Darkness: Chapter 12 - Nightmare

Rage burned in his chest, his heart hammered a drum beat of fury. The nerve of it, the insult, intolerable!

”You have some nerve, some arrogance to come here, of all places! How dare you make me relive this again!” he snarled, clenching his sleeping fists, the crack of knuckles sounded both in his slumber and in the waking world.

The spiritual visage of his long dead master shimmered, its eyes glaring in defiance. Ashlan was old here, as he had been when Krogon knew him. His scarred body, long silver beard and braided hair were as he had always known them. Those purple eyes had their usual steely gaze, narrowed and full of knowing, looking through him like glass. The choice to lack his left arm, as had in life, was a curious one though.

Why would he choose to be maimed as a spirit?

”Why do you think student?” came the echo of a voice long forgotten, the maimed masters calm, coarse voice probing for an answer. Krogon should have expected he’d only need to think to ask a question in this dreamscape, this vision.

”Because it is who you are. It is the essence of what defined you, shaped you into the famed one armed sword master.” He replied. He knew the answer, his sub-conscious needed no time here.

”Good. As for your first question, I am here because this memory is relevant to your current ‘predicament’, so now I will ask you a question. Why are you young in your dreams?”

Krogon felt himself snort before he even decided he wanted to. His former master had come to him in his dreams, to grant him some clarity from the spirits? So be it, if they had no other way to reach him in this prison he would follow the path they threw in front of him.

He grumbled, straining to keep his eyes from the shape of his long dead mate. Her beauty and the sound of her singing were memories he wished he could hold close, but time had simply eroded the visage and the chorus from his mind. If love ever had a meaning, it was to be distraught that you could no longer recall that which you had adored so dearly.

”I am young here, because deep inside I have not fully embraced who I truly am. Is that what you wanted to hear?” He answered, the scene shifting as rain began to cascade around and upon the memory of a long gone Nagrand.

Ashlan tilted his head, then shook it with a ghostly sigh. It was now that Krogon noticed a strange symbol etched into the tanned brown flesh of the dead master. Its single rune, seemed familiar yet unknown. The marking was also defiantly becoming more prominent as moments wore on.

”It is not what I want to hear that matters, Devilstep.” Came the reply, and he shuddered hearing it. Ashlan had never known the name Devilstep, it had always been ‘Krogon’, or ‘student’.

”Do not feel disdain at hearing me use that title. You have earned it well. The ‘devil Orc’ eh? Respected by your allies, feared by your enemies. Yet down here respect and fear do you no good.” He spoke, very simply put. He was right of course, fear was his favoured tool and he had been more subject to it than master.

”The dreaded Devilstep, master of the shadows.” The spirit groaned, then pressed on. ”He who can walk through walls, confound and route entire armies single handed, out-wit an ancient...” Krogon growled, where was he going with this?

”and yet, you can’t climb out of a Gul’dammed hole!” the spirit sneered, his expression showing clear and pained disappointment.

Krogon sighed, a weight lifting off his shoulders, his master was revealing the sense of things to him.

”Then what would you have me do, master? I have no weapons, no tools, no resources...”

The ghost shivered, the growing rune on its chest now glowed faintly red as if burning. It was familiar, so very familiar...

”The spirits did not proclaim this to be your demise, remember that, and hold that thought close... my student. Shed fear, wield terror and ascend. Remember the vision of Kosh’harg.” He continued, his lip turning in pain to a grimace. The mark on his body burned now, eroding.

Krogon’s memory flew, to the last Kosh’harg and the visions that Steelheart had brought. The words flew from his spirit mouth like a river running...

”When that dreaded bow is strung, at last your immortal song shall be sung...”

”Exactly, now is not the place, or the time. Dig deep within yourself, and do what you have too to survive. The constraints you had in the past, will not save you here... Ha—aagh!” He ended, wailing in agony. The rune was now on fire, then an inferno ripping that spirit to embers then nothing...

He jolted, his vision reeled as the dream melted away like mist and became only dark, the pitch black of the depths. Pain surged up his left shoulder to his neck and back down to his wrist. He was awake, back where he had begun.

Running a sore, calloused hand over the stony surface of the ground he lay on, he considered what he had been granted in a vision. Ashlan had come, but the runes etched into this prison by the dark shaman had eventually driven him off. He also realised that Vrex had forgotten to tell him why he knew this place so well, though he had a feeling.

A murmured prayer of thanks to the spirits escaped his lips. They had gone to great lengths to give him something to spur him forward.

Thank you, Ashlan. Forgive me...

Rolling onto his knee’s to return to the main chamber, he knew one thing that Mala’kal did not.

The dark shamans me given me the rope to hang them with...