Mark of the Finder: Book One: Marta’S Gift

By Frank Caccavo

Seth Kish is restless. Bored with life on the farming borderlands of the Elf nation, he dreams of a more exciting life. When a violent raiding party attacks his village, however, its more excitement than the young elf had imagined. He is sent for aid, but when things dont go as planned, he quickly finds himself alone, unprepared, and in grave danger. Before he knows it, he is embroiled in a dangerous conflict between nations; stalked by an ageless, homicidal wizard; and menaced by unimaginable creatures.

As he fights to survive he uncovers secrets from his familys past, the first of several trials he will endure on the path to becoming a man. He must travel through perilous lands and find a way to outwit beings of powerful magic that threaten everyone he loves. In his quest hell turn to the help of brave new friends and rely on reserves of strength he didnt know he possessed.

Each decision, each interaction, each escape brings him ever closer to the one confrontation he dreads. Along his inexorable but mystical transformation from boy to man, Seth must learn the true value of integrity, the thrill of love, and the honor of sacrifice as he grows toward his destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491718292

Frank Caccavo

Born in Philadelphia and raised in its suburbs, Frank graduated from The Citadel in Charleston SC and served in Marine Corps Infantry and Artillery units, attaining Captain’s rank. A businessman, traveler, inexpert cook, cigar enthusiast, and amateur historian, he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, children, and several standoffish cats.

Book preview

MARK OF THE FINDER

BOOK ONE: MARTA’S GIFT

Copyright © 2013 Frank Caccavo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse LLC

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1828-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1830-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1829-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922730

iUniverse rev. date: 01/07/2014

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While the pages that follow are the children of my thoughts they are also the sum of the patience and love of many. For all of you I offer these few and entirely inadequate words of thanks.

To my father and hero Iron Mike Caccavo (1931-89) for no truer man ever existed. To Mom for your faith in me and the deep well that is your love. Cathy and Don, thank you. You are the best!

Steve Allseits (RIP) and Jay Plafcan, with whom I’ve shared countless youthful misadventures. You have been and are the model of comrades. In the best working of my imagination, I could not have created better.

The Andrew’s and the Segal’s: There are no holidays without you. You are the blessing at our table.

To Jack Devlin; mentor, boss, friend and the toughest ranger I know.

MCPO Art Hart and LCDR Jim Bailey, USN (ret); true teachers and how I needed teaching! The path you showed me decades ago has led me all over the world, but it started with your patient sextants.

Countless Marines of all ranks! The title of Marine and to be numbered among its officers has been a privilege beyond price. To Rich; thanks for the challenge that started me and for an irrepressible example. I hope you find the peace that you so dearly deserve.

El Cid’s class of ’79, a shining thread in The Long Gray Line! To India, CAHOOTA!

Colonel T. may God keep you close at hand. Charles and Jean, the boys, Forest and Mrs. T. my beloved, southern family, you are never far from my thoughts.

To Colonels Wiley, Beebe, and Arcilessi of The Citadel: for love of books and truth and precision. Herein lies some of what you helped me mine with the keen awareness of how slow it was to extricate at times. Let the youth and inexperience of those days be my defense in a place and time where No excuse, Sir was the only acceptable response. Your hands are here gentlemen, rest in peace with thanks from a humble and grateful student.

To my children Michael, Frank Jr. and Princess Nicole who are my sun and my stars and my zest for tomorrow. You have given meaning to my life and life to this tale.

Kathy. My eternal love and my endless gratitude for all of the things you’ve said and done that have given me hope, incentive and the happiness I enjoy every day. There’s nothing here untouched by you. Of all the blessings I have received in life you are the greatest.

