The Azure Wizard (29 page)

The monstrous beast that stood before the Wizard stood about seven feet tall and possessed bare flesh of dark green knotted muscle. Its arms hung long to its knees and ended in five long hooked black claws. Above its rippled abdomen and hard chest was a thick, muscular neck and a face so horrifying that Ethan yelped in horror as he staggered backwards. It possessed no nose or lips but its tight snarling mouth revealed a wide sneer of conical yellowed teeth, as sharp as knives. Its beady eyes were solid black and glinted wetly in the candlelight of the room. Above its heavy furrowed and angry brow was a bald scalp with two upward-curving black horns above each long pointed ear. Ethan and May beheld the Troll in its true maddening form.

It roared wetly, “You’ll run no more, Foresters! I’ll rend the meat from your frail bones!”

Ethan clenched his teeth together in resolve, and an attempt to keep them from chattering in horror, and he took a bold step forward.

“No, Troll. This is over.”

The thin Wizard charged forward with his blue eyes increasing rapidly in radiance. Caught completely in surprise at the sudden actions of the human, the Troll could not recoil fast enough from the Wizard as the man laid his tattooed hands upon the beast’s forearm. In a rapid blinding blue flash both the Wizard and the Troll vanished from the chamber.

When they appeared upon solid footing again, the two foes abruptly and adamantly knew without the least bit of doubt that they were no longer in the Three Baronies, or even upon the world. Ethan knew where they were, though he was very doubtful that his Wizardcraft power of transportation could bring them quite this far. He was pleasantly surprised. The Troll, though, gazed around at the alien landscape in which it found itself and it roared in confusion and anger.

As far as the eye could see in every direction stretched a vast desert of broken and jagged grey rock beneath a rumbling sky of dark storm clouds that would never belch forth rain or emit a cool breeze in the humid still atmosphere pervading this realm.

“Where have you taken us, human!?” bellowed the Troll as it flexed its vicious claws eagerly.

“Welcome to the Soul Wastes, Troll.”

Both the Troll and Ethan looked to the side in shock as a lone dark figure strode towards them. The voice, spoken in a very thick Greenwellian accent, came from a tall lanky individual garbed in only black leather trousers. His bare feet were enveloped in bloody gashes and slices from walking upon the jagged floor of shredding rock edges and his torso was naked. The long angular face and the thin body beneath his greasy mane of long black hair were completely shrouded in swirling eldritch black lines and symbols that were an exact replication of Ethan’s own blue tattoos. Like Ethan, his entire body appeared to be totally covered in the bisymmetrical tattoos.

“Master!” roared the Troll and it bounded forward like a pup to its mother.

“Hold, beast,” growled the dark Wizard, and he extended his hand as his eyes flashed violet in the dim light of the environment.

The Troll screeched in agony as its body stopped moving, frozen in place, and its flesh began to twist and writhe beneath some unseen force.

“You have failed enough in your task of the last ten centuries. Your life is forfeit,” stated the Wizard.

The Troll let out a surprisingly shrill, almost feminine, shriek and very suddenly it began to disintegrate from its feet on upward, its glowing violet remains rising into the air and clouds like enchanted cinders. It babbled and pleaded with its master as its body continued to unerringly dissolve beneath the Wizardcraft. Its diabolic monstrous visage began to change shape as soft candle wax, briefly mimicking the pained faces of those it had recently slain and assumed the forms of. Its head became that of Bethany Kinsley once again before morphing into that of O’Dell, and then the Wendlithian face of Scarlet the minstrel appeared atop the Troll’s vanishing neck in an open-mouthed shriek of otherworldly pain and fear. In but a moment its head too was vanished and the Troll was forever vanquished. That left the two Wizards alone staring at one another.

“Who are you?” Ethan finally managed to stammer.

“I am Illumis, Emperor of all lands. Who are you?”

Ethan took a step back and paled at the terrible historical reference. He felt he was speaking with a ghost. He wasn’t that far from the truth. Finally he managed to choke out, “Skalderholt. Ethan Skalderholt.”

“Well, Ethan Skalderholt, I can see and feel that you aren’t intended to be here. You still live, do you not? I can see that you are a fellow Wizard. How came you to bring my monstrous creation across time and space to this realm of the hopeless dead?”

