The Elementals : The Dawn of Darkness

Chapter 27 - Buy Now and Get an Army of Zombies Free!

We were led deeper into the island by Zach and Tulip, weaving through trees and passing through more and more blight circles. Seriously, we'd passed like fifty in ten minutes. There was something weird going on with this place as the constant lingering scent of rot filled the air like the gents in any Underground station (Yes, even the posh ones). Luckily for us Zach was all too happy to fill us in on why Anglesey was slowly rotting away.

"It started about six months ago," he explained as we passed another circle of death. "People started to disappear, night patrols wouldn't come back, kids would go to play in the woods and never come back out again, that sort of stuff."

"That's happening back home too," the newspaper headlines flashed in my head.

"Yeah but that's just the people getting reported, the elementals living out there in the human world. In our settlements the number peaked at around five hundred in Anglesey alone. I mean take our town of Truespear Hollow, just a few nights ago five people vanished into thin air from that campsite you were at. That's why were a little jumpy when we saw you."

"Jumpy wasn't the word I would use," I said glancing at Tulip.

Zach looked sadly up at his friend. "Her girlfriend was one of the ones who vanished. She's not taking it well."

I looked up at Tulip and then my pocket. I darted forwards until I was standing in front of her, the gold necklace sitting in the palm of my hand. "I've been meaning to ask if this is yours. I presume it is, well its got your name on it so that's a bit of a giveaway, so I just wanted to know if you wanted it back."

Wordlessly she took the necklace and ran her finger over the names. Jasmine, that had to be her girlfriends name. She looked up with tears in her eyes and smiled sadly, "thank you. And I'm sorry for you know, attacking you."

"Don't worry about it. We're cool."

At this point Shadow decided to put in an excellent point. "That's all well and good but those blight circles are a sure sign of necromancy, death power. What have they got to do with the people vanishing?"

"Nothing and everything," Tulip said with a shrug. "They started showing up just before the first guy vanished, it was around the nineteenth of February. There's obviously some correlation as whenever one shows up someone else disappears, but we don't know what they have to do with it."

"Nothing and everything," Sheira muttered.

"Exactly. Now hurry up, we're nearly there and these woods creep me out."

Now that she said that every snap of a twig, every rustle in the undergrowth freaked me out even more so I was incredibly happy when the trees gave way to a quaint little village. Truespear Hollow, as Zach had referred to it, couldn't have been larger than fifty houses with a handful of stores and a church thrown in for good measure. It looked like a holiday village. Everything was made out of wood, except for the small church, its spire barely cresting the trees, which looked as old as the ground it was standing on. Everything looked at least one hundred years old except for one little detail. Surrounding the village like a ring was a stone wall that would have put Game of Thrones to shame.

It must have been at least fifty feet high but its jagged tooth like towers that dotted the length of the battlements must have increased it to seventy feet at most. The stone blocks were monstrously big, it looked like they'd just been ripped out of the mountains and forced in place with some giant hand. Steel cables as thick as Crash held it firm to the ground and a pair of massive bronze coloured doors, fortified by the biggest lock I had ever seen in my life, stood open and menacing like a pair of jaws.

I stared in awe at it, "what the hell are you trying to keep out?"

Zach sighed, "that's the other half of the story. The thing is, after the blight circles started popping up we realised that our gravesites had gone empty."