BLACK NIGHT RUN

CHAPTER 17

Evil; the only word to simplify the stronghold dwelling in infinite darkness. To the dwarf and his son, Bartholomite and Bilecky witnessed a fortress of soot, its sinister lights hellishly glared like a fire trapped behind a stygian forge straight from the bowels of hell. To the elf, Orcarina bore witness to a steel-clad nightmare, a caliginous fort dressed in infernal armor. Mace and Decan observed the fortress' ill-lighted spires, towers of black beauty clawed the rayless black above; warning Mace; familiar to Decan.

For Tyrune, the place posed as a cimmerian haven for sneaks and thieves. The craggy citadel, ways beyond a sea of serrated earth; chunks of razor-edged rock was what he thought of it all. A perilous shard lined in steel; crying to be exploited of its crevices and miserable nooks.

The travel ring at their backs collapsed as swift as it came and all that remained spanned a nebulous forest dressed upon a valley of lightless shrubberies. This place was unwelcoming and strange to the pack. They did not know where they were. No map or compass to tell them ahead. And the air felt grim, too; chilled yet dead. This was a realm that was death personified, ripe for a villain of nefarious misdeeds.

Misdeeds that can kill them all.

A crawling dread claimed its place in the depths of Bilecky's gut. With the number of lights to glower from this wicked abode, he imagined a legion unending waiting to flood them from behind its terrible gates. "Any bright ideas to light our darkest hour?"

Tyrune clutched his red chin hairs.

"Why are there no guards?" Mace exposed with tactical vigilance. "A fortress of this magnitude should not stand without its defenders."

Bartholomite snorted. "Who needs guards when your shit's so evil that it scares the bloody piss out of a man's dick-hole?"

"Entirely. This place is soul-deep in the bowels of darkness," Orcarina added. The realm's entire state of existence escaped her senses, mocking her. "It was never meant to be found."

Bilecky swayed his head negatively. Reluctance lingered within him like a grain of sand in the dark. "Then we should leave it unfound."

As the fortress lived as a prominent pinnacle of evil lairs, an unforgiving and maliciously familiar existence approached Decan's like a blast from the past. The stronghold's rock formations established a threatening dreg of unfavorable recollections, bad omens whispering from the wastes buried within the gritty brims of Saadia's uncivilized realms. "Doesn't this place give you the air of Somber's Brink?" He asked Mace.

But Orcarina's ears pricked to his words. "The Don'kaani," she uttered. The words as if a bitter taste curdled inside of her mouth. "The Dark Origin."

"The Don... Don'kaa... ni?" Bilecky tried and butchered the word. As if he knew the tongue of the Elfrik, anyway. On the other hand of it all, his father watched him with a funny stare, finally getting a closer look at Bilecky's choice weapons—as if he saw an unusual ghost.

Orcarina answered again. "Where the last of the Quartari fell."

Containing himself no more, Bartholomite finally snatched Tiff from Bilecky's gun holster so easy that the boy fumbled in to make much retaliation aside from a stumble at the force of his big-handed father's sudden move. Fascination stole the dwarf's study. The piece, its four square barrels, its overly-dressed frame; metallic bronze steel married to blackwood stock. The writing along its barrels an enigma to his expertise, but given its form, this thing, this pistol, ought to hurt worse than an arrow and, if anything, rivaled the blade. "Never did I even think to see the forgotten arms. Do you even know how to work those things?" He glared, still engaged in its discovery. "Do you even know what they are?"