Magic of Rindibar: Reawakening

By Ryan Hildebrand

It is the Fourth Age in the world of Rindibar. Magic is something more akin to myth and legend than fact. But as the events of the three novellas of The Magic of Rindibar: Reawakening unfold, we come to see that Magic is very real indeed.

Through characters like Jace Waters, Saphyr Claybourne, Frist Hart, Brad Drannen, and many others, we will discover a world that is about to be turned upon its head. Not only is the mysterious force known as Magic returning to Rindibar, but one particular individual is, unbeknownst to all, seeking to acquire and accumulate political power through the rapid advancement of technology. His actions will change Rindibar just as much as Magic.

The Magic of Rindibar:Reawakening, is a fantasy fiction book for late teen or young adult readers. It consists of three novellas, each of which focus on a different set of characters and locations within Rindibar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312383319

Book preview

Magic of Rindibar: Reawakening

The Magic of Rindibar: Reawakening

Copyright 2014 Ryan Hildebrand All Rights Reserved

The Pillar of Jeddel-Zu

Prologue

The fire burned small; compared to the bonfires of the weeks before it shined light like a shy child.  Could it be that even the fire was afraid of the forest?

If that was the case, Captain Vera wouldn’t be surprised.  After so much time out in the deep reaches of the Great Forest the soldier felt a little bit like a young child himself, oftentimes scared and almost always confused.  At the same time he felt like a very old man; he’d seen too much for his time.  Vera wished he could say the worst of it all was behind him.  He wished that the preceding week had been a time of slaps on the back, of good wishes and high hopes, a time filled with revelry for the task achieved.  But that was anything but true; these past weeks were turning out worse than the battle itself.  

It hadn’t taken the army of a hundred men long to find the place.  Their scouts and agents were among the best in Rindibar, and they’d collected information and accounts out ahead of the main party of knights.  Vera had heard numerous tales of the bushmen of the Grulon Desert, who could supposedly navigate through the desert blind and find water anywhere.  Nevertheless, the captain would take his scouts over the Grulon bushmen or anyone else any day.

Vera and his men were part of a proud fighting force called the Silver Knights.  In times long gone, the knights had specialized in fighting Magic.  In those days, each man had been well schooled in the study of Magic, each one trained relentlessly.  In Vera’s time, however, rogue Wizards, insane Sorcerers, and powerful Summoners seemed more like dreams than opponents.   

Captain Vera was middle aged, and old enough to know that the glory of the Silver Knights was behind them.  The knights had been created to fight against Magic and those who could wield it, the so called Of the Magic.  But those days were now buried in the past.  The Silver Knights no longer had their own men who were Of the Magic.  They no longer carried magical weapons and armor into their battles, items that, before Vera’s time, had been as much a part of the Knight’s repertoire as their muscles. 

Those days had been gone for a few generations.  A few of the men even believed that Magic was a falsehood, a story concocted by their great grandfathers.  To Vera there was no doubt; Magic had disappeared from the world. 

But Vera’s men didn’t need Magic to be kept busy.  Despite the fact that the Pellucian Lowlands were a remote backwater, Captain Vera hadn’t been surprised when General Rauls had taken the assignment; the leader of the Silver Knights was always ready and willing to display the prowess of his men.

Rauls told his subordinates, mainly his captains and majors, that tiny settlements north of Ovalay had been reporting strange occurrences in and around their woods.  Some of the lowlanders were spreading rumors that a magical fortress was being built deep in the Great Forest in the western reaches of Pellucia.  It was a request very much unlike the people of lower Pellucia, who almost always strived to remain isolated.

The men are growing lazy, Rauls had said.  We’ve been fighting bandits. Thieves with cloaks and daggers!  Bullies in plate mail!  Work for common law men!  No more of that; the Silver Knights have a real assignment now!  The Silver Knights will ride again!

A horse neighed somewhere outside Vera’s tent.  The soldier grabbed his sword and went outside.  The act was a mere formality, just an old habit that had been engrained in him over years of training and experience.  Vera knew that during the night and day he was safe.  Over the last few weeks he had learned that the time for hyper vigilance was in the twilight hours of dawn and dusk. 

He went back into his tent and sat down again, this time a bit closer to his tiny fire.  The summer was aging fast.  The locals down in the valley were getting restless; they were sending people every now and then to ask if things were safe again, if they were safe to hold their Autumn Festival. 