Given in love…

CHAPTER 1

The Great Blackness

T he final days of the summer were always craftily deceptive in the Virfrostler Mountains. Only the damp chill of dew-soaked mornings and the brisk breezes of the evenings betrayed the steady advance of winter creeping relentlessly like a fox towards a hare. The leaves upon the tree-swept hills surrounding the still glen, once bright with the full bloom of the season had begun to lose their brilliant luster and were now turning a faded shade of green as if in anticipation of the coming fall. As the summer season’s days grew short the autumn would come and go in this region with startling swiftness and many an ill-fated traveler would find doom in the serrated peaks when the first snows would fall a full two months before much of the lower lands to the south. It was not an uncommon event for those living in the high country to discover the thawed corpse of some hapless pilgrim after the fast-flowing streams of the spring melt carried the remains into the more inhabited areas of the territories known as The Great Border lands.

He had made a sparse camp in the glen, a clearing lush with long grass and fragrant with the remnants of late-summer wild flowers. A brook a few dozen yards before a thick cluster of pines noisily charged its waters inexorably southward to what would later become tributaries of the rivers Cascla and Vex. Puffs of clouds moved silently on an aromatic breeze while birds sang pleasantly as they fluttered in and out among the pines, but the beauty of his surroundings was wasted on him.

He spent his days in grim meditation and watched each sunrise, observing the frost that coated the wild grass only to be swallowed with the rising of the sun. To amuse himself his dark eyes would occasionally seek out those of a sparrow as it winged past or the inquisitive orbs of a foraging squirrel and in that instant the fragile creatures would wane and perish as if struck by the talons of a hawk. He could sense the shock and pain in their tiny lives and sometimes when the incantation struck the creature had a moment to react and he would be rewarded by a tiny screech as the life was whisked away as a candle flame in a sudden gust.

Beneath him, the soft patch of grass he rested upon was already browning and would likely not recover until the wind brought new seedlings. The result of an unanticipated and rather unpleasant residual effect of the Necrosse hex he had acquired decades ago in his necromantic studies. He sighed in dismissal. Wizardry was not an exact science and the incantation that granted him the spell’s use may have been recorded improperly or executed poorly, turning the injurious magic partially upon himself in the form of a malicious aura that affected living things that came in contact with him.

A price paid, he reasoned, and not the greatest he’d sacrificed for a possession he craved. He had sought to be more than a man and as he came nearer to that goal so too had he come to possess less of the defining attributes of a mortal, particularly in what it meant to be called human.

So be it, the robed man said aloud to the trees. It was a rare occasion when he afforded himself the luxury of introspection. I am more than man, and a race unto myself.

He called himself Locke now. He was accustomed over many years to naming himself and this one pleased him for it suggested a guardian of secrets. And while he favored it sufficiently to have used it several times in the past it was not the title given him at birth. He had not called himself by his birth name since he had embarked on the course of his destiny a very long time ago.

As the looks of men went— and he was far from the lands of men at the moment— he might be regarded as handsome. His hair was long and coal black, and tied behind him with a strip of black ribbon. His shoulders were broad and although he was thin, his spare frame exuded a wiry strength. His arms and legs were thick with whipcord muscle earned in hard passage through a wandering life, some portions of which had been spent as a soldier in this place or that. He was tall and his face was chiseled and square-jawed with thin lips that rarely creased into a smile. His forehead was broad and his expression reflected a keen mind. His dour appearance was made more severe by the black hooded cloak he wore.

Yet for all this he would still pass in many parts of the world as perfectly ordinary if not for the intensity of his eyes. These were raven and sunk deep in the sockets, reflecting his sharp intellect and giving him the countenance of one who knew a great deal more than he might let on. If he so wished his eyes could be twinkling black pearls, but just as easily a blazing death.

He was still a man in most respects and the women with whom he consorted on occasion enjoyed his company, although he grew easily bored with conversation and often lapsed into detachment and ill-temper. After his departure they only rarely associated their lingering illness as a result of his close proximity. He would snicker contemptuously after he left them. It had been through one such liaison that he had found to his dismay that the Necrosse was invoked not only by his direction, but as an aura surrounding his body that withered without discrimination unless he concentrated his will to withhold its power. This restraint was an exertion he would rarely make for any mortal. Decades after acquiring the spell and its unusual side effect he came to appreciate its deliciously amusing aspects. Whatever else he had surrendered in his quest for magic, he told himself, he had not lost his sense of humor.

