The Azure Wizard (9 page)

Without turning Scarlet simply rose from her sitting position on Ethan’s prone form and stood fully erect on the bed, her masterfully-crafted blade still gripped firmly in her left hand. “I thought I smelt the stench of a Forester in the taproom,” she sneered before finally turning to face the intruder, “And it, of course, would be you, O’Dell, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course, you loathsome beast, it’s always me,” returned the shadowed figure in the threshold of the room.

At that he advanced further into the room and the moonlight shone upon him. It revealed a man of Greenwellian blood perhaps in his early thirties, long wavy dark brown tresses and clear blue eyes on an angular lightly-tanned clean-cut face. He wore a long heavy hooded-cloak of dark brown wool, an oiled cuirass of dark thick hide upon the breast of which was emblazoned a sigil of a golden-yellow eagle, and boots and gauntlets of the same hide. A leather satchel hung across his torso, he wore tight trousers of dark brown leather, and in his fist was gripped a flawless silver hand axe with a leather wrapped shaft. The head of the axe was engraved with artfully-coiled ivy designs and bespoke prestige and status on an otherwise disheveled travel-worn individual.

After he stepped forward, into the center of the small chamber, Scarlet leapt from the bed, landing before the Forester of the Three Baronies. Ethan moved very slowly trying to roll from the bed as combat ensued.

Scarlet lunged forward with her curved short sword and O’Dell expertly parried it with his hand axe. After parrying two identical rapid diagonal slashes O’Dell went on the offensive, swinging his hand axe horizontally from right to left. The incredibly-swift attack slashed across Scarlet’s firm stomach, spilling oily black blood across the old hardwood floor.

Scarlet howled as she stumbled backwards and collapsed to the floor. The howl was in a voice unlike any human tone Ethan had ever heard. It sounded more akin to the cry of wounded wolf or bear, or some hideous conglomeration of the two, and it racked him with fright. As she clutched her gaping wound on the floor and struggled to get to her knees O’Dell darted past her and pulled Ethan from the bed, slinging him over his broad shoulders. The Forester turned on his heel and charged back towards the chamber’s doorway. En route he chopped the rising woman in the skull with his hand axe, splattering a cascade of her black blood up his bare arm to the shoulder.

The Forester, with Ethan in tow, ran across the hall into Scarlet’s open inn room and continued sprinting. He jumped up onto the perfectly-dressed bed and used its bounce to launch him through the window that was placed in the wall at the head of the bed. The two crashed through it, landing on the awning of the Deephollow Inn above the inn’s entrance in a shower of glass. They tumbled down the steep incline of the thatched awning and rolled from the end, crashing one after the other onto the bald dirt lane that coiled through the village.

By now, Ethan’s anxiety no longer crippled him physically, and combined with the fall and the night’s deadly turn of events the storyteller was urged to flee the village of Deephollow as fast as his legs could carry him. He took off, naked as a newborn baby, into the dark pitch forest south of the settlement in the coming twilight. O’Dell grunted as he shot up from the glass-strewn ground and took off after Ethan, vanishing too into the mouth of the wood. Though Ethan was a very fast lithe individual, especially for a Vharian, the well-muscled legs of the athletic Forester of the Three Baronies easily caught up to him in their race through the shadowed mighty oak trunks that held the canopy of the forest up like so many pillars.

As the two dashed deeper into the forest a horrid roar screamed into the surrounding thicket from the village of Deephollow.

“What in Illumis’s name is wrong with Scarlet?” cried an exhausted Ethan as he and O’Dell charged through the thick oak forest. The rising sun peaked over the horizon and illuminated the forest floor, breaking through the morning mist, and it shone brightly on the left sides of the two men. Both had been running for over an hour and were drenched in sweat. Ethan remained completely naked, having left his satchel and clothes in his inn chamber where he was sleeping when he was attacked by the woman he knew as Scarlet.

“Who’s Scarlet?”

“The woman you chopped into like firewood!” exclaimed Ethan before he stumbled and fell into a stand of thick ferns.

As Ethan cursed himself and started to stand up O’Dell, panting and exerted, turned and jogged back to the storyteller and reached into his full satchel. “No, don’t get up, kid. I’m tired of staring at your pale ass. Put these on.”

