The Worlds of the Sheaf

Fechlon - Part 4

     The reaction of the enemy soldiers was everything he could have hoped for. They stared in astonishment and uncertainty, their hands reaching for their weapons but afraid to draw them. Their commander again gestured for the archers and Thomas stood there with a smug smile on his face while they fitted arrows and took aim. The other Beltharans pulled the hoods of their glass ceramic armour over their heads, but none of the arrows were aimed at them and they bounced harmlessly from Thomas's Globe of Force. The soldiers drew back in fear, but the commander only snarled in rage and ran forward, bringing his sword down in a vicious arc.

     Thomas felt the force of the blow transmitted through the defensive spell, but the sword was kept a full eighteen inches from his flesh by the globe of magical energy. For the enemy commander, it was like trying to chop a lump of hard rubber which gave only enough to absorb the energy of the impact. In the end he could only back away in defeat, his eyes widening with fear.

     Thomas stepped forward, his hands outstretched. "Please, I only want to talk," he said, hoping that it would be as Drenn said, that they would understand the meaning if not the actual words. "I just want to talk."

     He smiled to try to communicate his peaceful intent, but the soldiers stared back distrustfully and the commander reached out a hand to an underling who was carrying a burning torch. Thomas stared uncertainly. Fire was one of the things that could penetrate a Globe of Force. If the commander attacked him with it...

     There was only one thing to do. He cast another Sleep spell, sending almost the entire group into spell induced unconsciousness, and those unaffected by the spell fled in terror. Moving quickly, Thomas then lowered himself gently to his knees, wincing at the pain in his injured leg, and touched the commander's head as he cast the Language spell. He didn't like doing it this way, as the spell had only a limited duration and some of it was wasted as he waited for the man to regain consciousness, but he saw no other way. Physical contact was necessary between the two of them for this version of the spell to work, and this was the only way he could get close enough to do it.

     He felt the spell having its effect on his brain, subtly altering his neural pathways to allow him to speak and understand the other man's language, while at the same time having an effect on his perception of the world so that he saw it in the same way as the natives.

     The first thing he noticed was that the room suddenly looked different. Or rather, it looked exactly the same but it... it felt different. That wasn't quite the word, but it was the closest he could come to what he was experiencing. Before, it had clearly been an old room. A volume of space surrounded by crumbling walls and a ceiling, but now it felt more like the inside of a cave. A confined space that just happened to be a regular shape.

     The natives, apparently, gave no thought to what these buildings had once been. They were nothing more to them than features of the landscape. They had no sense that they had been built by people, that they had once been shiny and new, full of light and life. They were still used as dwellings, those that were still structurally safe anyway, but only in the way that caves were lived in by some people. If they gave any thought to the buildings at all, it was only to give thanks to whatever Gods they had for the fortuitous presence of so many strangely regular natural caves. It shocked Thomas to contemplate this. The civilisation that had built this city and the ring above must have passed away such an incredibly long time ago that no memory at all survived of them. Not even in the form of legend and folklore.

     He tried to communicate as much as he could of this to his friends, pausing frequently to search for the right words, but the native soldiers were already stirring and Thomas spoke quickly, not knowing how much time he had before the spell expired.