For more years than he was capable of recalling he had studied his craft and attempted to live in solitude within the territories of men, from whence he came, as well as the faerie lands of the Dwarf and the Elf where travelers were routinely seen. But the substance of his power, the malevolence that fueled and sustained him radiated about him. So when he deigned to stride the cities of his race it took only a small time for people to become uneasy about him and then to avoid him. Eventually, regardless of his precautions, his fellow men grew to fear him and to look upon him with loathing.

Before the inevitable attempt on his unnaturally extended life would occur he would move on, more than a few times grudgingly so and often with dogs and armed men on his heels. Since the earliest days of his vocation he knew and accepted the immutable facts of his nature and its effect on others. One could not spend so many generations upon the world without learning something of the nature of its inhabitants. In the beginning he did not fault these lesser beings for their fear. But with the passing of the ages his heart grew harder. Eventually he grew to hate those who held dominion over the lands with a blackness that bordered on madness. From a hatred borne of the nomadic existence he had been forced to endure for ages he found the life’s objective of his tainted soul. And so, as he had killed the wild birds and beasts of the Virfrostler, so had he longed to do with impunity to man and dwarf, but especially to the elves.

It was the Elves above all mortals in the world who were closest to the magical fountain of the earth. It was they who were the first and greatest of the faerie and thus could detect his presence and abilities more easily. It was cursed elves who had actively or unwittingly foiled his schemes for generations and forced him to live like a wandering leper as the knowledge of his craft grew. So to the elves he doled the greatest share of his malice. It would be the faerie-folk that would pay the greatest toll when at last he came to rule.

At his modest camp he awaited the coming of the night. The site had been foretold in the volumes of tomes, runes and texts he had studied for nearly a generation. He had calculated that this location in the Virfrostler would gain him the first great milestone that would grant him power enough to make all things possible. The place, the day, and the time were carefully researched and his heart raced at the thought of his nearness to his goals. He experienced a giddy, near childish burst of excitement when his thoughts dwelled upon it and his casual game of striking down fowl could only distract him a few moments at a time.

With an effort the traveler inhaled a deep breath and closed his eyes, calming himself. He shrugged his shoulders and wrapped his black robe more closely about him, leaning his back against a broad tree. Then, with great deliberation as if the act itself held a special purpose, he folded his arms across his chest to wait for the inevitable setting of the sun. His chest barely rose and fell as he issued a small spell that made the air about him shimmer. Were there passersby in the region at that moment, he would have slain them. But before their murder he might have appeared to them as a sleeping shepherd, curled peacefully in slumber and nestled within the comfort of a tree.

Having achieved the tranquility required for his incantation, his heart slowed and his energies gathered and channeled within his formidable brain. He began reaching out with his mind, the power of his thoughts stretching outward like tentacles in all directions searching and exploring and sending back to him the results of that exploration. In an instant, it was done. He was quite alone and sensed no one for the many miles that his mystic vision could search. In his trance-like state he could feel the dying grass he sat upon and the stronger, more resilient tree he leaned against vainly resist his dreadful presence.

As a fisherman recovering a casted net, he retracted the tendrils of his will and let his mind ease into rest. In this dream-like condition time would pass for him swiftly and without notice. He had learned, before all else was possible over the long thread of his years, to become the master of hours.

The sun raced behind the western peaks as a fawn retreats before a sprinting cougar and day passed into evening in the normal course of a late-summer day. The light gave way to twinkling stars and lengthy wisps of white clouds that looked in the night sky like bed sheets on a clothes line and blown by a strong breeze.

Hours passed and still the figure leaning peacefully against the tree did not stir.

But when the darkest hour of the night was close at hand, that last moment marking the death of the day that was and is the birth of the new dawn, Locke roused and came to his feet. His black eyes glinted like gems in the scant light as he called his powers to him. He gathered his black cloak about himself to ward off a chill he did not feel, an act of ancient habit more than necessity. He peered into the gloom and sensed the coming of his great moment…his time. His patience, which had sustained him for untold years while he bitterly survived his hermit’s existence, was now short within him. In this midnight he would make a monumental leap toward his destiny, and the air about him crackled in anticipation.