Ethan caught a pile of wrinkled clothes, a light green linen shirt with a tie-up collar and a pair of dark brown linen trousers, which were tossed to him by the Forester. “Do you need to wear my boots, kid? How are your feet holding up?” asked the Forester.

As Ethan sluggishly slid into the clothes he wearily replied, “In my homeland I rarely wore boots in the warmer seasons. My feet are fine, Sir.”

“Alright, as to whom that lady was that I chopped into like firewood, well, firstly it was no lady.”

“I beg to differ,” returned Ethan as he stood and began to tie up the collar of the loose-fitting shirt. The two were somewhat different in size with O’Dell being about six feet tall and composed of a somewhat muscular figure, but he must have worn his clothing kind of tight for they almost fit the skinny form of Ethan.

O’Dell put his back to a mossy old trunk of a wide oak, its upper portions having been rotted away after a lightening blast or some such trauma. He still held his silver hand axe in his fist and sent wary searching eyes back to the north into the woods they had been running through, a maze of solemn old trunks shrouded in morning sunlight and mist. He explained in a vacant voice with eyes that never left the north, “That monster was neither woman nor man. It takes the form of anyone whom it kills. It is known as the Troll, an agent created by Illumis’s foul Wizards in the Ancient Age to infiltrate the ranks of rebels and loyalists to Lady Quinn. It has lived for more than a thousand years in the Three Baronies, still murdering and slaying and assuming the shapes of its victims.”

“But Wizardcraft powers and Wizards aren’t real! Such things are just myth!”

O’Dell only smirked and shook his head, dark sweat-drenched hair hanging limply. “No, kid, they aren’t myth anymore than Lady Quinn is a myth. Wizardcraft did exist long ago, and Wizards themselves once walked the land. The Troll is proof of that.”

“Why did she, I mean it, want me?”

“Perhaps it saw something in you that it wanted for itself. You see, the Troll first bathes in the blood of its victim, enabling it to assume its shape, and then it devours the victim’s heart. Once it eats the heart it learns the talents of its victim, thus becoming a more skilled warrior or more knowledgeable. That woman you called Scarlet, that was only her last victim. There have been thousands of other shapes it has taken, tens of thousands perhaps. Only the Troll knows how many for sure. This latest form it has taken is the form of a wandering minstrel that was discovered slaughtered in her inn room in Breckyn’s Call.”

Ethan absorbed this revelation. So that was why she was so keen on avoiding the settlements upon the road. She was afraid of being recognized, especially in Breckyn’s Call.

“How did she know your name?” asked the storyteller.

O’Dell sighed and then continued, “We have a history, that beast and I. You see, even though it sometimes pursues other victims to extend its repertoire of skills, at its heart it still follows its same quest, assigned to it by the Wizard Emperor himself at the end of the Ancient Age. It still seeks to exterminate those loyal to Lady Quinn, the Foresters of the Three Baronies.”

“But still, how did it know you personally?”

“I was getting to that so be quiet and let me talk, kid. Also keep your voice down. It knows me because I’ve been assigned to personally hunt it down. For about ten years now I have done nothing else except pursue the Troll, tracking it from Woodend on the border of Wendlith to the summit of Startouch Peak in the Vhar Mountains and back again. The Troll and I have had our fair share of encounters with one another and we hate each other equally. It knows me about as well as I know myself anymore.”

“Well, it is dead now, right? You hewed it with your axe, in the head even!”

“And I have done much worse to it many times before and it to me. Yet it still stands. It is only weakened by weapons, not ever slain by them as far as I can tell. Its wounds begin to close up and mend themselves before your very eyes. That is the other aspect of my assignment. I must find out how to slay the Troll. You heard it roar in anger as well as I heard it when we fled Deephollow. Even now it is pursuing us.”

Ethan sighed as he put his face in his hands. After a moment he said, “What now?”

“Well, I’m returning to our headquarters in Greenwell City for supplies and a little rest. What about you? Judging by your accent you’re a Vharian, right? What in Lady Quinn’s name were you doing in the village of Deephollow on the East Road? That’s near the center of the barony!”

“I too am en route to Greenwell City. We were taking a shortcut proposed by that monster. I have left my homeland and now I …”

“Yes?” questioned O’Dell impatiently.

“I am seeking to enlist in the Foresters of the Three Baronies.”

