The Stories of Latia, Vol. 2: Demon's Curse

Chapter 18: The Hollow King

Chapter 18: The Hollow King

The Narrator

They wasted no time, packing the few things they had, and heading up the steep, wooden stairwell that led out of the pit that the Bone Tribe camp resided in.

"Good luck, and I hope to see you all again under better circumstances," Mystia says when they reach the top.

"Thank you so much for everything you've done for us," Avery replies, shaking her hand.

Jayme can't help but hear Mystia mumble a prayer as they walk away from her, back on the uneven sand and start heading east.

Unlike the travel north, this side of the Dunes was somehow colder, and didn't have as many signs of life. No dead trees or even tumbleweeds, just sand as far as they can see, which isn't very far with the hilly terrain all around.

They were thinking Mystia misspoke and it was actually west or something, when Jayme trips on what looked at first to just be a pile of sand.

"Jayme, are you okay?" James asks, helping him to his feet.

"Yeah, I'm fine..." Jayme steps over to the clump of sand he tripped on, kicking it again.

He expected his foot to knock it over, but what it met instead was a strangely solid surface.

"What is it?" Avery asks.

Jayme kneels down and dusts the sand from it, revealing it not to be sand but the stack of cold, gray and broken bricks.

Avery, Cassidy and James stare confused at the bricks while Jayme studies them.

"That's weird- where are you going?" Cassidy starts, but halfway through her sentence, Jayme takes off up the dune in front of them, stopping at the top and gazing at what lay behind it.

The other three trail behind him, meeting him at the top and gazing upon it, too.

What waited on the other side was a giant stretch of flat sand, filled with ancient brick buildings, half swallowed by the sand and crumbling down, but completely untouched by any sort of vegetation. Behind them all sat a castle, made of the same broken bricks, and half sunk into the sand like a ship, frozen in time as it sank into a still sea.

"'A broken kingdom for an empty king,'" Avery repeats Mystia's description. "I think this is it."

The four of them walk down the streets of the half sunk village, looking around as if there was more to see than the same few structures made of the same material. She couldn't quite explain it, but Avery felt that the streets they walked on, what was left of them anyway, brimmed with life and personality once upon a time.

It didn't take them long to reach the castle, and when they looked up at it, what looked back was a face of square window eyes, and a gaping hole for a mouth. The edges of the hole were ridged with loose bricks and arrows, planted on the inside to look like teeth.

After a few moments, James led the group through the mouth, into the dark castle and out of the safety of the sun.

They lit flashlights they'd brought, and found themselves on one end of a sweeping throne room that stretched from one end of the castle to the other.

Several pillars lined the throne room, each one covered top to bottom in fragmented, scratched on text that overlapped so much that it was all impossible to read.

When they finally could see the end of the room, they spotted a large throne, and scrawled above it where two sentences of messy, scratched text that, unlike the lines on the pillars, were actually legible.