Ethan struggled for many a moment to find his voice again, but when he did he choked, “I was a Forester of the Three Baronies, a follower of the order begun by your arch-nemesis, Lady Quinn. I am among the last and was the only one able to defeat the Troll.”

Illumis chuckled to himself, a terrible dark sound, and he returned, “Quinn’s whelps accept Wizards into their order as well now? Why would a Wizard want to live in the dirt with those fools? Are you not aware of the power at your fingertips, boy? Why, you could enslave barons with your might and bed with baronesses. The world is yours if you desire it!”

Ethan looked at his shoes and shook his head. He looked back up to Illumis’s brooding visage and explained, “I don’t want it, Illumis. I never wanted it, this power and responsibility. It unleashes only destruction among those I care about. I am the only Wizard left in the Three Baronies. After your death, Wizardcraft thankfully left the world, but I have for some reason been chosen to bring it back. My land, your land that you once tried to conquer, is reeling from the horror that I’ve unleashed. And I pray to the Ancestors above that with my death it will vanish again.”

Illumis smirked condescendingly at Ethan and sighed, “Such a waste, boy. You could rule the world like I did.”

“Illumis, you couldn’t even rule yourself. You lost your manhood because you couldn’t control your lust, and you lost your life because you couldn’t control your subjects. Still, after a thousand years of desolation here in the Soul Wastes, you delude yourself into thinking that you possessed grandeur and the might of a baron. Barons rule justly and a successful baron is loved and adored by his people. Barons show humility and passion like Baron Fernhollow of Greenwell and they show brilliance and resolve like Baron Ruauld of Vhar. You never could have amounted to what they are, Illumis. You were a tyrant, nothing more. I know love, something you never had the wits to notice in your dark vile existence.”

At that Ethan turned his back on Illumis the Wizard Emperor and his eyes began to glow blue. But before he vanished Illumis sneered and spoke to him, “I can see into your future, boy. Love won’t be enough to save you. With your last breath you will know only loneliness and betrayal. In that, you and I are the same, Ethan Skalderholt.”

Ethan winced as he vanished from the realm of dark souls in a brilliant instant of cerulean light.

Ethan returned to the world and to Greenwell City to find Kraegovich painfully disentangling himself from all the ropes that had been binding his body. May was knelt down assisting him slicing the thick hemp cords where she could. Frightened little Nythee stood off to the side of the room, as far from the startling mess of black gore on the floor to the right of the hardwood desk as she could get.

When he appeared, all of the room’s occupants looked startlingly at him. Nythee was the first to sprint forward. The young Wendlithian girl wrapped Ethan’s waist in an emotional hug and she sobbed into his side, “I thought you said there would be no monsters now!”

He knelt down in front of her and embraced the girl.

“I’m sorry, Nythee. I didn’t know. I think we’re safe now.”

The floorboards creaked uncertainly as May came forward, and Ethan stood to meet her. She thudded into his torso in a full-bodied embrace and began sobbing fervently. Her body shuddered in gasps. When many moments had slipped by in relative silence, old worn Kraegovich having strode over to the lonely Nythee and lifting the child up to carry her protectively against his chest, Ethan whispered, “It’s over, May. The Troll is forever gone.”

Sobs formed of a conglomeration of relief and despair at the loss of her mother and all of her friends overcame May as Ethan rubbed her back soothingly with a blistered tattooed hand.

“May,” Ethan began as he held her a little ways away from him so he could look into her glistening blue eyes, “we need to get to the Castle of Greenwell. I need to speak with Baron Fernhollow about the state of the barony. I fear that the wilds won’t stop reclaiming the Three Baronies until we are all dust and bones.”

May sighed with a quick nod and wiped tears from both eyes.

“We aren’t out of the woods yet,” Ethan continued.

He kissed her once, long and passionate, his hands sliding down her bare back, and when they parted mouths she was smiling again. The Wizard whispered, “I love you, May.”

Ethan turned from his lover to Kraegovich and as he strode to the huge elderly Vharian man he shook his head saying, “I was sure that we’d seen the last of Bear.”

Kraegovich shrugged, Nythee protectively in one arm, and returned, “It would seem that the Troll had other uses for me, storyteller. But it is gone now?”

Ethan closed his eyes and nodded, “Aye, the Troll is slain.”

