The Shrouded

By Tim Brewer

The once-verdant island of Tara'saigh is being rotted away to nothing by a sinister and deadly plague backed by swarms of demonic creatures eating anyone who survives the Blight. As it chews its way inexorably toward the Western Shores province, the armies of the hated Wytheran Church brace for impact, and a tiny band of starved youngsters wielding ancient, forbidden powers emerges from the eastern mists. They were brought together by a Tinker as his last gambit to stop his archrival from bringing an evil would-be god out of exile. The team: a Berserker who feels everything, an aloof, tattoo-covered elven Hunter, a beautiful Mage with more power than sense, a Wytheran Paladin suffering from a crisis of faith, a chill Druid, and an empty-handed, emotionless killer. Hopelessly outnumbered and reeling from recent events, can they survive their friends and enemies long enough to save the land?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643502410

Book preview

Face in the Sun

Chilled by the melting ice and snow that regularly smashed into the North Slope during the winter months, the Valkyr flowed clear and cold, southward out of the mountains to the sea. For much of its course the Valkyr served as natural border between the Western Shores province and the Shrouded Lands. Other barriers existed. These were mainly fueled by fear and religious superstition and the occasional war.

Will’s leather soled shoes seeped water onto the greens and browns of the mossy forest floor. Cold water dripped from his sandy hair and ran down his back. He knew he would catch hell for his incursion into the Shrouded Lands, not for swimming the often deadly Valkyr, but for getting his new shoes wet. He gazed up at the ancient and magnificent tree before him and knew that it was worth it. The tree towered over him; he couldn’t see the top. Will marveled at its girth. Nearly seven span if it was a king’s finger. Pale green moss and lichen grew heavy on its deeply gnarled bark. Never had he dreamed of such a thing in all of his ten summers.

Since swimming the Valkyr, Will had filled his lungs with the pleasantly earthy scents of conifer, moss, and rich, fertile soil. He didn’t understand why the village magistrate and even the priest, who always admonished them to work harder for the glory of God, would not allow them to farm east of the river. Yes, these were the Shrouded Lands, heavily forested and eternally cloaked in mist and fog, and haunted by all manner of evil creatures, but to Will’s youthful eye, this was fine, fertile land. Even so, part of him rebelled at the thought of putting it to the plow.

A new scent drifted to him on the warm autumn breeze—sharp and musky and dangerous. Will looked around, worried, then turned back to the river. The hair on the back of his neck began to stand up. His courage failed him and he ran for the river, not with the ungainly gait of youth, but with the strides of a practiced runner. His feet made little sound on the heavy litter covering the ground. Behind him he could hear something large pounding after him. He ran harder.

The river’s edge was almost in sight when four long claws tore through his back and shoulder, spinning him to sprawl in a rare sunny spot on the forest floor. Will numbly watched his bloody arm bounce off of a nearby tree and land a half span away. As he lay there on his back, Will noticed the smell of warm pine needles and his own blood. A blast of fetid breath brought his eyes back to center. A massive dog-like mouth, filled with savage teeth, hovered over him as if considering which end to start eating him from.

Rather than finish the boy off, the creature shuddered and seemed to lurch to the left before collapsing. Will could see several arrows fletched with raven feathers protruding from the beast’s side in a tight group. A slim young man in dirty buckskins appeared out of the gloom and seemingly slit the beast’s throat with his bare hand before kneeling at the dying boy’s side.

Sorry I’m too late for you, lad.

Who? bubbled faintly past the boy’s pale lips.

Arn, he said as Will’s final shallow breaths faded away.

My name is Arn, he said as he gently closed the boy’s eyes but left him lying where he’d fallen. Arn moved to the side of the great beast. He regarded the bloody holes left by the now-faded arrows; only the barest hint of magic suggested they had ever existed. Only the one that had carried the magical charge remained. He fingered the black fletching briefly before pulling the shaft out in reverse with one fluid motion. A small gout of blood and tissue came with the heavily barbed head as it pulled free. Arn flicked it free of most of the gore then tossed it into the bushes.

A slender hand plucked it from the air. An elven woman, her face swirled with tattoos, stepped into view. You knew I was there. What gave me away?

Arn grinned and gently tapped the side of his nose. She snorted, The wind is blowing the wrong way for that, smart ass. Besides, even on my worst day I could never out stink a droge.