Vera scoffed at the notion.  A festival?!  He was up here in these horrible woods, doing a job that should have been the lowlanders’ to do, losing men left and right, and all they could ask about was their Autumn Festival?  Vera didn’t care how many autumns had passed since the festival was last interrupted or delayed. 

Indeed, the lowlanders seemed to be a strange lot.  Vera found them to be petty and primitive, but tough and gritty as well.  He admired their ability to live of the land in this isolated region, but at the same time, their silly traditions flew in the face of their knowledgeable and practical nature.   

The captain let himself relax a bit.  He’d been writing a letter to his wife, a process that he’d always leaned on when he was far from home; it kept him sane, kept his morale high, and it served to keep things in perspective and keep him focused.  But he’d been forced to put his quill down.  His marriage had seen more than a few difficult and dangerous expeditions over the years, but Vera had always found a way to grind the harshness from the letters.  He’d always been able to circumvent the horrors that he witnessed on the battlefield while still holding true to his experience. 

But never before had he struggled so mightily.  How could he possibly explain what had happened without terrifying his poor wife, when he himself was more terrified than he had ever been?

Finally, Captain Vera decided to go back to the beginning.

They’d begun the trek in Marc-Greno, following a trading caravan as it moved west from the coastal city.  After nearly two weeks they’d reached Gresbeek, the capital of the Highlands region.  The downhill part of the trip took another two weeks, but covered more ground than the first leg had, and the men soon found themselves surrounded by trees.  It was a sure sign that they had entered Pellucia. 

They’d turned north then, walking until they arrived at a tiny, nameless village just on the outskirts of the Great Forest.  The locals called the forest The Kinn.  It was Vera’s first encounter with the primitive lowlanders, and he wasn’t impressed; they had a name for the forest but not for their own village.

Vera picked up his quill again, thinking perhaps he’d found a way to navigate through the difficult part of his letter.  He thought back to the day they arrived on the edges of the forest.  Vera had been nervous and excited to arrive in person to the very area where the rumors had originated, but after travelling all that way he had found the locals acting completely normal.  He remembered thinking the rumors were untrue.  He had believed the Knights were chasing a ghost.

And after the first two days in the forest Vera was only more confident of such thoughts.  The landscape was easy and travel was light, and after so many dreary days on the road the men went into the forest with high spirits, the trees now sheltering them from the sun and wind that had assailed them over the course of their long journey.  The men sang songs as they made ground west.  Indeed, the Silver Knights were riding again!

Nobody had given the Sorcerers any second thought at that point.  If they were really Sorcerers, if they were really Of the Magic, they wouldn’t be secluding themselves in some remote corner of the world.  In everyone’s minds the Sorcerers were probably little more than crazy hermits brought together by some common goal.

The Knights talked amongst themselves as they made their way to and through Pellucia.  They passed stories of what powers the Sorcerers would wield.  Each one of the Knights had learned the history of their storied battalion.  They knew that their predecessors had fought Wizards who could manifest fireballs out of thin air, and Druids that could cause lighting to strike at will, and Necromancers who could raise the dead.  The men who fought under General Rauls, however, had seen nothing that compared with such things. 

On the third day the men finally met some resistance.  It came not from Sorcerers or any other villainous wielders of Magic, but from nature itself.  The band of men came up to a hill that rose up from the forest floor.  From talking to his scouts Vera knew that the locals referred to the feature as First Hill.  It turned out to be a mere bump in the road; only a few Knights wore heavy armor, and the men and their horses were in excellent physical condition.  The entire troop had gone up the hill quickly and down it just as fast, and with the hill behind them the men sung even louder than before.

Looking back, Vera had since decided that it was that night when things began to fall apart. 

The morning after the Knights mounted the small hill was a difficult one for all involved.  It dawned a day full of apprehension and doubt.  For just as the sun began rising through the tree-filled horizon, men began scattering into the woods, screaming and yelling as if they were on fire.  Each of the five men who deserted that morning was battle hardened.  They were all good soldiers, well tested and confident in their ability, and each was used to living and surviving in harsh lands far away from home.  Desertion was the only word Vera could use in that situation, but he knew the men weren’t deserting; they had taken off into the woods as if they were being chased by death itself, leaving their weapons behind in their haste. 

They were as scared as anyone Vera had ever seen.

Things only got worse from there.  As the men pressed through the forest Vera watched as men who usually ate like horses lost their appetites.  He watched men he knew to be great leaders, soldiers who raised the morale of all those around them, grow forlorn and become suddenly disinterested in the goal at hand.  Men became paranoid.  They started questioning their mission, and themselves.