There was moisture in the air that hung wetly in the trees and he could feel the dampness clutching at his cloak and boots. Thin fog rolled through the clearing propelled by a light wind that swirled like dancing wraiths and clung to him like a shroud. He paused with ears perked and turned his head from side to side in quick motions, like an owl waiting on the incautious step of the hare it has yet to see.

But as the seconds passed into minutes, a tremor of doubt invaded his cold heart. What if I am wrong!? He despaired. His mind raced, attempting to recall calculations and fretting over the trail of years that he had poured like a black river ancient scrolls and dusty volumes to stand at this place at this precise time.

As the minutes passed he sensed his fragile composure failing. He was upon the edge of giving in to his anxiety and the fury that would follow his failure when the night around him vibrated from a distant rumble in the west, the announcement of a coming storm. He froze, alert and listening as his knowing ears detecting more in the rising wind and grumbling of the heavens than a coming storm.

Suddenly, the sky was split by a flash of blue-white lightning that illuminated the field and woods with the dazzling brilliance of full day. Before the ear-splitting clap of the following faded he knew that the bolt was not a natural occurrence. This was elemental magic of the oldest form, a herald to all that might comprehend that a great event was afoot. The lightning announced a night that was unique among all others. The earth and the seasons were signaling that ancient prophecies were at hand!

He cursed his enemies above the din of the unearthly storm that swam with growing intensity about him, bending the trees and tossing loose leaves and twigs across the darkened field in a violent shower of debris. He was shaking with excitement now as his apprehension was replaced again with the fire of his ambitions. He bared his teeth and whirled about in swift circles, looking anxiously for The Sign as he spat out his venom to the rising wind.

He began to roar into the winds as they rose to gale strength. The gusts whipped at his form and caught the folds of his cloak like a sail, pushing him backwards. Nothing do you know of the land…Nothing! he screamed to the unhearing ears of those he despised, his words and the harsh cackle of laughter that followed were drowned in the howling tempest. Your age has passed! The birth of your last days is at hand!

His thoughts raced as he envisioned his long-awaited vengeance. He would show the denizens of the world the darker nature of the power that made their feeble lives possible. He would come to them as a storm of fire and death. He would drink their terror and laugh at their torments. He would…

He ceased his rant abruptly, his shout trailing off as his eyes locked upon a fierce blue arc that raced from the sky and struck the woods beyond in a crashing shower of sparks. The ground shook as if a comet had been thrown to earth to give him the marker he sought. He moved his head trying to peer around the trees obscuring his view and began moving towards the glow. The lightning had struck within the line of pines beyond the brook with explosive force and ignited a blaze that was burning intensely among the trees. There were flickers of light visible only in blinking patches through the nearer pines and a blue glow at the tree tops. His ears rang from the great boom of thunder that had followed the streak but he was scarcely aware as he propelled himself towards the faint firelight. His uncaring body stumbled as he waded through the brook, hands instinctively reaching out to break his fall and scraping on the rock and pebbles of the bed. He ignored the pain and scrambled to his feet, the mountain water dripping off his face and clothing, and continued towards the small flickers of blue-white flame.

His uncaring hurtle into the dark forest made him clumsy and hidden stones and roots tripped him. Thicker limbs that he blindly crashed into felled him several times, but with each fall he sprang to his feet ignoring the sting of a dozen cuts to his flesh, his eyes focused upon the blaze before him. He burst through a last patch of pines and fell to his knees, panting like a dog in a small clearing not forty paces across.

Before him was The Sign, a withered tree awash in flames. Its wide hollowed trunk gaped open more than a foot and its limbs stretched outward and upward as if howling a protest to its consumption by the fire. It stood in the clearing’s center, blazing in a fire that made no sound, gave no heat and burned without scent or smoke as if it flamed in a dream.

