Read The Scepter of Namiss (The Books of Braenyn 1) Page 6

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  The peaks posed a decent challenge but in the end Braenyn cleared them all and arrived in a scorched land of dead trees and gray skies. There was a faint smell of decay in the air. All around him plants withered and riverbeds were dried up and barren. There was nothing but death here and the perfect location for the catacombs.

  Dark clouds formed in the skies and followed him wherever he went. An unsettling feeling crawled through him and before he knew it he was drawing his sword.

  What harm can the dead do me?

  The words repeated in his mind. His own voice mocked him.

  Whispering came in the foul-scented wind that blew through the land. The whispers teased him, taunted him, tickling his ears. Someone stood right beside him.

  He turned sharply and swung his sword but no one was there. He shook his head. “Strength fool,” he scolded himself. “There is nothing dead that I must fear.”

  Hours passed and the land revealed nothing to him until he laid eyes up the largest dead tree he’d ever seen. It reached to the skies like a giant’s hand, skeletal and ravaged by time. Ancient and twisted, the tree stood alone barring the entrance to a hillside.

  “If you can’t go through it then over it I say.” Braenyn saw no other way but to scale the great tree to reach the hill. The map pointed to the lone hill in the barren land. For miles there had been nothing but flat dead earth. It had to be it.

  Almost immediately he raced to the tree and launched himself into its branches. A baleful moan vibrated from the tree. Braenyn stopped dead. He clutched the trunk…by the Gods the tree moved. The branches twitched. They wiggled. He studied them closer…it wasn’t a tree at all…. it truly was a giant hand! It was the hand of an enormous undead… a giant still buried deep beneath the ground…reaching above…reaching for the top of the land, unable to escape its deep-sunk grave, only able to plunge one hand out of its eternal resting place.

  Massive clawed fingers spread and bent. The land trembled as if by a quake. Braenyn gasped and sprinted among the bones, through the fingers and over the claws. Just as the hand swiped into a fist, Braenyn flipped out of its grip and landed in front of the hill. The hand flitted once before going still again.

  Braenyn caught his breath and backed away from the hand with much caution. His back leaned against something hard in the hillside, he turned slowly, took note of the sloping hill and discovered a stone door half buried in its side. Many strange glyphs were etched in this door. He could feel the power they emanated.

  He approached the small door and took hold of it. Its surface was as cold as ice. He swallowed once, tensed his muscles and pulled it open as a rank smell met him head on. “Steady on…” he uttered before entering.

  Before him a maze of tunnels and corridors twisted and stretched in every direction, their entrances gaping maws of darkness. The dirt below him appeared undisturbed even though there were some bones embedded in the walls nearest him. He had entered the lands of the resting dead, the great kings and queens of yore buried deep in elaborate crypts and tombs, ones that legends were sung about, ones that were protect by blessings and…curses, the burial grounds…the catacombs.

  Somewhere within good King Namiss slept with his scepter and Braenyn would be the first to find it.