Though it bore no thickness, somewhere in the great city of Lefebvre, street lanterns gave life to a soft, plump shadow in the Southeast section of the gigantic city. With absolutely no effort, it glided from structure to structure; noiselessly jumping to the ground and back up with each alleyway it passed. The shadow contoured itself to and perfectly imitated its surroundings, becoming a darker version of each object, door, and window along its path. It was at ease with walking the streets at night. It moved forward without any pause in its purposeful strides.
Its owner had an unscheduled appointment in one of the back alleys that littered the streets with neither rhyme nor reason to their location. The silhouette did not feel disheartened or saddened with the alleys that had thus far turned up empty. It came here expecting a possible delay in the meeting because it knew the exact alley changed night to night. The shadow had years of experience in this particular subject, so to speed up the hunt, every now and then the silence of its movement was broken by a very intentional scuff of soft silk. The sound was not unlike what a slipper would make on the stoned lined street. The sound of a scuffing slipper would normally attract the wrong type of people on these streets at night. A noise one would try not to make but in this case, the wrong type of people were what was wanted.
It found that the silken slipper “cat-call” worked well in this line of work. Largely, only the higher class of life wore slippers – and generally, the higher class of life was smarter than to be out on the streets of Lefebvre at night. With plenty of patience and more than enough hours left to the night, it had faith that this cat and mouse game would be finished before light broke over the horizon. As the shadow passed one of the larger alleyways on the street, it vanished along with the half scuff of silk on cobblestone.
“Wut do we got here?” a deep, scratchy voice belched out, “I do believe our luck is changing.” The man who spoke wrapped his thick arms around his plump cargo and dragged it far back into the ally. A flame sparked out of nowhere and lit the wick of a lantern sitting on the ground. Soft light ate away the darkness, revealing four figures towering over a huddled figure. The one being looked down upon was wearing a hooded, black cloak wrapped tight around its owner, covering all hints of skin, hair and clothes. When the largest of the four men spoke, it identified him as the one who had claimed their luck had changed.
“Let me guess, finishing errands for your mistress?” he asked laughingly. His voice sounded like two mountains having a push-of-war with each other. “When me and my boys are done here, we’ll have you wishing you left earlier to return. This is our ally, and to pass by, you need to pay.” A cruel grin pasted itself on his wide jaw. He crossed his massive arms over an even more massive chest and took a step back while nodding to one of the three men with him.
With orders given, the man squatted down with a thin, evil grin. “Don’t worry darling,” he said while reaching a hand towards the cowering figure, “we’ll take good care of you while you are in our home, and then send you awAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!”
Before the man could finish his sentence, he catapulted backwards and slid to a stop a pace or two away from the opposite sidewall of the ally. The next few heartbeats came fast and went without anyone making sense of what had just happened, except for the cloaked figure. To him, everything was happening according to plan; his plan. His lips widened within his hooded cloak. It was a relaxed smile to no one in general. His name was Redlew Feiht. He wore a calm exterior that was covering a tightly wrapped coil whose time had come to be sprung. As the hand reached toward him, while speaking of what good care he would receive, he was ready. Redlew tightened his grip on the dagger he held in his left hand.
In one fluid motion, that hand shot out of the cloak and passed inches above the out stretched arm of his would-be assailant. When he felt a small trace of resistance in his wrist, his foot was next to leave the protective covering of the black cloak. It did so with all the speed and force he could muster. While that foot introduced itself to the thug’s nose, with a muffled thud thanks to the silk wrapped around the hand tailored leather boot, the other leg straightened underneath him, standing him up straight. During the stand, his right hand threw a large, soft pillow to the ground that had been used in his disguise. The man who had squatted landed on his back at the same instant his severed hand landed on the hard packed dirt floor. The fingers were pointing towards the back wall of the ally, the same direction the man’s nose now did against his cheek. Redlew flicked his left hand and the injured man’s scream ended as a knife sunk hilt deep into his throat. Death was coming tonight to collect the rent on life for these four. He was there to see to it. As the last dying groan escaped the man on the ground, the cloaked figure sprang forward toward the dirt-covered alley floor and somersaulted on top of the dead body. As Feiht’s rear landed on the dead man’s chest, his feet rolled forward and planted themselves on both sides of the neck holding his knife. After grabbing the hilt in his right hand, he used his momentum to his advantage and raised his butt, leaned forward and planted his left hand on the ground. He twisted his body and arced his feet up and around to his left. The eyes of the closest man standing near him widened with surprise and shock as he stumbled backwards from the force of Redlew’s foot to his chest. The dark silhouette continued his spin, bringing his feet back to the ground. One foot of Feiht’s was pointed at the man who was trying to regain control of his backwards momentum. The other was pointed towards the muscle bound giant to his left. A few feet behind Redlew was the sidewall of one building or another that the first to die had been flung toward. Half a dozen paces up that wall was the back wall of a different building. This alley was boxed on three sides; the only way out was past that same giant of a man who dragged him in here when thinking Redlew was a female.
