina I swear this is true."
I needed details so I said, "Clearly this was magic of my sort father, preserver magic, or else the primal power of the druids. Please tell me what happened when you entered the trap door."
"At first it seemed deserted but then we were attacked by spirits of the dead and spirits of the desert. The ghosts nearly killed Jorvak and he was forced to flee for his life. Then the ghosts passed through the walls and flanked us. I thought we were in big trouble then but my friend rallied and crushed the flank while I fought of those on the front. We managed to survive without losing a single man even the new comer Ash was still on his feet. We were mauled pretty bad so we thought it best to return to the dunes and bind our wounds. Sometime in the night Ash left the camp without so much as a farewell. The battle must have left him pretty shook up."
My father seemed to be involved in an violent internal struggle. Guessing the problem I said, "Father if there is something you wish to say then please speak. Consider it a command if that helps."
"Thank you Mina. I wanted to speak of a dream I had that night. But you had not asked me to talk about dreams. That very night I had a very strange dream, if it was a dream. I was in the wastelands with Rolen. The sand was covered in a layer of the fine silt from the silt sea and it was hard to move. There was a great gem in the distance and it spoke asking for help. You were there and your mother Frigga also and you were both calling to me. I kept trying to get to you but the soldiers of a sorcerer king tried to stop me. I was badly wounded but I fought on towards you and your mother. I was desperate to get to you and to my shame I turned my back on Rolen and he did most of the fighting. Before I could reach you Stone Brother appeared and I dropped to my knees to pay him homage and I sank into the sand and woke up.
Strangely Rolen seemed to have had a very similar dream except that in his dream Stone Brother attacked and tried to kill him. It seemed that somehow it was more than a dream though at that time we did not know what it could mean."
The dream was interesting, to be sure, but I wanted to redirect my father to actual events not prophetic dreams so I said, "What happened after you woke from the strange dream father?"
My father instantly resumed his narrative, "After Rolen and I awoke from our dreams we decided to go back in the tunnels. A feeling or a voice kept drawing us back. I definitely did not trust such sorcerer but everyone was set on returning. We met a group of thrikeen and allied with them.
Soon the thrikeen lead us to what seemed to be calling to us, it was a great underground tree. I don't think I had ever been that close to an actual tree before and it didn't look much like a cactus. And this tree was special in some way, magic or something. If that wasn't strange enough there was an undead defiler that said he would protect the tree from us. Well I don't take to undead and a fight soon broke out. I made some bad calls for tactics that almost cost us our lives. On top of his undead troops the dead defiler had a number of crawling swarms of dead body parts. It was the mobs of dead pieces that nearly killed us. Eventually it sunk in that my tactical call was getting us killed so I charged the leader and the others joined me. Once the undead defiler was slain the hordes of undead body parts stopped attacking and we won, though just barely. Searching the room we felt that it was the tree nut that was calling us and we gave it to the thrikeen."
"We were badly mauled and we decided that we had better rest up and we thought it would be wise to rest near the magic tree. When we felt better we headed to the surface. Then the crap went flying as they say. We were taken by surprise by an ambush let by one of Hammanu's templars. The templar led a small force of soldiers and half giants. He even had a defiler and a living salt statue with him. The templar wanted the nut. We were surrounded and it looked pretty hopeless. Rolen realized this even quicker than I did and he tried to make a run for it with the seed. The templar was even quicker and he hit Rolen with some sort of spell that knocked him down. But Rolen's Kirre grabbed the seed and ran so we tried to surrender but they wanted us as slaves and I would have died rather than be a slave again. Then everyone ran in a different direction. I dove into the passage leading into the dungeon. Jorvek skirmished with the defiler while Rolen and Rhogar ran off in opposite directions.
I didn't see most of the rest of the battle because I had to retreat down the stairs to avoid the templar's spells. I was alone surrounded by enemies and my only thought was to take down as many as possible before they killed me. Then an evil voice asked me to allow it to steal souls. I had no idea what it was but I refused. Then our enemies fell to the ground in pain. I took advantage of that and butchered the soldiers at my back. When I got back to the surface I found that Jorvek had beaten the defiler to death and had nearly done the same to the templer. I killed a half giant and then Jorvek and I destroyed the golem together. Rhogar and Rolen returned and we found out that they had killed the half dozen half giants that had been chasing Rolen's kirre. Somehow we had survived a battle that should have killed us."
No comments:
Post a Comment