The Hollow King Part One: The Broken Towers

By Blake Haycraft

Swords, magic and madness. In a land dominated by wild sorcery, and a king driven to insanity, salvation exists in the hands of a cowardly wizard, an angry young man, and a bitter exile. Worlds will collide, and worlds will burn in the shadows of the Broken Towers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blake Haycraft
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301868247

Blake Haycraft

Born in a small country town, Blake has traveled furthest with the pen. He wrote fantasy as a child and has never grown out of it. He scrapes by with a few different jobs, and a far too tolerant wife.

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THE HOLLOW KING

PART ONE

THE BROKEN TOWERS

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Blake J.Haycraft

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THE SHADOW KINGDOM

The wizards, a world away, shrieked at him. Warning.

An instant of cold increasing and darkness drawing in.

Dale snatched his blade free of its scabbard, filling the silent gloom with the bright glint of steel -- spells swam across that blade in unctuous films of subtle power.

Shadows leapt at him. Claws slashed and he felt, briefly, their chill touch. Dale shuddered, it burnt him to the core, here where he was not quite flesh, and he knew that too many of such caresses would bring a death that was not death. He swung out and heard -- first real sounds in this place -- the howls of creatures dying. He heard, rather than felt, their deaths, it was as though his sword sliced through air. He thought it odd that creatures of such little substance could even exist, let alone die. But die they did, each swing of his blade brought screaming death.

Silence.

Ichor, or perhaps it was starless night made deliquescent and stinking, dripped from his blade. At whispered command he hurriedly sheathed his weapon and walked on, carefully stepping over the remains of creatures out of nightmare - shapeless, livid and with the mass of spider’s silk.

He moved a little more certainly now, his steps grown confident, lifted by the success of his first encounter in this world.

But then he had never truly lacked that confidence. The night would part for him.

If he hadn’t been so sure he would never have attempted this. Dale remembered old Aradern Mage-lord staring at him hopefully -- and, perhaps, a little fearfully -- as he spoke to his mage-brothers and sisters.

"It is Dale’s knowledge that this quest is true that will save him. His certainty that he is right. Yolessin devours those who doubt; those who know true power and have tempered it with fear. It is the Shadowland’s power and its weakness. And gods' willing, we shall it exploit it."

#

More shadow creatures came, more died, sliced to writhing, substanceless pieces by the precise swings of Dale’s blade. Nothing would stop him; magic aided him -- in wizards' voices distant. He was strong and in dire need.

Staff.

Near.

He smiled. There it was, in the chamber beyond, no more than a hundred yards away.

Radiant in the night -- as pure a light as Dale had ever known -- Minyael-tah spun gently, a few feet above a grey slab of stone. The staff floated, suspended by spells more than five centuries old. Sorcery cast in blood by a desperate and frightened folk.

Thirty wizards had died to bring Minyael-tah here -- to the heart of a dark and hungry world. The bones of that thirty, long ago stripped of flesh by creatures unnamable, lay in piles carelessly scattered across the chamber floor. Skulls stared up at him. And he felt their ancient terror. Their lamentations. The staff was too powerful a device to be taken back to the sunlight realm.

Minyael-tah, the captured universe, the once cause and device of the old wars. Always it had been trouble and Power. Minyael-tah, hidden and spell sheathed in the Shadow land.

But these were desperate times.

The kingdom of Caledern was falling.

Daily crashing down in the face of invaders unstoppable. The last few months were a collection of terrors and tragedies beyond his worst nightmares.

As with all such things of treachery and conflagration it had happened without warning. The Eastern Kingdoms and the Northel warlords forged some kind of unholy alliance - linked and bound by mad and powerful Northel sorcery. Dale’s elder brother fell in an ambush on the Northern frontier that also slaughtered a third of the Caledern Home-guard. His father died, almost at the same time, to an assassin’s blade in the capital itself.

In a matter of hours Dale found himself lord of a land beyond his ability to manage and rapidly spinning out of control.

The invaders had proven themselves far superior to Caldern’s troops. His army stretched itself thin and collapsed under the weight of an enemy that should never have been. Only the elite Disvarli showed their worth, battling their ancestral enemy with a deep and bitter knowledge of their tactics -- if not for them Caledern would have fallen weeks ago. Still a force of just under a thousand warriors could do little more than shrink and fall back against this onslaught.

Even an alliance with the Elverni made little difference. Their weapons, though superior to anything his men possessed did little but slow the inevitable. Armies massed on every side in but days his homeland would be destroyed and his people enslaved.

Minyael-tah was his only chance -- its power the only way out his people had and for them he would die a thousand deaths. With the captured universe under his control, his kingdon would be saved. What had been, would be again. No. Nothing could ever be the same again. Too many had died for that.

Fingers tapped at him from behind. Heavy fingers to disturb his reverie. Dale spun, unsheathing his sword in an instant.