O’Dell turned his head and looked the storyteller from head to foot and back again to his face, and he smirked, “Good luck with that, kid. But first we have got to get there, and no easy task that is.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Ethan as he nervously picked at a piece of bark.

“Well you are going to have to keep up with me, but we are going to make all haste southward for about one-hundred and twenty-five miles to Greenwell City. The route is completely uninhabited by people and is naught but wild dark forest. If we keep at a very good pace we can make it home in a week.”

Ethan moaned in sarcasm, “Wow, this was some short cut.”

“Don’t move, Ethan.”

Ethan stopped in mid step at the serious tone of O’Dell’s voice as the pair of them marched through a patch of dewy plush ferns that covered a sweeping vale between a pair of gentle wooded hillsides. Interspersed among the long grasses and ferns were countless violet wildflowers, and in the morning sunlight the wide sylvan meadow in which they found themselves echoed a more natural primordial time. O’Dell and Ethan were only two days north of Greenwell City, the largest city in all of the Three Baronies. But still no signs of human habitation existed in these forestlands. The only sounds to be heard at all, aside from those introduced into this immaculate environment by the intruding humans, were those of the morning songbirds flavoring the morning with their assortment of ballads. Thus Ethan was a bit confused and alarmed when O’Dell spoke to him.

“What’s wrong?” inquired the storyteller with a confused voice.

“Woodfolk,” was all that O’Dell replied in a tone that sounded akin to the dreadful tolling of a chapel’s bell tower signaling a death.

Ethan knew of Woodfolk from a smattering of tales he had memorized as an adolescent, and all of them had been strewn with a strong horror element. From what he knew of Woodfolk, they were that a type of savage people not unlike the Berserkers of the Ice Wilds who remained wild and uncivilized, even well into the First Age. But whereas the Berserkers dwelt in the frigid far north of the Three Baronies, the Woodfolk wandered the deepest reaches of the Forests of Greenwell, in the heart of the land. Though Woodfolk hadn’t raided a settlement in nearly five centuries Greenwellians still feared them with an almost primal instinctual dread. They were seen as uncouth and barbaric.

O’Dell, his athletic form garbed in his Forester’s cuirass, dark woolen cloak, and trousers, strode passed Ethan’s frozen form. He didn’t draw his silver hand axe nor look around to the thick woods on either side of the wide vale. He simply walked forward, his long dark hair flowing down his back and shoulders. Once he was about two-hundred feet in front of Ethan he stopped and stood there alone in the high grass as some stoic statue of a Forester of the Three Baronies, a man of duty and utterly possessed of an infallible wild spirit. He shouted, “Em fro Wulduk!”

His deep Greenwellian voice echoed throughout the meadow that encompassed the saddle between the two hills and into the murky ancient woods beyond. Ethan didn’t relax a muscle in the slightest when no answer immediately came, but he did, in fact, tense considerably when a cry from the forests east of the vale returned some other verse in the same foreign tongue. Soon after, numerous men and women began to amble out of the surrounding trees enclosing in on the two companions. Though they showed no outward signs of hostility or aggression, Ethan was sure that within the barbaric bloodthirsty blink of an eye that could all completely change.

The Woodfolk possessed the same white skin color as the Greenwellian and the Vharian, if but a little more pale. Their hair, the same blondes, reds, and browns as the people of Greenwell and Vhar, was very long and tightly-braided, adorned with beads of colorful polished stones. The Woodfolk wore no clothes to speak of, breasts of the women and the genitals of both sexes revealed to all in the morning sunlight. Ethan had learned from some random bit of lore gleaned at one point or another in his life, though, that when the weather turned foul these tribal people produced garb made of animal furs and skins. All present in this scouting-party of about fifty individuals carried a weapon of some sort constructed of materials widely available to those who dwelt in the woodlands. There were spears, slings, clubs, hatchets, and daggers but where the blades would be forged of iron or steel in civilized lands they were instead made of chipped and sharpened stone.

The apparent leader of the party continued walking forward when the rest stopped less than a considerable distance from O’Dell and Ethan. She had long dark red hair gathered in a thick braid interwoven with long emerald-hued grasses that hung down to the small of her back. Her perfect athletic figure was covered in smooth alabaster skin and her naturally-pretty face with its vivid green eyes was speckled in childlike freckles.