What if.... a Tangled story [ENG]

Chapter 15 - The Dark Kingdom

The next morning, we woke up early and immediately began preparing for the journey. I was a little tired from the previous night, but I still followed my mother out of the shell house, towards our horses.

The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray, and the air was cold and damp. My mother wrapped her cloak around her body and I tried to cover myself as best as I could, with a blanket that my mother had brought in her food basket. She had also slipped some food into it during dinner the night before, since we were out of supplies and Mr. Matthews' cooking was excellent.

That morning, the enigmatic man did not show up or say goodbye. As we rode away on our horses, I thought I saw him at the door of the house, but after I blinked for a second, he was gone.

We quickly moved away from the house, entering a fresh wooded region, where the meadows presented bright and luminous colors. The atmosphere was very joyful, too bad that the black rocks that invaded that place, were guiding us towards something terrifying...

The days seemed to pass too quickly, and it was since the day of the collapse of the Great Tree that I had this perception of time.

A lot had happened in the last week, and I was still struggling to digest it all... I had discovered the secrets linked to the demon that haunted my visions, and I felt that that discovery would be crucial during the near future. However, I had no idea why Mr. Matthews had told me the story of Demanitus and Zhan Tiri, but I felt that something very magical tied me to their legendary vicissitudes, and that perhaps soon, I would discover it.

We continued to travel our path, towards a destination, a place, that could give me answers. The black rocks became larger and larger and more threatening. By now the place had to be close.

I did not experience any visions during those nights. Probably the rocks had something in store for me, something even more disturbing than anything they had shown me up to that moment, and they were waiting for the right moment to show it to me, the moment of reckoning.

One day, the landscape and the weather began to darken: we continued on a plain with reddish soil, surrounded by black firs and protruding rocks that seemed to be desperately looking for the right direction. They were elongated to the maximum, and pointed to a cliff.

As we approached, I saw that on the cliff there were many black rocks and that therefore the only way we had to go down was to jump on the rocks, using them as handholds in the perilous descent.

Before looking at what was at the base of the cliff, my eyes observed what rose on the horizon: a forest with a thousand shades of green grew in the plain beyond the cliff, and black rocks taller than the trees rose among the plants. I shivered slightly when I saw those gigantic rocks, but a much more powerful shiver ran through me, when my eyes rested on what rose beyond the forest.

A thin fog surrounded a dark plateau, entirely composed of rock and devoid of any form of life. In the center of the plateau stood a black tower that had been surrounded by many black rocks, and those horrible things had also risen behind the tower, surrounding everything.

From afar it looked like a very ancient castle, with a tragically interrupted history... the black rocks had destroyed it, they had destroyed that now dark kingdom.... and I already knew it... they had told me, the black rocks, on a distant night in Corona...

A castle as black as the rocks I had just touched...

I saw... an immense tower standing out on the horizon... and around it.... I saw... the black rocks!

The kingdom was almost completely destroyed... it seemed that the black rocks were engulfing it...

I heard the scream of a woman... followed by the desperate cry of a man... but I couldn't see them...