And then the army had come to the second hill.  The locals had warned the Knights about it, and their words seemed true enough; indeed, the second hill made the first look like an insect mound. 

The hill was much too steep for horses, so the men left the animals at the bottom.  Rauls had led the men north for a bit in hopes of finding a way to circumvent the hill, but just as the scouts and locals had said, the hill seemed to extend north and south for quite a distance.  Climbing the hill had been arduous and time consuming.  One Knight lost his grip and fell, breaking his back.  Another man tore his knee to shreds when his foothold gave way.  Vera could only thank the stars that they completed the grueling and dangerous ascent before dusk.  He was sure that if they had waited another hour the entire expedition would have been lost.

The Knights had taken a short respite after conquering the hill.  It wasn’t long after they resumed their journey until they found the fortress. 

The place had turned out to be much different than what Vera would have expected, and in a way, the knights’ arrival was anticlimactic.  The fortress they had expected to find was really just a small, triangular structure built primarily of wood rather than stronger, fire resistant stone.  What really stood out though was that the entire two story structure was lofted off the ground, held about ten to twelve feet above the forest floor by three massive stone columns.  The masonry of the supports was incredibly detailed and ornate.  How the Sorcerers had found, constructed, or transported the pillars to the secluded area deep in the forest was a question that left Vera feeling uneasy.

The battle began almost immediately upon their arrival.  Rauls had announced that the men holding the fortress peacefully surrender for their crimes against the Pellucians.  No reply had been received, and thus, Rauls sent his men in.

The first part of the conflict was spent chasing things that weren’t there.  Men rushed to attack Sorcerers in the tree line only to have their enemies vanish.  Entire squads of soldiers began conducting their own independent actions only to be told later that the orders they were following had never been given. One of the Sorcerers, a man the Knights guessed was the enemy leader, could actually teleport from one place to another, oftentimes travelling large distances instantaneously.

But despite the fact that the Sorcerers could do little to directly harm Rauls’ men, the battle had quickly tilted out of the Silver Knights’ favor.  The conflict had started in the evening hours, and just like the previous evening, soldiers were inexplicably scattering into the woods.  The Knights outnumbered the small group of Sorcerers nearly twelve to one, but the edge dwindled as soldiers fled into the trees.  The Magic of the Sorcerers seemed to grow as the battle descended further and further into disorganized, frantic chaos.

The action had largely ceased by nightfall.  The Knights retreated a short distance from the fortress and regrouped.  Vera went out amongst them as he always did, doing whatever he could to lift their spirits.  When Vera walked amongst his men he’d hoped to see confident, stoic expressions.  He’d hoped to hear the men talking about the brothers they had lost, galvanizing their spirits and resolve.  He’d hoped to hear the widespread clinking and chinking sound of weapons and armor being repaired or sharpened.  Instead, Vera was greeted by silence.  Most of the men had their eyes fixed on the ground in front of them or into the fire they were sitting by.  Some studied their sword or spear or axe, their weapon of war, as if they were holding a useless stick.

Vera had asked Rauls about the possibility of retreating east of the large hill to regroup.  The subject instantly brought Rauls into a near rage.  He gave Vera a brief lecture about pride and tradition, and made it very clear that they were too close to restoring the glory of the Silver Knights for his captain to be talking about retreat.

Then, the General had left Captain Vera and gone through the camp.  The men stood up, listening as their general gave his wild (and final) speech, his voice booming through the trees as he prepared the men for an all-out assault on the fortress. 

But much to Captain Vera’s dismay, that attack began at the first light of dawn.  The column of Knights moved to attack the fortress.  General Rauls would personally lead the charge, and since the two Majors superior to Vera had already been killed, Rauls had mandated that Vera keep himself out of direct action.  So, Vera watched as a wave of Silver Knights rushed the fortress, its three white pillars standing out against the sea of green and brown.  He watched as the Knights suddenly began fighting one another, battling as if they had never met each other let alone fought alongside one another. He watched as Rauls’ own men, soldiers who had never faltered in their loyalty to him, cut him down with blades and ran him through with spears, ruthlessly attacking him like he was a wild animal. 

At that memory Vera winced a bit, not so much at the brutality of Rauls’ death, but because it had only been the beginning of treasonous acts that occurred in the battle.   In fact, any of the soldiers who had made it through the fight had been forced to kill one of their own.  Vera himself had put his war axe into the skull of Garret Junis, an enthusiastic and loyal man who had served under him for a year.  Garret was well versed with a sword but attacked wildly and savagely as if he’d never trained with the weapon in his entire life.