What he saw should not be. He had been warned of the strangeness and dangers of Yolessin, yet nothing prepared him for this.

He moaned, the sound thin and odd in that alien air.

Dale faced his own shadow, grown huge and wild. It held a flickering shadow sword and grinned a brutish umbral smile. The creature stared at him, its eyes filled with hunger and dark knowledge. In those eyes Dale saw something that made him cry out in terror.

No! He could not. He was not.

In the face of such a dire thing, he did all he was able. He threw his sword at it and ran the other way. Towards the staff.

Dark things beat at him, tried to trip him up with limbs viscous and vile. The shadow roared and crashed in pursuit. The staff grew nearer, but the shadow’s heavy fingertips brushed at his shoulders. A moment either way. The earth shook with its steps. Its hot breath echoed in his ears and rushed against his neck.

All Dale’s confidence fled, torn from him by mad and knowing eyes that were his own. Certainty undone by cruel and hideous insight. Now he felt as a child in bed alone as the night creeps in and begins to whisper and, perhaps, to laugh. He cursed beneath his breath and ran and ran and ran.

The mages' voices were a'clamour in his skull.

Beware.

Damn it, he already knew!

The wizards had failed him -- perhaps that had been their intention all along, they were ever fickle in their alliances. He was as good as dead -- if he was lucky. This shadow thing would devour his soul. It would grind his flesh to dust and chew the memories out; all this he had seen in its eyes and more. Tears of frustration and pain streaked his cheeks. It had come to nothing.

He ran on in the knowledge that despair could not be outrun for it dwelt in the heart. He ran on, without hope, just fear and a grim and dreadful dedication to his people driving his legs.

Dale may have been betrayed, but he would not betray his own.

Dark fingers snatched at him, as he in turn flung himself towards the staff. Night’s laughter echoed in his skull, drowning out the cries of wizards. Dale whimpered, his body grown slack with fear. His right hand closed to a fist around tingling wood.

Minyael-tah’s power filled him, flared up and out. Penumbral fingers dropped away and he spun, staff blazing.

His shadow was gone. Only the skulls of those long dead wizards stared at him now - their empty orbits deep and knowing and sad.

#

In a circle of ruins, dimly lit by half a dozen smoking torches, the wizards clustered around Dale. These surviving of the elder race, who had cast him to Yolessin and drawn him back.

All thirty-nine of the Master Orders were present - men and women alike. They were, every one of them, old; skin dark, and severe faces pinched and parchment dry. And yet, for all the appearance of age, they were much, much older. Millenia had laid but the lightest of trails upon their flesh.

They were alive and already ancient when the Elverni ruled as Tyrants and the manling races were nothing more than a weak and frightened folk. They remembered the central players of the Deep Tales and not as the legends and heroes which they had become (and which mage-kind had helped to perpetuate) but rather as the real men and women, with real weaknesses and fears, that they had been. And in those long ago years, they had been far, far less weary.

There was about this gathering of magi a sense of absolute caution; a jealous counting of the years. Only through the exercise of incredible care had they lived so long - and so many had not, their names etched with blood upon the Temprea stones of the distant Miamisketar plains. Now they had thrown caution to the wind.

Dressed in their pale robes, fingers tightly clutching their own staves of power - all weakling devices to that which Dale held - they stood in the old ruins of the city with faces somewhat ambivalent.

Aradern stood at their fore. Greatest of all the mages alive and equal to most that dwelt in the half-life of the Necrotaur, he wondered at the wisdom of what they had allowed to pass.

His kind's last and most potent action in service of humanity was to lock Minyael-tah away, forever. And now... He thought of those lives lost. Of the great battle in the chamber of the staff. Magi far greater than he threw down their lives to hide Minyael-tah.

Wasted, he thought. Wasted.

It would be all but impossible to bury the staff again. The best of his kind were gone; their names writ on the stones.

He cast into the future, that he might catch glimmering of premonition and found nothing but cold grey noise. Minyael-tah’s power drowned out his own, at this close proximity it was all he could feel.

Dale grinned at the assembly before him -- the wizards and a score of Disvarli, the warrior’s bright-red tunics fluttered in a chill and newly risen breeze. Beyond them stood what remained of his army. The air was heavy, almost chokingly so, with ash. The staff’s power filled him, brought to life greater sensitivities, his mind touched upon the horizon and he felt for a moment the agonies of his kingdom.

Hesitantly, Dale raised Minyael-tah above his head and let its power flare up and out. The radiance of a captured universe burst skyward, casting everything in a false sunlight that broke asunder the evening.

‘Minyael-tah is mine, he cried and all present cheered. A time of wonders is upon us and a time of victory."

Dale watched the magi now and they stared back -- he remembered that sense of betrayal and the horror of things he had seen in Yolessin, then the glory of the staff washed it all away. He reached out towards them, his free hand open.