The Arkanist

The Night's Inn

Chapter 6

The Night's Inn

Thunder rolled across the black night sky as Aera knelt beside a soldier fir, the ash-laden fingers brushing at her skin like her mother’s hands used to do before she went to sleep. A clasp of lightning branched through the inky sky like a crimson scar, bleeding stark and searing across the shadowy curtain. The sudden flash of red rained down over the Ashwood, showering the darkness with light. Aera urged Aeron forward from the eerie forest, making their way toward the light up ahead. She felt her heart quicken in pace, skipping like she used to across the grey grass fields of Ahhid in the summer. In the winters, the days were darker than pitch, and the air was colder than the fields of ice in Vorae.

         Another crack of lighting lanced through the darkness like a contorted arm, accompanied with the roaring of thunder, its brother. Great grey clouds loomed overhead, slowly crawling across the black sky, pregnant with rain. Aera’s heart skipped when a third crackle ripped the sky in two in a gleaming red wound as she hurried across the grey grass, the fingers whispering in light voices. Aeron wheezed and cried behind her, his leg seizing as he put any weight on it.

         The oil lantern burned through the oppressive shadow weakly, the iron rusted and old, screeching in the night like the ashens as the breathes of wind hissed by. The wooden inn was cloaked in a dense shadow, but still slightly discernable in the flashes of red. It was rather large, made completely of wood, with lichen infesting the crags like insects would. Heavy, thick ash sat on the pitched roof, leaking off the sides and tumbling to the rotten earth, smelling rather stale. A crude stone chimney puffed out sickly breathes of coiling black smoke, wrapping together like great sable snakes, blending in with the night sky. The shimmering red embers fluttered through the air like fairies. Distant stars of flickering light dotted the darkness behind the inn, with wooden guards walling the long, dirty mud and stone road through the town, watching the night with yellow eyes of flame. Aera guessed it was the Mountain Road, leading up from Ahhid and onwards up north, wrapping around the Mountains of Svaerdon, reaching into Alderon, and turning into the North-South Road.

         Aera wandered around the outside of the inn, stumbling over broken limbs and muddy trenches that reeked of filth. Ash tumbled through the sky like snow as she found the gate in. She helped Aeron along the slick, crude rock path, the stones flickering sharply with the dull ruddy light of two large oil lanterns mounted beside the front gate. The night was quiet as the walked up, as it was many a night, for the thunder had ceased for a time. Above the door, there was a pale square in the wood where a sign had been mounted, the elements yet to barrage the its bare skin.

         Aera rapped against the locked wooden door, the deep thuds echoing through the eerie night. Aeron hunched at her side, sick and weary, seemingly dead. His breaths came out in feeble pants and his voice croaked like an elderly man’s before he would pass. Nobody answered at first, just the empty silence, but when Aera thundered a second time across the wood, she could hear a rasp from the other side, and a grumble. An eye-level slit slid open and the dark, grizzled face of a middle-aged man glowered down at them, as if they had disturbed something. His hair was greasy and black, like strands of ink running down over his shoulders with ragged black brows arcing over his grey eyes.

         “The Night’s Inn welcomes you,” he rasped. “On what business are you looking to enter?”

         “My brother,” Aera said, looking down at Aeron. “He was shot with an arrow. He needs medicine, he needs aid.”

         “And from where are you two coming from, might I ask?” The man raised a brow. “Dangerous times these in Sheon. Certainly now after the Fall of Ahhid. The Darkness is seeming to grow darker each day. The winds begin to whisper things, and the mists begin to answer. Such dark times these are.”