for service… for servitude.
So when I had learned how to weather the storms, to survive in this changed land, my mind returned to those stories. I had served in the Royal Guard, we who protected our righteous royal family against the horrors of Krona. I wanted to see the seat of that which we most hated. I needed to see it, and the need grew over the months and years, until finally I could resist no longer. After all, was not Krona just as emptied out as Esis? Had this terrible place not suffered as all of Theris has suffered? What had I to fear, if this place was as empty as the rest?
The throne was now as it had been when I first found it. It seemed to me just as sad a thing as that first day, now years past. A solid thing made of thick wood, lacquered dark and red, as though the blood of the owner’s countless victims had helped color it. The back rose high, yet the throne itself was not raised above the floor. In our own throne room, the Esian kings looked down onto the throne room from a raised floor. Not here, though. Here, the Dark Lords of Krona had loomed fierce enough on their own. The maroon cloth that draped over the back of the throne, down over the seat, was dusty but otherwise intact. Nobody save myself had likely entered here since the days of the darkened kingdom.
I could imagine some terrified captive of the last darkened ruler, cowering before the throne. In my mind, Sarena, the last to sit high in her chair, glares at the shaking prisoner, and rises from the throne to her full height of seven feet. Her blackened armor seems to absorb the light, and her cruel eyes reach outward, the sharpened fingernails at the ends of long, bony fingers, hungering for the poor prisoner’s throat. No, this throne needed nothing more than the beast that sat upon it, in order to draw out the fear of its victims.
The raging fire storm outside the door distracted me from my revere. The door rattled, yet held fast. The terrible power of this room was still enough, fifteen years on, to hold back the plague storms. Even the terrible result of so much misused power could not penetrate here. I knew I was safe here, at least from the storm. What effect the room itself might have on me was another matter. Would I feel my heart turn cold? Would I feel a growing need for power, or for blood, or for… what?
The villagers of Clearlake, where I lived when I was not wandering, did not take kindly to my stories of this place. When I first returned from the keep, parents sent their children from the room when I recounted the stories. Eventually, even they did not want to hear about what I had seen in this place. It was as though they feared that the very keep itself was tainted. I could not say, one way or the other. I had visited this place perhaps a dozen times since the storms started, usually on my way to somewhere else. I felt no ill effects, though I suppose evil rarely announces itself to its new host. Still, I did not crave blood, nor seek power. Jeannine still took me in her arms, and tenderly set her lips upon mine. If she did not fear me, what was there to fear?
The door rattled again, and I sighed. The storms either burned out quickly, or stayed for a while. This one had gone on long enough to tell me it was the latter. This storm would likely last all day and through the howling night, and I unable to leave until then. I made my way toward the throne, and sighing again, sat down.
Just wood and cloth, that was all. No whispering voices, no sudden blood lust. Just wood and cloth. I smiled to myself, enjoying the irony. Here I was, a Royal Guardsman for a family long since fled, sitting upon the throne of our single, terrible foe. She was also fled. I was sitting on the bones of the enemy, the carcass of a powerful kingdom long since crumbled and burned.
This was what happened when rulers put too much faith in the powers of their mages. This is what happens when the desire for power over one’s foes overtakes all sense of restraint. The mages of both kingdoms, powerful magic wielders, had conjured magic far beyond their ability to control, and this was the result; a world nearly swept clean of its own people. The land was cursed. Its people were forced to escape into the doom of the eastern mountains and the endless desert beyond, where they had all perished. The survivors, we terrible few we stayed behind, eked out a life haunted by plagues of magic.
Sometimes those plagues came slowly, like in the once-great forest of Meekwood, where the uncontrolled magic had melded wolves and men into terrible, merciless creatures who hunted by night. Sometimes, it came in a flash, like the plains of Akuna, where in an instant, a spell by our own battle-mages, intended to heal our wounded soldiers, had reduced the entire population to shambling mockeries of life.
Sometimes, the plagues came again and again, like here. Here, the plagues came as storms. Sometimes, like now, fire swept through the empty places where life had once thrived. Other times, it was sheer rage, a howling, furious wind that overwhelmed those caught in it with the angry cries of the dead. It was enough to kill, your own soul joining the howling storm. Sometimes it just drove people mad.
Every parcel of the once-great land of Theris was cursed with its own manner of magic plague, the halls of my own kingdom no less than here. Theris was a tortured land; fifteen years of endless terror reigned over it. I had seen enough of it to know that the land itself was losing its battle against our foolishness. Soon, we few would be left to perish, just as those masses that fled across the mountains had perished in the endless desert of the east. Perhaps they had been the fortunate ones, to die under a parching sun. At least there, with the magic plagues held back by the mountains, they were left to die on their own. How sad it was, I thought, that the best off all choices was death in a parching, endless desert.
I shook my head, and looked about the room.
“What a waste,” I muttered to nobody in particular.
CHAPTER 1
Sometime during the night, sitting on the throne of the long-fled Dark Lord, listening to the raging fire storm, I fell asleep. The pulsing pain in my hand seemed to lessen, my breathing slowed, and I began to sleep. It was an uneasy sleep. The flat, straight backing of the chair was not the problem, however, nor the un-cushioned seat itself. I had slept in worse places. No, that was not the problem.
The fire storm howled with the angry voices of countless victims. The cries reached out to me, even through the thick doors which protected me from the flames. The voices cried out, though for what I could not discern. Some of those voices had lost their bodies a thousand years past, when the first Dark Lord seized Skyreach Keep and began a reign of terror which others would continue after his death. Some died in Krona's last days, only fifteen years ago, when the magic plagues swept through the halls of the keep, and its inhabitants fled with whatever they could carry.
Skyreach Keep. Even the name was a reminder of its sullied past. It was built a thousand years ago, when the secrets of towering construction had only recently been unraveled. Skyreach Keep was built to watch over the lands of the north. Though only a scant eleven stories high, it must surely have seemed to reach into the clouds, to those early primitives who sought to extend their reign over all the land of Theris. So they built their keep and called it Skyreach, to remind themselves that their new kingdom, Esis, would soar as the great birds did.
Then the first Dark Lord came. His name long since lost to the fog of history, the first Dark Lord emerged from within the ranks of the Esis nobility. Drawn by the promise of power and riches, and worshiping the terrible gods of the sky, he seized the keep. At first, or so the murky story goes, not even the King in the south knew what was happening. A peasant uprising? A jealous knight? Some spoke of a shooting star which predicted the coming of a great evil. The stories began to travel south, carried by those lucky enough to flee the carnage which issued forth from the keep. Villages razed, crops burned. Nobles killed and their children hung from trees as a warning. At some point, and none who actually witnessed it lived to speak of exactly when it happened, the Dark Lord made a pact with the angry gods which skirted the edge of our world. What started out as a jealous