Vera realized that had been the moment when he’d discovered how greatly his underestimation of the Sorcerers and their fortress had been.

Finally, the Silver Knights had broken through; Vera wasn’t even sure how it happened.  A man named Raygan Twilleed had somehow infiltrated the fortress during the latter part of the battle and killed the leader of the Sorcerers, and with him the power of those remaining had begun to fade.  The surviving Sorcerers made no attempts to flee or bargain for mercy, and were quickly dispatched.

After the battle was over Vera had called for the man.  He didn’t recognize Twilleed’s name, and thought perhaps the man was a recent recruit to one of the other brigades.

When Twilleed had arrived in Vera’s presence, the Captain was more than a bit taken back.  Firstly, it was obvious that the man wasn’t a member of the Silver Knights.  He wore the typical lowland garb of tanned leather hides and moccasins rather than armor and boots.  

Where did you come from Twilleed? Vera had asked.

One of your men asked for a guide, was Twilleed’s response.  I know these woods well.

Despite the clothes he wore, it was clear that Twilleed wasn’t the typical lowlander.  His hair was long, very straight, and jet black.  It was held back from Twilleed’s face by a headband.  Vera supposed that was to keep the sweat out of his eyes, eyes that seemed eerily close to orange to the Captain.  A large part of Vera suspected that, under Twilleed’s headband would be pointy ears.  The Captain had seen a few elves in his time, but never thought he’d see one living in the forests of lower Pellucia. 

Vera wouldn’t have cared if Raygan Twilleed was a Half-Elf or a Tree Elf or Tall Elf or a person; it was quite possible that he had saved their entire campaign.  But when asked of his heritage Twilleed had simply said he had never met his parents, and had joined the Knights just south of Ovalay.  He’d apologized for his infiltration of the army, but Captain Vera could find no reason to raise anything but praise for the man.

Twilleed had turned down Vera’s offer to permanently join the Knights, but when the Captain practically begged him to stay on until they could totally destroy the fortress, Twilleed had reluctantly obliged.

It had been four days since Vera’s offer to Twilleed.  In those four days the Silver Knights had lost as many men as they had in the battle for the fortress itself.  It was in the gray hours of dusk and dawn when men would vacate their posts and flee into the woods. 

It was the screams that came reverberating out of the forest, screams that rose the hairs on Vera’s neck each and every time they occurred, that were the reason for the order he’d given earlier that day.

The thirty-four surviving members of the Silver Knights were to abandon any more attempts to remove the remaining pillar from the forest.  Vera knew the pillars were an important piece to the puzzle of this fortress, a place the Sorcerers had called Jeddel-Zu, and the Captain knew that getting some evidence back to civilization would be vital to understanding the Magic of the place.  But such plans eroded from Vera’s mind as the list of missing or dead soldiers increased. 

The first two pillars were easily removed; they were simply heated in two places and then broken, and could be carried any distance by a rotating squad of men.  But the third pillar seemed sturdier than the others, and heavier, and problems and oddities seemed to revolve around it like bees gathering near nectar.  Indeed, many of those who deserted the army following the siege of the fortress were soldiers who had been tasked with burning the pillar, or breaking it apart, or carrying it, or even patrolling nearby it.

Vera had stood by personally as the ground was dug up and the pillar was rolled into its resting place.  He was the commanding officer now that Rauls, Major Belk, and Major Heshen were dead, and it was important that the men see nothing but resolve and confidence in his demeanor.

So, Vera kept the things he’d been seeing to himself.  Since they’d gotten near to the second hill Vera had been seeing faces in the trees, the patterns of the bark twisting into threatening visages, obvious malevolence written all over their scowls and grimaces.  Vera did his best, as he stood there looking over his men, to make it seem like he wasn’t hearing whispers in the bushes, whispers of children begging him to leave the forest, leave the pillar.  A few times he even saw them; a little boy here and a little girl there, sweet, innocent, and in need of his help.  He pretended not to notice as creatures he had never known to exist attacked the children, biting them and chewing them, slowly disfiguring and mutilating them, torturing them, tearing them limb from limb as he watched.

No.  None of it was real.  The other men would have heard the screams of the children.  They would have seen the horror and tried to stop it.  But they didn’t, for these were just illusions in Vera’s own mind.  He knew that.  But the Sorcerers were gone!  So too was their fortress, much of it was little more than charcoal and dust now.

But the pillar.  The pillar remained. 

