NexLord: Dark Prophecies (58 page)

Three Togs spotted Gandarel and charged.

He
leaped
and his hate fueled body blurred to meet them.  As they
died, Gandarel's hatred bathed in the feeling of their fear and
turned it outwards.

Ten more ran at him to attack, but they
flinched away in fear when they neared.  Gandarel
laughed, it was easy, he channeled their new fear back and they
were
repelled
as if a wall of fire
stood between them and
Gandarel,
and
then they fled.

The feeling of their fear increased his power
and Gandarel's hatred reveled in it, he advanced with Betrayer at
his back.  The more Togroths that ran, the more fear he
channeled.  Soon the whole Togroth army was
in rout
as they fled the young human in abject
terror.  The mass of their terror fed his power like a
torrential river, and the boy reached a new level of raw
fear.  It called
a
waiting
power, attracting it and pulling it from
afar.  From the east, a pulsing shifting ball of energy
came streaking toward him, drawn like a fly to sugar.  It
sped up and slammed into Gandarel's chest, and his mind expanded to
heights and powers that he could hardly fathom.

He turned and the nearest fleeing Togs died
and fell skidding to the ground.  The fear of the others
swelled and Gandarel's power waxed on.  An accelerating
circle of expanding death cut down the fleeing Togroths, who fell
dead as the wave of building fear burst their hearts in their
chests.

Enolive's body suddenly shifted in shape, and
swelled into a large, yellow-scaled demon, with red
eyes.  "Behold!" Betrayer cried in rapture, "The
Dreadmaster reborn!  Never has there been a Dreadmaster
in this world to match you!” the Dreadbeast's voice was
gleeful.  "The prophecies are met!  A NexLord
is the Dreadmaster and the world will fall under his power,
forever!"

Gandarel was still killing the Togs, when the
demon stepped up next to him, "Master, leave one Tog alive, we will
do unto it worse things than death."

Gandarel complied and all but one of the army
of fleeing Togs died in their tracks. He left the last one shaking
on the ground.  Abject terror kept it huddled in a fetal
position.

"Make us a steed, master!  Use the
power within you to change the Tog into your vision!"

The boy's body, that stood there, was both
Gandarel and the Dreadmaster.  Thoughts from other men,
who had held the power that was the Dreadmaster, warred in his
mind.  He was the evil Maugh, and then he was Logan, and
then both.  Dead men's thoughts, that made up pieces of
the ancient power, warred with Gandarel’s personality for
dominance, and neither one triumphed, yet a melding was
achieved.

Out of that mixed bag of insanity, Gandarel
pulled the image of a Dragon and held that form in his
mind.  He combined the power of fear from the eight
hundred Tog deaths he had just absorbed with a large portion of the
power that had come to him from the
east
and pushed it into the body of the Tog on the
ground.  Gandarel willed it, and the power flowed through
him and into the cowering body.  Dead Togroth bodies
lying near the quivering living Tog were pulled, like metal to a
magnet.  Wings sprouted and the Tog's body
swelled.  The dead bodies melded into the living Tog, as
their mass swelled and changed him into something new. He swiftly
grew larger. The Togs arms changed to legs, its hands to
claws.  More bodies dragged across the ground and pooled
themselves into the growing beast.  Its skin turned to
scales
and became bright green. A
long sinuous neck sprouted and then a dragon’s maw formed with long
curved teeth. When Gandarel was through molding his creation, a
green dragon, with a forty-foot wingspan, stood before the
Dreadmaster reborn and the Dreadbeast Betrayer. The dragon waited
for its master's commands.

Betrayer went and climbed onto its wide
scaled back, and Gandarel
joined
him on the new
dreadbeast
. At a
command from Gandarel, the dragon lifted from the valley floor and
winged off into the east, carrying the Dreadmaster Gandarel and his
new teacher toward the wastelands.

Chapter Seventeen

"It was terrible.  We stood before
the Dreadmaster's fortress in the wastelands of the east, and the
hoard came forth by wing and foot.  They bore down upon
us, like a landslide toward a child, and I did nothing."

- From the Prophecies of Doom

Lying in the Chamber of Stone with a deep cut
in his chest, Aerin could do little but wait as Katek bound his
wound with cloth torn from a dead man's shirt.  Aerin
turned his head and gazed at the dead Guardsmen, Bluecoat
soldiers and Togroths lying
on
the
floor.  Red and yellow blood mixed in pools of swirling
color, marking another place where hatred and fear had feasted.

Aerin felt helpless; any second the
Togs could come out of the dark and make short work of his
friends.  Where was Mara?  He remembered the
vision that had come to him back in Strakhelm of Lor dying and of
Mara being dead.  He raised one of his arms before his
eyes and saw the two intricately detailed golden chains that went
around his entire wrist.  The first was larger than the
second, and both were almost three dimensional to his
eyes.  Without warning, as it had that night at the east
wall, Aerin's world suddenly shifted into a strange vision.

He saw his wrist before him, but instead of
two chain marks, now there were five.  The fourth mark
was identically shaped to the others, but where the others were
brilliant gold, this one was solid black.  His gaze came
up and he found himself in a strange place.  His vision
was again that strange in and out of focus view he had experienced
once before.  Desolation lay around him, black rocks and
beige sand dunes, that had numerous bleached white bones laying
about or sticking out like arrows from a corpse.  A
massive fortress rose up from the dunes and black columns of smoke
billowed upwards from huge fires burning on each of the multiple
corners.  The walls sloped inwards slightly from the
base, and within them was a structure that soared to even greater
heights.

Deep, booming drums beat a slow tempo, that
was felt as much as heard.

Aerin looked right and saw a magnificent
female warrior.  She was young, with raven hair and
various pieces of armor strapped to her sinuous
body.  Weapons bristled everywhere around her, and when
she turned the fires on the walls reflected in the bloodthirsty
grin she gave him.  He didn't know her.

Her words chilled him to the bone, for she
was almost gleeful in their delivery, "It's time to die!"

   Suddenly the drums stopped
and a hoard of Togs poured out of the open gates, like a burst
damn; large creatures took wing from the battlements. It was a
sight that would have made the heartiest veteran of battle quell in
fear, but the warrior girl just laughed.

Time returned to normal and Aerin found his
gaze on the twin chains of gold around his wrist.  He
knew he had seen another glimpse of the future, and it terrified
him.  He wondered what terrible events could bring the
young son of a scholar before the battlements of the Dreadmaster,
and he wondered about the black chain mark he had seen on his
wrist.

Against all of Mara's prophecies, he was a
NexLord.  It was all so confusing to his tired
mind.  What was he supposed to do?  NexLords
were the great leaders of battle, the heroes of legend, not young
boys picked by mistake.  What were the powers of the
Nexus?  Now that he had bonded to Lor, what did that
mean?  He knew the answers to these questions must be
discovered if he was to survive.

His last thought, before drifting off into a
fitful slumber, was that if he was going to keep having these
visions, he better start writing them down; visions of death,
visions of battle and visions of black chains.

"The story of the NexLord Aerin and his
bondsmen will continue in the second volume, NexLord: Black
Chains."

* * * * *

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