Eternal Beasts

Chapter 5: Freedom

The young man blinked once then twice against the rushing light filling his eyes. And when they opened the second time, he found himself looking down at a worn stone block, directly beneath his knees.

"Where ...?" he began with a hesitant croak, slowly raising his head to look around.

They appeared to be crouching in a glade of sorts, a small clearing the heart of some thick and dark forest, dawn's light just pinking the eastern sky. Beneath the entire party, nearly hidden in the thick loam of the forest floor, were more of the same worn blocks Jared now found himself kneeling upon. He couldn't tell how large they were with their bulk hidden deep under ground, but he could see their surfaces, worn by time and the elements, were artificially broad and flat.

As were the man-tall pillars of stone set at the points of the compass around them, in the same gray as the stones set into the ground. The plinths were broad at the base, narrowing as they climbed towards a weathered point. No distinguishing mark or symbol decorated their worn faces but Jared got the distinct impression arcane symbols had once, long ago, been chiseled there, sealing into the living stone some kind of great power.

"The power of the Ancients!" one of the men breathed in astonishment, the knot of vadu slowly climbing to their feet to look around the glade in wonder.

"How ... how did you know, stranger?" the young woman at Jared's back quietly asked as she stood to stare in wonder at the glade around them. Rising to his feet beside her, Jared's voice was lost in his own astonishment as he also stared at their new surroundings.

"That really doesn't matter now, Diedre." One of the men, a heavy-set fellow with swarthy skin and thinning hair, said, his voice marking him as one of the speakers in the cage. He stood only to Jared's shoulder, and he was the tallest of the men in the company.

"What matters is that we're free of the darkling encampment."

"Aye," another remarked, stepping off the stones and deeper into the glade, looking carefully around. Other than the stones, the only other artificial construct they could see was a tall obelisk roughly three metres tall, some ten metres away. It too had its faces worn smooth by time and the elements.

"I'd say we're now a good thousand leagues north of the camp, somewhere in the Kasidian, if I don't mistake the trees. Well outside the Cholim's ability to easily retrieve us."

"Do not err, Dovin," a third man spoke up to say, his voice marking him as the second speaker in the cage, the one named Garl by the first speaker. He was a wiry fellow, with a full head of hair and bright, sparkling blue eyes, his swarthy face made distinctive by its hawkish nose. He looked sharply at the second man.

"The Kasidian is as infested with dark soldiers as the eastern Nerath, you can be sure of that."

"Not if the Nomads have anything to do with it," the first man retorted, several heads nodding in agreement even as the company spread further into the glade to examine it in earnest.

The comment only brought a snort from Garl.

"The Tuatha have better things to do than patrol the vastness of the Kasidian, Isik. They've their own troubles, with the Gathering full upon them and all!"

The Gathering? That wasn't a term he remembered reading about in the book. Jared looked down with a question in his face at the young woman who still stood near his side. She looked up as he did, her delicate, oval-shaped face with its pair of large, luminescent purple eyes, exquisite cheekbones, pert nose and full, pouty lips as lovely as any he had seen on Earth.

"Fear not, stranger," she said with a quiet smile, the expression adding further beauty to an already stunning face. "They know as little of the Tuatha and their lore as you, though they count themselves learned men and schooled in many great things. Master Garl only brings up the Gathering because he read about it once in a book." Her amazing eyes dropped to look at the men of the company, now gathering around the obelisk to talk in low voices, leaving the handful of women that had been imprisoned with them, to wander the glade in relative peace.