Aurelius and I (32 page)

“That’s it dear, let it all out. It’s okay.” The voice came again, before being followed by a second voice, the voice of a woman.

“Your father’s right Ophelia, it’ll all be okay in time. But right now you have to focus, you have a job to do. You’re a warrior now you know.”

Ophelia? OPHELIA!!!

Ophelia was alive? But it couldn’t be? She couldn’t possibly have made it out in time. And if she had done, and everybody was safe, then why was she crying?

I sat up straight, my curiosity overcoming any remaining dizziness, and instantly discovered the answer to all my questions.

There, in the mud, sat a weeping Ophelia being comforted on both sides by her parents, her father’s body twisted at an angle so as to protect his daughter from the sight that caused her tears, a sight which my young eyes now came to focus on. Next to the fairies lay the body of the rock demon. As with his companion before him, it now looked like nothing more than a series of pebbles and boulders of various sizes. Poking out from beneath the largest of these were two thin, scaled, purple tails.

For a long moment I was suspended in silent disbelief, my brain unable to comprehend what my eyes were telling it. Gradually, my mind lost the battle to protect me from the truth and I understood what had happened. The dragnor I had branded a coward and abandoned had heroically returned when he was needed most in order that he may selflessly sacrifice his life in order to save that of another.

I felt faint with guilt. My heart felt as though it were trying to abandon the useless husk of a supposed leader that imprisoned it by burrowing its way out of my chest through my back. At the crucial moment, the moment when it was imperative that I rise up and assume my destiny for the good of millions of innocent lives, I had achieved my greatest failure. Who was I kidding? I was no leader. I was just a lost little boy who had allowed himself to be caught up in the glamour and the prestige of heroism with no real understanding of what the word meant. As a result, an innocent creature had lost his life. And the truth was that he probably wouldn’t be the last.

“RRRRAAARRRGGHH!”

The rage and frustration flowed out of me, echoing through the forest around us, warning any other of Blackheart’s men as to our location. It also silenced the tears of the young princess, who instead stared at me with shocked dismay as I tried in vain to lift the giant boulder from atop of the crushed remains of my friend.

It quickly became apparent that this was no use, that an eight-year-old child would never be strong enough to move an object that weighed ten times as much as himself. Yet still I continued to try. When lifting failed, I pushed, first with my arms, and then with my back, coming at the boulder from a different angle each time in the desperate hope of discovering its weak spot.

“It’s over, Charlie. Grahndel’s gone,’ said the queen, the kind empathy behind her soft words pulling on my heart strings and filling my tear ducts.

“It’s not over!” I snapped back, making myself feel even more guilty in the process but finding that I was unable to stop. “I’m the chosen one! I’m the Messiah you’ve all been waiting for! I say when it’s over, not you! And it’s not over yet, all we need to do is find something to wedge this with, some sort of pivot. So why don’t you stop patronising me and start helping!”

The queen looked as though she was going to cry, a fact which only served to make me angrier.

“Fine, I’ll look myself,” I complained with a sigh.

King Rolinthor came across and place a comforting arm around his wife’s shoulder. Turning to me he said sternly; “We must focus on the mission, Charlie. We can’t help Grahndel now.”

“Maybe you can’t, but I have the power to heal, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“But you can’t heal the dead,” the king retorted calmly but firmly as though he were trying to remove a drunk from a party.

“
You don’t know he’s dead!”
I screamed in childish denial, the existence of which I was aware of but could do nothing about.

There followed a brief pause as the king sort to allow me to realise the idiocy of my own statement as the best way of deterring me. Something I pig-headedly refused to do.

Then came the words that broke my heart;

“He’s gone, Charlie, Grahndel’s gone. He died so everyone else could live. We have to make sure that happens. We can’t let his death have been in vain.”

I don’t know whether it was Ophelia’s quiet, tear-broken, but resolute voice that gave the words their meaning, or the fact that the instant I had heard them I realised that, as leader, they should have been coming from my own mouth. Either way, the effect was the same. The reality of our situation was brought home to me and, although my guilt and anger at what had happened was in no way lessened, it was at least deflected onto a more useful target.

A bitter, resentful anger filled my blood as all the guilt I had felt materialised instantly into blame, blame for one act of betrayal that had forced me too soon into the ill-fitting role of saviour, blame directed at one man; Aurelius.

I picked up the scimitar with a steely determination. As I did so I felt the massive weight of responsibility lift from my young chest. For the first time I was no longer held back by the constant concerns of how I was ever to fulfil my destiny, and fear of failure. None of that mattered now. For all I cared the entire forest and everything in it could be drowned in a sea of concrete, as long as Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones died first. Died in pain. Died at my hand.

I marched into the cave with renewed purpose and vigour, uncaring of what dangers may face me. My three fairy companions followed nervously, and silently behind.

Perhaps, had I not allowed myself to be so completely overcome by my feelings I may have felt the watchful eyes of our observers from across the river boring into my back. But I did not. All I felt was hate.

The inside of the cave was, well, cave like. It was dark, and damp, and dingy, and the air was filled with the smell of the stagnant water which ran down the walls and dripped from the encroaching stalactites that formed a topsy-turvy mountain range across the ceiling.

Although I call it a cave, as I soon discovered, we had actually entered a network of undergrounds caverns, linked together by the single, narrow, downward spiralling path. Every so often another pathway would branch off of the one we entered by, leading into other caves. Most of these were small dead ends that had clearly provided homes for some of the forest’s inhabitants before the arrival of Blackheart and his men had caused them to relocate (whether this happened voluntarily or otherwise I did not like to contemplate). After the first couple had proved of no use I began to simply ignore these detours, feeling that the particular chamber I was looking for would be quite obvious when one came across it.