The sound of steel rang out to his left. The boss’ two thick, hairy arms dragged a large sword out of a sheath strapped to his back. The ring was twice echoed to Redlew’s right as both a short sword appeared, attached to the thug he kicked back, and a dagger was produced by the man standing at the opposite back corner of the ally.
“Finally,” the cloaked man said in an even voice, “I thought you would all be dead before someone had the idea to bare steel.”
“Don’t know who you are, but I know what you will be,” the burly leader spat back, “a dead one.”
“Oh, yes,” said Redlew, the one in black, “I will be a ‘dead one’ sometime, but not tonight.” A slow cold grin spread across his face. Light splashed reflected across the wooden wall behind the black-clad figure as the man in the corner to his right brought his sword around him and started to pitch his body forward to close the gap between the two of them. The cloaked figure flicked the blood-coated dagger in his right hand up in the air and expelled all the air from his lungs while relaxing his mind. He shot his empty right hand down to his hip and unsheathed an evil looking dagger strapped at his waist. He sent his thoughts to his right hand, or rather, to the wicked knife clenched in it.
A familiar hourglass image floated up from the depth of the weapon. Along with the image, a cold numbness crept out of the hilt and into his fingertips. As the sensation flowed up his arm to his elbow, he recalled the very first time such a thing happened.
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It was a late summer night over two years before, and Redlew Feiht was exploring the vast ruins a few leagues to the north of his home city of Lefebvre. The weak sunlight cast flickering shadows over the stone remnants of the once great and proud city of Kessela. Built to honor Bal’derick Kessela over a thousand years ago, it used to be a major seaport and one of the largest cities built in its time. Kessela’s worshipers lived there in prosperity for countless generations. No one knows why or how the great city met its demise. All that remained now were hulking husks of stone, toppled and broken by the countless years of abuse suffered from the elements. Some still formed parts of foundations or other recogn
izable parts of building structures. It was on a fare-sized foundation, near the center of the immense ruins, that he set himself down to gobble up the remaining salted beef and dried fruit he had left in his pack. The trek out here, only half way through, had taken almost three days. He cursed himself for not being more careful with his rations. It was not the first time his “eat while you can and worry about when you can’t later” motto failed him miserably. While washing his meal down with the last couple swallows of spiced ale from his wine skin, he started contemplating what course of action to take.
With the sunlight rapidly dwindling into dusk, he wondered if he should start to make his way back towards Lefebvre. “The trouble that caused me to vacate the area for a spell should be over,” he thought, “by now. Or maybe I should find a suitable camp site for the night?” Both options presented their fare share of problems, so the choice was not an easy one to make. Walk among boulders, rocks, holes, bushes and weeds littering what was once a grand, cobble stone paved road, or wake up in the morning hours from the nearest berry patch where he stopped for a snack earlier after his lunch. He should have filled his wine skin with the cold, crisp water that still flowed from the ground not ten paces from the berry bushes, but a quarter skin of good spiced ale was not worth dumping no matter how thirsty one might get later. He also knew well what drinking all that ale at once with his lunch, in this heat, would do to him.
In the end, he chose to make camp on the idea that being hungry and thirsty for a bit was nothing compared to being hurt, hungry, and thirsty. Being stranded out here, if he found himself unable to walk, would more than likely shorten his life span more than the risk was worth taking. He set up camp, which consisted of unpacking and rolling out his blanket on the octagon shaped floor he had just eaten his supper on. He positioned himself directly in the center of the large stone slab, more out of habit then the fear of any walls collapsing on him during the night.
Unlike any of the other remnants of ‘buildings’ he had seen on his trek deeper and deeper into the remains of the city, the walls here all fell away from the floor as though they were afraid to desecrate the very structure they were built to protect. In addition, he noticed, that although covered in dirt and weeds, this was the only structure whose stone floor and walls showed no sign of wear from the centuries upon centuries of lying dormant and unprotected from the weather.