He did not hesitate now. His whole being was committed upon success or death as he came forward, breathless and stumbling, to the tree. He paused once before it, staring into the bold conflagration with awe and doubt. Then, closing his eyes for a single moment to pray for whatever redemption might still be left for him, he stepped resolutely into the raging flames to fulfill the prophecy and thrust both arms to his elbows into the trunk engulfed in tongues of eldrich red, orange and blue fire.

Like a shroud the flames enclosed him, roiling as if they possessed sentience and the desire to destroy him. The fire burned him within and throughout as no blaze of wood could. He could feel the enchanted inferno gnaw his arms and torso as he was consumed. Searing heat engulfed him and he could smell his flesh burning.

With a colossal effort he mustered his formidable will to the task. He commanded his body, searing with unspeakable agony, to reach deeper within the open maw of the trunk. His hands searched as the blaze roared about him, tearing at him like the claws of ravening beasts as he gritted his teeth against the pain. The inferno swallowed his clothing, his flesh, his hair and his face but still he would not retreat. He felt the moistness of his eyes boil and sizzle as the flames stabbed viciously into his brain. In that part of him that still knew mortality he could sense the near-fleshless bones of his arms charring and igniting like kindling. He tried to close his scorched lidless eyes against destruction and failing shook his head violently from side to side, trying to ward off the flames blackening and stripping his flesh. His body was near revolution against his will, seeking to pull itself back from the magically spawned blaze when his searching hands felt something within the center of the trunk. Its smoothness was alien within the hollow of the tree and was soothing to his troubled touch. Pain receded from his ravaged arms as his wanting fingers gripped the object. The First Talisman, it’s here! His thoughts rejoiced. I have the staff at last!

Pain and desperation merged with ambition and madness as his hands closed around what he had sought for decades. Realizing only at that moment that he must escape the flames surging about him or be destroyed at the moment of his victory, he pulled at the rod within to extract it. It resisted his tug, but he braced himself, the flames still tearing at his frame like the claws of an enraged bear and pulled mightily, his tortured body entirely ablaze with mystic fire. He strained with all he possessed to free his prize from the hollow tree and himself from the harm he had inflicted upon his bones and flesh in acquiring it.

With a last, great heaving effort he pulled free of the blackened trunk with such force that he recoiled several paces and fell on his back. The fall stunned him and he was barely aware of the fire receding from the tree, withdrawing within its blackened form as if it swallowed into the trunk. The flames died, flickering slowly into small licks of blue and then gradually into nothing, leaving him to lie whimpering in pain, ribbons of smoke and steam rising from his ravaged body into the cool night sky. His chest heaving, straining to draw acrid breath as he tried to recover a measure of strength as night reclaimed its hold upon the world, and he was enveloped in both the cloak of darkness and his own unconsciousness.

He was unsure how long he’d lain in the meadow drifting in and out of awareness, but when he roused himself, it was still black night. He raised himself on one elbow and looked about him, wincing as daggers of pain tore into every part of him. He remembered with terror that his eyes had bubbled away in the fiery trial at the tree and yet he could discern dim shapes and shadows about him. Not knowing if this was true sight or only the memory of his vision, he looked up.

Stars! There were stars.

The sky was clear and a multitude of lights were visible in the moonless sky but their flickering pinpoints did not lend enough illumination to see far or with much detail enclosed as he was in the pines. He could barely make out the husk of the tree from which he had drawn his prize, only the bare reaching limbs discernible scratching upward at the night.

The staff! he cried hoarsely and, rolling over onto his knees, flailed blindly in the grass until his groping hand rested upon it. He staggered to his feet, the pain of his exertions torturing him still, and began to stumble back in the direction he’d come towards his small camp.