“Dare I ask how?” asked Kraegovich.

“I would not, Kraegovich. It’s one story that I would be glad to forget.”

The old Vharian nodded in understanding and extended his free hand towards the Wizard. Ethan grasped the large open hand and they stared into one another’s eyes, Ethan’s blue and slightly aglow. “I’m very happy to see you again, friend.”

About an hour later, as the sun was creeping towards its bright and hot midday position, the quartet marched from the Forester’s Compound with washed faces and hands, new outfits, and some random equipment.

Nythee wore a loose-fitting light blue tunic, the smallest that they could find, as a dress belted at her little waist by a white ribbon that May had in her room. Finally shed of her scant Woodfolk outfit, May was garbed in dark leather boots, a pair of dark brown leather pants, a dark green short sleeve linen shirt with a low-cut collar, and her wet hair was tied into a short ponytail with a leather thong. Her new weapon of choice, Férfa’s stone dagger, was held in a small fur scabbard at her hip.

Kraegovich, Nythee still sitting in the meaty crook of his thick arm, wore simple brown trousers and dark leather boots, a grey short-sleeved tunic belted about his waist by a wide dark leather belt, and an old sword with a leather-wrapped hilt that he had as a replacement in his room rode at his waist. Ethan wore a loose white linen shirt with a tie-up collar that he left partially-untied, black trousers and dark leather boots, and one of the heavy brown wool hooded-cloaks that Foresters were seen to wear. He kept the hood up to cast his mysterious tattooed face in shadows, but he had to remain with gaze downcast so passersby didn’t easily notice his glowing blue eyes gazing out from the shadows of the cowl.

All of the former Foresters of the Three Baronies took pains to not take any of the armor or hand axes of their once-proud order. The order was finished and they agreed not to salvage pieces off of it like scavengers over some steaming kill.

As they stood there in the courtyard of the Forester’s Compound with the shadow of Lady Quinn creeping over the rim of the fountain, May stated the thought that all were thinking, “Do you think we’ll ever be back here?”

They were silent for many moments until Kraegovich spoke, “I’ve been a Forester for longer than either of you have been alive. It is my life, my reason for existing in the Three Baronies. But it pains me a great deal to say that I don’t believe I’ll ever be back here again. I’m too old to start something else, but the Foresters of the Three Baronies have fallen. The order is finished.”

The silence pervading the courtyard proclaimed agreement and resignation. At that the trio, with young Nythee in tow, left the ivy-shrouded wrought iron gate of the abandoned headquarters of the Foresters of the Three Baronies, and all knew in their hearts that they would never enter it again.

When they walked into the Great Hall of the Castle of Greenwell the former Foresters possessed an anxious resolve, a determination to find what had befallen in the time that the Wizardcraft-changed beasts had to wreak havoc and carnage upon the folk of the Three Baronies. They found the dark chamber oddly empty of Greenwellian Knights. The sight of the royal stag emblem and the green banners about the bases of the pillars reminded Ethan of Sir Ross Silverstag, who he had abandoned in the warm company of Eikjard and The House of Chronicles. He pondered on the old knight’s life, obviously trapped in the Barony of Vhar with no hope of returning all the way back to his home in Greenwell City, no hope of returning to his order. Ethan, with his home destroyed and the Foresters disbanded, could certainly empathize with what the old knight must feel.

Marching through the forest of pillars in the dimly lit vaulted chamber, they caught sight of the throne upon the central raised dais in the center of the room, and they caught sight of the grim forlorn figure posed in desolation atop it. Baron Reynard Fernhollow sat upon it with his gold-gilded royal sword bare across his lap. His elbow was perched atop his knee, fist holding his downcast face aloft. There were none of his personal guard of Greenwellian Knights about, and from the look of things the Great Hall was utterly devoid of life save for the Baron and his four approaching callers. Their footsteps sounded like the echoing rumble of thunder in the empty stone chamber.

Without looking up Baron Fernhollow rasped, “Who calls now, to Baron Fernhollow, another landowner whose land has been overrun by monsters, another merchant with a ravaged and ruined caravan left to rot in splinters and gore upon the Three Baronies Road, another Knight Commander come to impart the ill news of the loss of his entire patrol, another wife inquiring after the whereabouts of her doomed lover, so obviously slaughtered in the wilds?”