Sleep overtook him swift that night and, over two years later, the wild, vivid dream he had was still clear in his mind. It was the last portion of the dream that showed him what no one in centuries could have even guessed. He was flying like a bird above a gigantic city with beautiful stonework houses, stables, forges, and workshops. Nobody was out and about, which surprised him for the position of the sun showed it to be just high noon. He was in no control of this dream, soaring high above the city like an eagle, so his eyes wandered over the area, gazing at the structures. The whole time he was covering ground from above, he wondered how they had been built. Large and small they were, but each one just as awe inspiring as the next. No wood or thatched roofing could be seen anywhere, nothing but multi-colored stone. Even the wide, long docks stretching far into the ocean waters were crafted with stone. For how long he flew, he could not tell, for the sun did not move here in the dream world. Eventually, his eyes picked out a familiarly shaped structure. An octagon building lay ahead of him. The buildings surrounding it dwarfed the eight-sided structure, being in itself only one story tall. It was formed with gray stone, the color of dusk, which set it apart from all the multi-colored stonework surrounding it. In his dream, he circled the octagon building lazily a few times from above before floating down. His decent continued until his feet almost touched the jet-black coble stone which had been set in a circle at least ten paces wide around the whole building. The combination of jet-black on dusk-gray did a good job of making it look like a place he should not be looking at, let alone entering. He laughed at the thought of that because after floating around it three times from ground level, he had not seen anything even closely resembling a door or entranceway. The only thing that marred the smooth, polished, gray stone was a finely crafted hook-peg ladder running up from the Southern wall. It traveled from the street up to the building’s top. With no windows or other breaks, the stone looked like a solid block of rock that had been carved into an octagon. Where the eight walls met each other, there was not even the slightest sign of a crack or seam.
His stomach lodged itself in his feet when unexpectedly he shot upwards rapidly. He stopped rising about twenty feet above the building. Just as his belly started to inch its way back up from his feet, it was catapulted to his throat by the downward plunge that followed. Scared out of his wits by this time, he covered his eyes with his hands. The thought of sicking up, even in a dream world, was not a pleasant one. He felt his body come to a stop and waited for the spinning sensation in his head to slow before releasing the death grip his hands had taken on his face. When he did at last open his eyes, he found his body was horizontal to the ground. Not the ground, he realized, but the roof. Directly below his eyes, Feiht saw there were five small holes bored into the rock itself, forming a circle. They looked out of place on a structure that had absolutely no cracks, carvings, or blemishes on it anywhere that he saw during his dream flight around it.
Without conscience thought or planning, his hand reached out and he buried the tips of each finger and thumb into the small holes. A faint “click” was heard and a trap door opened upward, reaching for the sky. It was not large, but he was sure he could fit through it, if that is where his dream led him. His dream did not lead him in, though. In fact, his dream had him doing nothing at all except laying on his stomach, staring at a handful of small holes not even a couple of inches from his face, on top of a smooth stone octagon roof in the middle of, he looked around, the Kesselain Ruins.
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“Ah, the surprise I felt at that moment,” he recalled and almost smiled. The cold from the weapon had spread up his forearm and into his elbow. It was now making an assault towards his shoulder like a hungry Stone Skinner towards a wounded Water Lilly.
“But,” a voice that had slipped into his mind out of the cold corrected, “that surprise was nothing like what was to come.”
“How true you are,” he mentally answered back.
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He knew that he was awake when he realized he was back in the ruins, not on a brand new roof. He looked down and saw that the stone was reflecting the full moon’s light, shining brightly in the night sky. He was a little puzzled by this, for just last week there was a full moon, but that thought was quickly replaced with others when he lifted his head slightly off the ground and saw that no more than inches away from him, there in the stone, were five small holes in the shape of a circle. Dirt and sand must have filled the holes in after whatever catastrophe had brought this once great city to its knees. He remembered from his dream that the holes were on top of the building, not on the floor. He thought that maybe since he did not go down the hatch that opened up in his dream, that maybe there was another similar hatch on the floor to match the top. This brought another question up, and not the obvious one most would think of, like “I wonder if there really is a hatch hidden in this stone.” His thought was “Where did the roof go?”
Not to be one that went blindly through life without answers in hand, he stood up and went to the edge of the stone floor. The rock showing was at least two hand spans thick from the dirt ground to the top of the stone. He tried to remember how thick in his dream the stone was at the hatchway. He woke, however, before he had even looked into the opening, so it was still a mystery to him. He bent down and thrust his hand in the dirt, and found it to be loosely packed and easily movable. He dug himself a small crater by moonlight and after just a few moments, he found the bottom of the slab. He felt a groove in the thickness of the rock, and then th
ere was more stone lying underneath it.
