Excerpt from "The Ending Dream" (Chapter One, Continued)

The sky never changed: Dane felt sure it should have been night. He’d wondered for what felt like days. Admittedly, he’d moved slow, for more Gorgoloth had made themselves known, most of them burdened by sacks full of slain Jlantrian soldiers, and Dane had been sure to keep to the shadows of the still-endless ruins. His skin had grown used to the biting cold, but his armor had grown heavy, so he’d slowed his pace, taking extra care to not attract any attention. He felt like a coward, but he’d convinced himself there was no point in getting killed: if he saw any fellow soldiers he’d go to their aid, but though Dane sometimes still heard the sounds of distant battle he never saw any, and by the time he reached any fighting it was already done, always with the black giants victorious.

All the time, Dane wondered where he was, and how he’d gotten there.

That he’d somehow wound up in the Reach was beyond question. The Gorgoloth had no foothold anywhere else, not after the Rift War, and it was known that their numbers were greatest there, in that frozen wasteland west of the White Dragon Empire, where the Thirteen Towers keep the black-skinned brutes at bay. Dane didn’t remember them ever being this large…the Cruj were giants, true, but they and the Gorgoloth, though once allies, were different races. Maybe this was something new.

How did I get here? What happened to the Veilwarden who saved me?

The more questions he asked, the less he remembered. So he pressed on.

Dane found shelter for a time in what looked to be the hollowed out remains of an ancient church. Shattered pews lay covered in drifts of frozen and ice blue snow; shards of broken glass had petrified like fossils inside sheets of frost on the stony ground. Desperate as he was for a fire, Dane knew he didn’t dare, so he huddled in a corner, back against the wall and vra’taar on his lap, and rested his eyes. Shadows passed through the tall, long shattered windows over his head now and again, but nothing disturbed him. He nursed the scar on his cheek – the shape of the wound told him someone, a human someone, had raked at his face with fingernails – and tried his best to rest without sleeping.

She falls up.

He sees a field of ruin: a plain of red sand, surrounding by tributaries of brackish water. The forces descend upon the city, a city with no walls, no defenses, and no reason at all to be nestled so far from any other civilization, so far from anything that can protect it.

Dane woke to a woman’s screams. At first he thought it was part of the dream, but as he shifted the muscles in his sore neck and straightened his stiff back against the crumbling wall it came again, closer than any of the sounds of battle he’d heard that day before. The scream sounded yet again; this time, it was followed by a bellow, a bestial roar that cut through the air like a fistful of knives. Dane sprang to his feet.

Fresh tracks lay in the snow outside the church, as well as fresh blood: a trail ran from the direction Dane had approached from to a narrower expanse of the mountain, a crumbling ledge from which chunks of snow-laden rock detached and plummeted into the fog below. Dane advanced cautiously. The way ahead narrowed and descended, and while Dane could see where the mountain ledge elevated and widened on the far side, from his vantage near the ruined church he couldn’t see anything that happened on the depression ahead. He was now close enough to the edge to gaze full on into the vast empty space below. A curtain of white mist lay hundreds of feet below: there was no telling how high up he really was, but judging from the sharp pull of the wind and the thin quality of the air he guessed several thousand feet, easily as high as the Razorback Mountains he’d spent so many of his years as a Dawn Knight in, and maybe even as high as the Titans.

He sees the dead girl. She stares up at him from the mud; her eyes are locked forever open.

Dane shook himself to.

What the hell is wrong with me?

The scream came again. Dane held his weapon ready, and cautiously advanced far enough to peer down the mountain path to see what lay at the nadir of the natural bridge. His armored boots threatened to give way at the icy stone beneath him, but Dane crouched down and used the weight of his sword to lend him balance.
The shelf of rock below him was wider than he would have expected, but also thinner – even from his elevated vantage, it was clear that the bridge was only four or five feet thick, and beneath the stretch of stone lay a sea of frothy white fog. Thick banks of snow and black ice formed low walls on the natural bridge, which was just wide enough across to accommodate the size of the wrecked sailing ship that had somehow landed there. Dane blinked, sure that he’d lost his mind. The ship was ancient, a small galley whose hull had been breached in numerous places, enough that one could peer into the hollow innards of the lower decks. Tattered and snow-covered sails fluttered in the heavy wind, and the level of decay and frost of the old wood indicated that the vessel had been wrecked some time ago, even if there was no visible clue as to how a sailing ship had been marooned on the top of this vast peak. The bow of the ship dangled just over the edge; Dane watched a whip of wind tear away some loose boards and send them sailing off into the icy air.

Two Gorgoloth held a fourth giant, who’d been tied down and forced to its knees just in front of the ship. It was a Cruj: of that Dane was certain, even though he’d never seen one in person before. The Cruj were known for their extreme size and enormous girth, and if the Gorgoloth were only vaguely humanoid in nature, the Cruj were even less so: its head was square and squat and little in the way of a neck, its mouth was large and filled with blunt teeth, and its arms and legs all seemed too large for its body, branch-like and simian. The Cruj giant towered over the Gorgoloth, who in turn were larger than the human prisoners huddled together and held at bay by a bloodied maul yielded by a fourth Gorgoloth. They were all just about a hundred feet away, at best, but Dane made out three: the screaming woman and two men. All of them were in manacles, and held together by a length of old iron chain.

The whole scene was something from a nightmare. The Gorgoloth were known to the Empire, and feared. The Cruj were even more feared, but most people had never seen one: they’d acted behind the scenes during the War, serving Vlagoth as her war engineers and advisers. The brutal, Veilcrafted war machines that the Cruj built for use during the Rift War were legendary, as was the death toll they’d brought about. Dane didn’t know why these Gorgoloth – who’d once served the Cruj as Vlagoth’s soldiers – would be beating this one now, and he didn’t much care. He wasn’t worried about them, but about the human prisoners, and what the woman screamed about: a fourth human prisoner who lay at the feet of the guardian Gorgoloth and who lay face down on the ground at the giant’s feet. Dane wasn’t positive, but he thought it was a child.

“Time to die, I guess,” he muttered. He hoped they wouldn’t be his last words…he’d always hoped to say something more profound just before he died. Regardless, Dane decided to take the direct approach: there was no cover at all between himself and the ship, and as much as he’d have preferred to use a ballista on the Gorgoloth, that wasn’t exactly an option. “Giants!” he shouted.

© 2007 Steven Montano


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