You cannot destroy Jeddel-Zu! one of the children in the treeline had said.  The child couldn’t have been older than eight, but he spoke with a strange tone of confidence.  His voice was very soft and quiet.  He walked barefoot in the grass.  One of his eyebrows was cocked up at Vera as he gave the Captain a sarcastic, almost arrogant expression.  A smile was on the little boy’s face, but it was very unpleasant to Vera; it seemed to the Captain that the child was not only privy to all the violence and death occurring in the woods, but that he was very happy about it as well.  Vera had only been marginally relieved when the little boy had walked behind a tree and then not come out the other side.  The child had been beckoning Vera to follow, but the Captain had simply turned and gone the other direction. 

Vera was eager to walk away from that memory.  He was eager to walk away from this land, forever.  He was glad that the third pillar was now buried in as much dirt and mud and earth as they could pile on top of it. 

Vera looked into his tiny fire as he thought back on everything.  He was holding the quill pen in his hand, but both remained motionless. 

Captain! came a voice from outside.  The scout to see you sir!

Vera stood up from his desk and left his tent.  Twilleed had arrived at Vera’s tent, just as he’d been asked to.  He and Captain Vera talked a bit about their next move. 

The pillar had been buried somewhere west of the large, nightmarish hill.  For now it seemed like the right course of action, for dusk had come and gone and the nightly terrors that coincided with that time of day hadn’t come.  The force of the Magic, whether it came from the Sorcerers or their fortress or the forest, seemed to be abating now.  Soon the remaining men would once again meet the smaller hill east of their current position.  From there they were as good as gone from these woods.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.  Captain Vera led his men out of the Great Pellucian Forest.  He would go on to a fairly normal military career, a career that would never again bring his path across anything like he had experienced in what would later become known as the Deep Woods. 

And Raygan Twilleed would never again find himself involved in the matters of Magic.  He would settle down and have a family, living quietly in the woods southwest of Ovalay.  A few generations later some of his descendants would find themselves in a difficult position with debtors, and would change their name to Tweed. 

Many, many years passed.  Years flew by into generations and generations eventually became centuries.  The names of Raygan Twilleed and MacKensor Vera were long forgotten.  The Third Age became a distant memory.  It was in 849 of the Fourth Age, nearly two thousand years after the Silver Knights completed their mission in the great northern forest of Pellucia, when the Magical force slumbering there awoke once again. 

Part One

About a month remained before autumn ushered in the change of the leaves in the Pellucian Lowlands.  The deep forests would soon begin their progression from shades of green to various hues of yellow, orange and red.  Each evening the sun would meet the horizon just a bit sooner, and the air would feel slightly chillier than that of the previous night.  The seasonal shift was noteworthy throughout the land, but in the local villages within the lowlands the change was particularly poignant. 

The villages of Lidden, Numa, and Ovalay sat in a narrow, thinly forested valley near the center of Pellucia.  The area and its inhabitants were somewhat different from much of the rest of the continent of Rone; while most of the continent’s population lived in larger cities that were networked together by trade caravans, the lowlands of Pellucia were somewhat isolated from surrounding areas, and compared to the city folk the lowlanders lived a fairly primitive existence. 

But it was an existence the lowlanders were proud of.  They lived off the land just as they had since their ancestors settled in the valley countless generations before, and although it could be dangerous and difficult, the lowlanders took great pride in their lifestyle of self-reliance. 

Geographical isolation played a large role in the continuation of the lowland culture.  Although travel wasn’t impossible it was often difficult.  The people of the Pellucian Lowlands didn’t need much from outside their area, and those in neighboring areas had little to no interest in rugged forested terrain.  Still, the lowlanders sometimes journeyed to the borders of their homeland to meet up with trading caravans.

To the west and north such travel was not possible; the western forests grew thicker and increased in elevation as one pressed in that direction.  Beyond, a branch of the Spirduk Mountains curved southward, almost hugging Rone’s western coasts, while the main body of the mountains rose up as a steep, impenetrable obstacle to the north. 

To the east was The Steps, an area of rugged, difficult terrain that was characterized by periodic and sudden changes in elevation.  It took several days by foot to complete the climb up The Steps to the Pellucian Plateau.  There, the lowlanders could meet trading caravans on their way to or from Pellucia, the capital city of the region. 

Lidden was the northernmost of the lowland villages.  The road between it and the village of Numa was little more than a well-beaten path through the forest.  As one progressed south the land gradually sloped downward.  Small streams became more prevalent.  At Ovalay the water became deep enough that larger canoes could be used.  Unlike