Aside from the pain which stabbed at him like a dull sword, he felt as if the ordeal had kneaded him like clay and transformed him. The shards of his recent torture made it difficult to focus his thoughts and he proceeded groggily, as one coming out of a deep sleep. Despite his extensive studies, the culmination of which led him into the Virfrostler and the ancient prophecies, he had been unprepared for the agony he endured to acquire his goal. Nor was he prepared for the physical drain it would demand from him to grasp and pull free his plunder. The act had consumed him completely and the walk back to the larger clearing was slow and staggeringly painful. He paused several times along the way to catch his ragged breath. Occasionally he raised his trophy in the blackness as if he could look upon it in the dark. He touched it lightly, running his hands along its smooth length and damned the night for its lack of light to view his trophy. Then with the very thought, the sockets of his eyes tingled as if he’d stared into the sun.

He tried to close them against the sudden brilliance, his brain not yet accepting that he possessed neither eyes nor eyelids and braced for the pain that he knew must come. Yet there was none! A tingling like submerging in cold water flooded him and his aches of moments ago dissipated in the chill.

Cautiously, he focused his vision and moved his head downward to The Staff he held in his hands.

I can see it! He thought. At the moment that he made his half-mad plea for sight the woods about him had become illuminated in a red hue. He could feel the magic flowing around and within him. The Dark Sight, he murmured to himself in awe. Such a spell had eluded him for ages and now it had become his for nothing more than the asking, his because he held the staff in his hands.

Only the start! He growled. The words were cracked and broken as though torn from his throat. Oh wonders and wonders yet to come!

He roared into the dark heavens, his toils and pain forgotten. His shriek of victory echoed his malevolence like ripples in a pool sending deer hundreds of yards from him into flight. In the distance wolves, their senses alerted to danger, fretfully howled their cries at the sky.

When he staggered clear of the woods, returning to the meadow where he had camped he turned his face to the sky. The evening, which had boiled into a swirling maelstrom during the enactment of the magical prophecy, had returned to its proper luster. The starlight, away from the obstruction of the trees was sufficiently bright for him to look down at last upon the Staff of Power without the aid of his newly acquired spell of vision. His sight functioned normally, although he could feel an unpleasant throbbing, something oddly akin to but clearly different from a common headache. A dull tenderness taunted his senses from just behind the small twin sockets where his vision would reside. He ignored it with a pain-spiked grimace and examined his reward.

Its black lacquered wood was smooth and shone as though glass. He slid his hand down along its tapered length to the lower end, capped with a lustrous white point of fine silver. There were ancient symbols inscribed upon this cap. Some he recognized from his long studies as marks of power yet many were completely foreign to his eyes. At the wider head of the long staff was a second silver cap, carved with exquisite detail and marked with grooved settings that were obviously for the three other talismans spoken of in the tomes; the ruby, the sapphire, and the pearl. He contemplated a moment on this triumph. The seeds of his ambition planted long before, had borne monumental fruit. True…all true, he muttered.

In his cradled hands lay The Staff of Power, called The Earth Talisman by the elves. But beyond granting him an awesome augment to his wizardry, he knew little of the full capabilities of the staff. He managed to learn its origin and the nature of its power but so much had been lost throughout the ages that he would have to discover for himself how to call forth its power and harness it to his will. Above all a single certainty echoed again and again in his thoughts. His possession of the magic stave validated the legends.

I hold the truth of it in my hands. He thought to himself. It exists and so must the others. Once Fire Water and Air are within these grooves I shall have strength to wield power over nations—Lord of all the lands!

His hands lovingly caressed the wood of the pole, probing gently at the edges of the small notches where the missing gems belonged. He rested the point of the staff on the ground and caressed the top with both hands. The staff’s height came to just beneath his chin, its cap securely fixed to the wide head of the wood with gold nails and powerful enchantments that he could feel even before he raised his fingers to gingerly touch it. As a test, he tentatively uttered a simple incantation, a Phrase of Calling. The staff reacted immediately shimmering in blue and yellow coils of light, eerily illuminating the trees around him and making his hands and arms tingle numbly as if he had plunged them in icy water. It was only at that moment that he noticed his hands and arms, and his soaring thoughts fled as if driven away with a whip.