"It must be," he thought, "that I am actually on the roof of the building and not the floor after all.” He could now envision the walls falling outward and the roof falling on the floor below, and then Mother Nature trying her best to swallow the whole city. With that portion of his curiosity settled enough for him, he walked back to the holes in the “floor that was now a roof” and knelt before them. With a casual shrug of the shoulders, he reached down and stuck the fingers and thumb of his right hand into the holes. He felt the stone vibrate ever so slightly before hearing the click of some sort of mechanism moving underneath his fingertips. As he slid his fingers out, not five paces straight ahead of him, he saw a hatchway swing open as though stretching from a long, long nap. He turned to his left to check if his backpack and walking stick were still there, as they were not in his dream, and found them right where he set them down upon retiring for the evening.
The gray stone somehow had shed its protective covering of dirt, and now looked polished, even underneath his pack and stick, though neither appeared to have been moved. With his heart beating hard and fast, he got up on his knees and moved himself forward until the hatch was inches from his chest. He peered over the door, and sure enough, there was a small opening etched out of the stone on the other side. The excitement of the find was equaled only by the fear of what had just happened and not having the knowledge of why. How long he knelt on the opposite side of the hatch, looking down he did not know. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? He shifted forward for a better look and, miraculously, he saw what appeared to be steps leading downward. He had thought, up to this point, that whatever the hatchway opened up into when the building was whole would have been crushed and sealed away forever. For a stairway to be located in the floor, almost directly underneath the roof hatch, must be a token of good luck. Finally, wondering about it all lost its appeal and he stood up and backed away from the door. His eyes never left it during his backward travel. He continued to the spot where his backpack and walking stick lay on the glistening stone.
A sudden wind picked up and threatened to topple him as he bent down to his backpack. He opened it up and did a quick inspection of what he had left within it. A small leather bag, drawn tight with a looped leather cord, was first to come out and he placed it around his neck. He made sure to tuck it in under his leather vest. He then pulled out two woolen rags and a jar of pine pitch. He balled one rag up and stuffed it into the front pocket of his vest. He then wrapped the other rag around one end of the walking stick and poured some of the pine pitch over it. He placed the pitch jar on his bedding and rolled them up together before stuffing the bed into his bag. He then reached for his empty ale skin and deposited it into the bag as well. He cinched the top of the pack before slinging it over his shoulders to rest in the small of his back. He, at the very least, would be prepared to have light if he was to make it down the hatch and out of the wind. While walking back towards the hole in the roof, he gazed down and saw himself looking up back up at him. The image reflecting off the mirrored surface of the stone was eerie. There he was, looking down at himself swimming in a sea of stars with a large full moon island glimmering on the stone floor... or was he looking up at his image while it was looking down? He started getting dizzy as his orientation was being distorted. So real and life like, everything he saw on the surface of the stone looked like he was looking at another world just under the surface. “Either way, up or down,” he thought, “one foot in front of the other and on top of the one bellow.” A wave of nausea threatened to cripple him. “Or,” he added, “above.” He squatted down to try to regain some sense of equilibrium. He knew by all accounts that he was on top of the stone and not upside down underneath it. His senses, however, were going haywire in an argument with each other. They left him almost doubting the basics of life like gravity pulling down. Slowly he stood up, trying to ignore both the image below him and the floating on air upside-down feelings within him. He set his sight upon the hatch and forced himself the few paces remaining to stand beside it.
He swallowed hard, trying to wet his throat. He inhaled, held his breath and took the first step down. He was not surprised that it held his weight, being that it was the same type of stone used to make the whole roof. The second step brought him down enough so that his waist was even with the top of the roof surface. His legs disappeared from the knee down as the passageway seemed to suck in the moonlight and render it useless. This was also as far as he could step down because the hatch was only so big. He would have to crawl down a few stairs, if he could fit, before being able to stand back up to full height underneath the roof structure.
He realized as he turned himself parallel to the stairs that his head had cleared and he no longer felt odd as he did on the surface looking at the reflections casting themselves off the roof. He sat down on the second step. Just the very tip of his head was visible now to the outside world, but at least he was out of that god-forsaken wind. He laid his torch down on the inside of the step, next to his legs, and folded his upper body down on his lower. He grabbed the roof with his right hand to support his weight, and the left probed below him to see if indeed more steps followed suit. He counted about four hands before his fingers hit the face of the next step. He placed that hand palm down on the step and moved it out as far as he could reach. Using both arms simultaneously, he picked his body weight up with is right arm while pushing his weight up with his left. He used his feet as a pivot point and angled his butt past the step he was sitting on. He eased himself down, and then his legs followed his butt so he was sitting on the step below where he was.