I know you’ve always got my back, Andhra. Suddenly somber, Arn gestured to the arrow, Sadly we weren’t in time today.

Lost in thought, Arn moved to pick up the boy’s arm. There were so very many dead. He’d seen villages burned and trampled or simply abandoned with the dead lying where they had fallen: huge, ancient forests laid to waste all across the Shrouded Lands. And worse yet further to the east in the elven lands, as Andhra could attest.

At least the boy had died innocent with his face in the sun and his killer following close on his heels. Arn hoped his own death would be half so fine as that. Someday. After he had sent every last one of the Blight minions back to whatever hell they’d come from.

Andhra watched Arn retrieve the boy’s arm and lay it next to his body. With a rather distant sadness she wondered if she would ever be able to return to her home far to the east and do the same for her family. She wondered if she’d even be able to find their bodies after so much time. It had been a little less than four years since she had fled her homeland, but it felt like a black lifetime ago.

Shaking herself free of the past, she stepped back into the forest. His village is probably on our way. Do you want to try to find his family?

Arn thought for a moment, then said, And tell them what? That their son was killed in a land they fear by a creature their priest tells them doesn’t exist, which was in turn killed by an Elf wielding magic? Both of which their batshit religion also says don’t and can’t exist?

She nodded, Yeah, you’re right. I just wish that … Her voice trailed off.

I know, Andhra. He squeezed her shoulder. Someday we’ll go find what happened to your family and lay to rest anything needing it.

She trotted off down the path, avoiding his eyes. Thank you for saving the arrow. I would have been forced to leave it.

Following, he said, You are most welcome, Andhra.

Their mood lightened quickly for it was not their way to dwell long on the dead, especially in these dark times.

The Grove

Jude’s head spun and his senses blurred. His sense of touch seemed to expand exponentially, and at the same time all of his other senses collapsed in on him. He felt as though he were being pulled through a thin tunnel like an earthworm caught in a robin’s jaws. He was flowing, as the ancient Druids called it, from one location to another.

The sensation of touching the earth swelled until he could perceive the squirming, crawling presence of the thousands, perhaps millions, of creatures living in the soil along the leagues upon leagues of distance that Jude’s person now encompassed. He was buried alive in a writhing, airless mass. He desperately clung to his last breath of air.

Jude became aware of a burning sensation along the leading edge of his perception. The crawling and burning sensations grew in his mind, obliterating proportions, then collapsing to nothing as his other senses returned like the snap of a bowstring. Jude peeled free of the chelating grasp of the branches and fell to his hands and knees in a strange forest. He gasped for air, groaning loudly, painfully and vomited on the forest floor.

After a few moments he rolled back into a kneeling position, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. By Ashanti’s sweet womanhood, that was unpleasant. He paused then laughed at himself. Starting to sound like Tor, he muttered.

Standing, Jude turned to the tree in whose embrace he’d just been. The sacred Viltau tree was in sad shape; its simple, serrate leaves on its entire east facing side were withered and brown with nearby leaves turning yellow and spotty. Other trees in the vicinity were completely dead. Jude pushed his magic aura to touch the Physical around him and could feel the encroaching disease. He realized the burning sensation he’d felt while flowing was where his consciousness had brushed up against edges of the Blight.

He considered the ramifications of doing something about it and cast them aside. This was a Viltau tree, sacred to Druids. He couldn’t simply leave it to die, not when he could give it a fighting chance.

Jude gathered residual manna, as much as he could from the Viltau itself then from other living sources. He shaped a spell that would drive back the disease and heal the tree then released it. He was gratified to see almost-immediate results. Yellow leaves faded into light green, brown leaves to yellow. Fully dead leaves dropped off, pushed away by new growth. Jude turned a slow circle, watching the expanding event horizon of his curative spell.

Halfway around, Jude stopped and stared. Before him stood a cut basalt column with archaic Tara’saigh script on it. Approaching, he realized there was text above that had to be Elvish script. A quick study revealed the pillar to be the southern gate to an ancient human/elven city called Veratrace. In the distance Jude could see remnants of buildings and broad avenues. His heart ached to explore it, to steep himself in the history, but there just wasn’t time. His friend Tor was ahead him by a day at least. If he and his friends could stop the Blight and make it to spring, perhaps he could come back and explore to his heart’s content.