My assertion was quickly supported by the reappearance of the river – or at least an offshoot of it – emerging from one of the smaller side caves and mirroring our spiralling, downward path.

I marched quickly and silently down through the caves, eager to allow my anger to flourish and find its target before my resolve began to weaken and allow in any thoughts of the enormity of the task before me. It was a plan that worked well... until, that is, I first heard the sound of chanting.

“Onn Sellum, Crastody, Bellingwum.”

The strange words echoed towards us from around the bend.

“Tapulec, Simultifla, Unn Kellum.”

This was it. It had to be. Around the next corner lay the ruins, Blackheart, Aurelius – everything we had fought so hard to reach and everything we would have to fight so much harder to overcome. Instantly I felt the fear welling up within me once again, inconsiderately trying to replace my blind anger with common sense at the most unhelpful of times. This was not the moment for me to realise how truly poor our chances of victory were. In a desperate attempt to avoid doing so, I moved swiftly around the corner to meet my fate.

The cave before me did not look like a cave at all. The ornate carvings of scenes from the forest above that adorned each wall and the man (or, more probably, alundri) made pillars that supported the chamber’s ceiling looked as though they had come directly from a roman amphitheatre combined to provide the chamber with the feeling of a purpose-built temple as opposed to a naturally occurring phenomenon. Even the river which flowed into the underground temple, encircling its centre, looked as though it had been deliberately manipulated to do so in order to form a protective moat around the prized tablet. For all I knew, it may have been. The large stones that formed a walkway across it certainly were.

Our position at the chamber’s entrance was largely hidden from view by the enormous, flickering shadows caused by the flaming torches that punctuated the carvings at regular intervals in order to furnish the dark ruins with their only source of light. This, combined with the intense concentration that all those present were paying to the ceremony, enabled us to observe the proceedings unnoticed.

“Prandula, Mencula, Abdumee-Fey.”

My eyes were immediately met by the creature doing the chanting, though this brought me no closer at all to knowing who or what it was. Though it was human in shape it was far from being so in appearance or stature. Standing at a little under four feet in height, the creature looked to be something between dwarf (the angry, bearded, warrior kind you get in fantasy books as opposed to just a little person) and a hawk. He wore a long, burgundy robe and read from a thick, ancient-looking text. This, combined with his bushy eyebrows, long white beard, and monocle, served to make him look very wise. Evidently though, this was not Captain Blackheart’s opinion of him.

“NOTHING’S HAPPENING!” the Gravlier screamed at the strange looking creature who barely came up to his waist. “You claimed you could translate the ancient writings!”

“I-I can,” stammered the stumpy wiseman. “I am doing.”

“THEN WHY IS NOTHING HAPPENING?”

“I-I d-don’t kn-kn-kn-know. P-Perhaps it o-only w-works when a-all the words h-have b-been sp-spoken?”

“THEN SPEAK THEM FASTER!”

“B-b-bilicon, R-roomantsii, M-methinglo.”

The strange creature continued in his efforts, constantly flicking through his little text in order to discover how he might pronounce the alien symbols that appeared on the tablet. It seemed that, the more quickly he attempted to speak the words, the slower he became. Finally my grandmother’s favourite saying of “Less haste, more speed” made sense to me.

Part of me almost felt sorry for the little bird-dwarf. He might have been on the side of evil, but compared to the bully who stood next to him at almost three times his size, it was difficult not to feel some sort of empathy with him. But this was no time for compassion. However useless he might have been, he was going to finish his chanting sooner or later, and who knew what would happen then? The time for action had come. The question was, what kind of action?

I quickly surveyed the scene before me. The good news was that our enemy were not as numerous as I had allowed myself to believe. Clearly the Professor had underestimated our threat when assembling his charges, a fact which could only work out in our favour – as my father had once told me, one should never be afraid of being underestimated, for by not appreciating your strengths, people weaken their defence against them.

Aside from Blackheart and the stumpy wiseman, their stood only five others in the chamber observing the events – two more rockalusses, the two trolls who had chased us earlier and, of course, the inimitable Mr Jones.

I know not why I describe the scene as being inhabited by
only
five others, other than that was how I thought of it at the time, so concerned had I been that we should find ourselves confronted by great hordes of troops. The truth was that they outnumbered us two to one, and even when faced with the same odds reversed in our favour just minutes before, we had failed to come through with everyone in tact.

“Y-Yemini, Floo- Floonatrous? Rosingwa, C-Coo...”

“What do we do now?” Ophelia asked, vocalising the question that was spinning around my head. We were outnumbered with no plan, and no time. I knew that our next move would be crucial. I knew that we had to make it now. Unfortunately, I had no clue as to what it should be. I was on the verge of shattering any remaining confidence my companions may have had by admitting as such when, thankfully, the decision was made for me.

“...R-Romalliah, C-C-Crasteechimo, Kr-Kr...”

“Oh shut up you blithering fool,” yelled Blackheart pushing the timid, stammering creature to the floor, causing him to loose possession of both his book and a monocle I had not previously noticed him wearing, which he promptly began blindly scouring the floor for.

“Some shaman you are, you couldn’t comprehend the power of these ruins if you had a thousand new moons.”

“I-I did try to tell you, my lord. Th-The prophecy foretells that only the chosen one shall be able to unlock the secrets of Kenzoor.”

“SILENCE YOU INSOLENT SLIME!” shouted the gravlier, issuing a sharp kick to the flailing shaman. “You also told me that the tablet could be translated with the help of your little
book
.” He spoke this last word as if it were dirty. As if reading were something real warriors should be ashamed of doing.