“So far so good,” he whispered to himself as he reached up and transferred his walking stick torch to the step below him. He repeated the procedure of step sliding a few more times, using the step above him and the step below him for leverage. Light was non-existent down here, any light from the outside world had vanished as soon as his head broke through the blackness within the stairwell. He could not wait to get far enough down where he could stand and use his torch.
With one more step, the pressure of the wall on his back disappeared. Not wanting to move too quickly out of fear of the unknown, he inched himself forward until his feet made solid contact with the descending wall. That both walls had not vanished made him feel a little better. He carefully slid his left hand out, palm down and felt the smooth stone expand as far as he could reach. Using his hands and feet, he moved at a snail's pace around, feeling the stone underneath him. He realized he must be on a landing of some kind. He felt down the side where the wall disappeared and, sure enough, the stairs continued. He touched the next step and ran his hand out as far as he could reach. Before he had gone very far with his hand, he suddenly started to feel very anxious. Something about the complete darkness down here unnerved him. He desperately needed some light to be shed on his current situation. He reached up a step and felt around for his torch, but it was not there!
“OK, slow down and relax,” he tried to tell himself, but fear may as well have been knocking at the door between reality and imagination with a battering ram for all the talking to himself did. Panic gripped him like a blacksmiths vise. “Gotta get out – can’t see – can’t breath – gotta,” he did not even try to finish his sentence as he started a dog paddle assault on the steps to the surface. His right hand landed on something other than a step. With his fear-induced retreat pumping adrenaline throughout his body, he was unable to stop his momentum. The object that supported the downward thrust of his hand did not do so well once his feet pushed him forward and up. The object rolled backwards toward him, carrying his hand with it. He was not able to react fast enough to compensate his movement. With his left hand extended half way up, reaching for another step, and his right hand now useless by his side, he went down hard. His stomach drove into the leading edge of the step above the one he had searched for his torch on and his chin smack
ed the edge of the step up from that.
Lying dazed for a second, he was finally able to cast off the wild panic within him. After catching his breath, he felt for the object he was now blaming for his injuries; the worst of which was his wounded pride. He felt the familiar wood walking stick that was doubling as a torch and started to laugh.
“Told you to take it easy,” he told himself. Without thinking, he used his hands on the step that caused his stomach to ache and tried to push himself up to a standing position. All he accomplished with this act was adding a lump to the top of his head as it hit the underside of the collapsed ceiling.
Cursing his luck, while making his way back down to the landing, he was thinking about calling it quits and heading back out by the safety of the torchlight. His pride, however wounded now, would not allow that, though. The few steps down were not as rough on him as the few up had been, and when he squatted in the dark on the landing, he found the aches in his body were almost gone.
He laughed at himself again and shook his head. He grabbed the small sack he had placed around his neck and pulled out his flint. Within a few strikes, his torch rag started to smolder. Small, pebble-sized amber glows started to cut through the darkness. With years of practice, at the same time he closed his eyes to protect them from the fire that would soon be and take a large breath, his hands packed the flint with the tinder inside the small leather carrying sack, the strap was drawn tight, placed back over his head and tucked into his vest. Then his left hand went to the ground to steady himself as the right one picked the walking stick torch up and held it a few inches from the ground.
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“To this day,” his thoughts carried on,” I don’t know what to make of it.”
One of the voices in his head agreed. Another voice, sounding just like it, disagreed with a sarcastic grunt.
The cold had now encompassed his entire right arm up to the neck. He looked over and saw the man holding the short sword frozen in place. One foot was in front of the other, his body leaning forward with frozen momentum. His left upper arm was extended straight out and the elbow was bent, leaving his forearm to cross his chest. His left fingers came together, almost forming a fist. His right arm was pointing behind him, with that forearm facing up towards the sky with his sword extending beyond the closed fist. Redlew noticed the sword was angled slightly to the right.
“A pity, that one will never be able to receive proper training with that weapon. All that lost cutting power,” he heard in his head as he shook it. He looked to the face of this would-be attacker and sighed. The man’s eyes were focused on the ground between the two of them. “Poor bloat,” he thought sadly, “won’t even see it coming for him.” There was still a little bit of time before everything was ready to act upon, so Feiht let his mind wander back to his previous thoughts.
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