Jude took at last look toward the Viltau tree. It looked vibrant and healthy again. However, the overshadowing scent of rotting vegetation reminded him that his effort was a temporary fix at best—he simply couldn’t gather or control enough residual manna to affect the whole island, not even a fraction, and the disease would only come back. But there was a chance he and his comrades could find the cause of the Blight and stop it before the Blight overtook the tree completely. He harvested more manna and sent another curative pulse toward the tree.

On a whim, Jude brought up his Mage sight and looked at the rotting edge of the Blight. Its advance had slowed even where his restorative spell had not reached. Starving it of the residual manna produced by living things had weakened it. Ishcanian, the so-called peace god, forbade the use of magic and yet Saltraeon was using it to fuel his Blight.

Thinking of what else this might imply, it occurred to Jude that the same technique might work in reverse. If he could fashion a reverse Blight spell that independently used residual manna to counter the Blight, it might prove to be effective in slowing the Blight’s progress. For the moment though he could intervene personally. Jude concentrated, focusing his mind on the Blight perimeter and began to pull manna from the new growth he had just spawned. Unwilling to use it to cure more land lest the new life produce enough manna to feed the Blight again, he channeled the manna into a burst of wind, centered on himself and blowing out in all directions. The wind swept an area nearly a King’s league in diameter free of decrepit debris.

Jude looked again at the edge of the Blight. The magic signature of the Blight was no longer visible to his mage eye. Satisfied that he had done all he could, Jude stepped onto the overgrown, but still serviceable, road that led west out of the city gate. His brain grinding away at how to create a self-propagating spell to stop the Blight, he started to jog down the road but stopped when something tangled in the roots of a blown-over tree caught his eye. As he drew near, he saw that it was an ugly, bone-white sword. Thinking of his friend, Tor, he climbed up and disentangled the weapon before continuing on.

On a bald knob, nearly a league down the road, he cast a locator spell to find out where he was in the world. To his dismay he learned he was over five hundred leagues east of where he had started this morning. There was no way to catch up to Tor without going back through the Viltau. Jude turned with a groan and jogged back into the dead forest.

Under the Viltau, another plant caught his eye. Somehow protected by the sacred green, a black root had survived beside the path and been revitalized by his earlier spell. Without hesitation, Jude used trickle of manna to loosen the soil and uproot the weed. He harvested the bulbous, bitter roots. The Shrouded were able to shrug off most disease and many poisons, each in their in their own special way, but more mundane people and animals could not. As a Druid, it behooved him to maintain a supply of medicinal plants for those in need.

Barbarians Run Wild

Hundreds of leagues away in the tawny foot hills of the Lookout Range on the far southwestern edge of the Mount Valkyr province, a wild young man clad in only a hide loincloth grunted in pain as one of his attackers, a man named Smits, broke a stout staff across his chest. The young man’s name was Torsten, as his attackers well knew after last night’s party. Normally he would have fought back, but he’d awakened from a drunken stupor tied to a tree and, as yet, was only annoyed.

Smits looked speculatively at the broken end of his staff. During his stint in the Church’s army he’d seen a similar punishment administered to a man for some infraction. That man had passed out immediately and had remained on light duty for nearly a month while his ribs healed. This youngster was either shockingly good at hiding his pain or was made of far sterner stuff.

He looked back at Tor, his eyes growing hard once again. You won’t be so tough when we get through with you, he snarled, jabbing the jagged end of his stick into Tor’s stomach. Smits smiled at the lance of pain that shot across the boy’s face.

Shared my fire and ale with you, and this is how you repay me?

Smits glanced at the bloody end of his staff. A just recompense for what you disease spreading barbarians have done to our land!

Tor raised an eyebrow. Recompense was a big word for the simple farmer Smits had made himself out to be last night. The morning light also revealed Smits to be surprisingly well armed. Tor concluded that he was most likely an agent of the Church sent to foment ill will toward the refugees fleeing the Shrouded Lands.

Tell me. How does a simple barley farmer come by so fine a sword as that? Tor asked, nodding to the weapon on Smits’s belt.

Smits bristled. Ishcanian provides for the faithful. He tossed the broken staff aside and scooped up Tor’s own sword, a worn, pitiful thing. "Tell me, how does a pacified barbarian such as yourself come by an illegal