Both arms were charred black and stripped nearly of all flesh. His mouth opened in mute horror as he beheld his condition, but realized that the two limbs were fully animate and functioning without pain or inhibition. Despite his alarming appearance, it occurred to him that the agonizing pain of the night’s endeavor had receded. He ran his blackened hands along each arm and judged that the damage to his mortal flesh ran to his shoulder. His terror subsiding slightly he cautiously touched his face and winced at the sharp pain this caused. Gradually he began to explore his features more completely with the tips of his bony fingers. He required no looking glass to detect the toll that the effort had taken. He returned to the stream bed he had crossed on the way to the burning tree and gazed into the flowing water. His Dark Sight responded instantly to his will and made the reddened countenance that stared back at him from the water all the more frightening to behold. He recoiled from the image that greeted him in shock and despair. Slowing, as if creeping up on his own reflection he looked back into the stream and peered anew at his visage.

His once-handsome face had nearly been consumed by the blue fires that had ignited the tree. He could feel the charred bone hard against his fingertips. His cheek bones jutted out cadaverously against what remained of his flesh giving him the appearance of a ghoul. The scorched flesh that remained felt so fragile and wasted that he was certain the slightest pressure of his fingertips would puncture it as easily as the ancient parchments he had studied.

His eye sockets were horribly misshapen, with two gaping holes sunk deep within his skull. From within these black wells brilliant flashes burned with the awful intensity of crimson flame. He thrust back his hood to see that his hair now lay in ragged wisps about his charred and blackened skull. Shards of black ragged flesh clung in tatters at his neck and shorn ears.

What have I done?! Thoughts screaming he raised his hands to his ravaged face. Despair wracked his frame as the cost of his deeds assailed what was left of his sanity, pounding and shaking his brain like maddened waves upon a shore.

But whether through the machinations of madness or reason, as swiftly as the tide of his fear rose it receded. It was as if a voice of coldest logic had whispered into the remains of his ears. Had I not traded the greatest portion of my humanity already? He asked. Had I not ceased to be a man in most things save flesh and memory long before this night? The price for The Staff was the appearance of a man and little more. What is that against what I have just achieved?

Within the dungeon of what remained of his soul, the desolate and tortured prisoner that was his humanity shrieked its damnation. But Locke did not acknowledge the captive’s existence, having purged himself of such failings by its incarceration long before.

He was aware that from this night onward he would never pass unnoticed among mortals, save perhaps the witless or blind. He cared not. Decades before he had lost the option to walk anonymously for long among many races, the faerie in particular.

No sooner had he reminded himself of the magic folk, than any thought of regret was displaced by his consuming hatred. Whatever disguise or shield he created the faerie or certain talented men and dwarves would sense and eventually recognize the dark magic within him. The realization of his powers would come swiftly, and just as swiftly, they would seek to destroy him. When discovered in his fledgling days, he would flee as a thief. In later years, as his skill and powers increased, he would slay the most impetuous of his pursuers. Yet in the end, it was always Locke that would have to move on.

But he sensed that the blessings of this evening had changed that forever. Up to this hour, he would have avoided the notice of mortals out of prudent fear of his own destruction. But now, at this new awakening he sensed a coursing power that made him feel as if he were a match for armies.

The staff had heightened and magnified his already considerable skills, giving him night vision and the ability to live beyond the destruction of his flesh. He knew its acquisition would provide him such protections, but realized that he would require time to learn the full extent of his new-found power. He could feel the untapped energies flowing from the staff through him. Its power was his to command and he need only learn what to demand of it. Time, He hummed, his blazing eyes fixed upon the staff. Time to determine the locations of the other talismans, and then I cast my shadow over the world.

He paused to contemplate, nurturing the seedlings of a grand plan. He had achieved the first objective and only now could he let his thoughts wrap themselves around the next phases of his designs.

There were many races of the earth now and so many of these were suspicious, envious or hateful of others. To rule all he would, at least temporarily, require the use of allies and would need to set in motion schemes to bring some of the kingdoms