“Only the dead walk the blackened Ruins of Garrlohan and only the dead pass through it!” She flashed her blanched teeth. “My husband once thought as you did. He thought to establish a trade route between here and Kurn. Forty years and seventy-seven nights since he left me with warmth in his bones. Forty years and seventy-seven nights since he took that road. But the dead rose up and took him. The dead pulled him down to their soiled graves!”
The old lady’s description gave him chills. He started to walk away when suddenly she jumped up from her rocking chair.
“A curse! A black curse lays thick on that land!” the woman shouted, gesticulating with wild abandon, “Death! Death comes to all who pass that way!”
Shade clenched his teeth. He spun a dagger into his fingers. He pulled his arm back for the throw that would end her mad raving forever.
“He still visits me, you know,” she said softly.
Shade froze.
“My husband returns to me every night…the flesh still rotting on his bones. He has joined them! Joined the ranks of the dead! He has asked me. He has asked me many moons to cross the river. To make our bed in the graves and dine on the flesh of the living, but I have resisted him. But you! You walk willingly into their embrace. Have you not learned? Men once came from all parts of the kingdom to plunder Garrlohan! Fools, just as you! But the undead rose up and drank their blood. And they will taste your highborn Elvish blood, Dark Elf! And you too will join the ranks of the walking dead!”
Shade snapped his arm back. The knife slid down naturally. It came to rest between his middle and index fingers. He was about to release when he heard the sound of heavy boots crunching snow behind him.
He turned to see six heavily armed Doljinaarian guards who had just emerged from the local garrison. They stared at him drawing their weapons, eyes widening in alarm at the sight of a Dark Elf.
The assassin glared daggers back and they hesitated. He could take them, he could take them all, but the last thing he needed was an entire Doljinaarian garrison on his heels. Shade twirled the dagger in his fingers again and slipped it back into its sheath. He swept his cloak about him. He sprinted toward the stone markers of Garrlohan. He passed the markers, made his way half way down the bridge, slipped into unseen form and waited.
He could hear a ghastly moan screaming from the deep ruins, as if he had awoken some horrible spirit. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. A ghastly wind blew through his hair. He clamped his hands over his ears as the maddening moan groaned loudly. He knew that blood-chilling lament…the lament of the one who haunted these ruins. He could not wait long. Already, he could see the bones rattling…soon to rise. They were coming for him.
“Death!” the old woman ragged on, “Death has claimed the fool!”
The guards waited a few more minutes and shrugged. They headed back to the garrison relieved, figuring the old lady was right. Shade breathed out a long sigh of relief. He slipped silently back over the bridge and cut back around the outskirts of town. He left Graystone and set up camp far off the northwestern road in a thick grove of old Fogrim Pines where he rested until the break of dawn.
Chapter Four:
The Ruins
of Garrlohan
Shade kicked up bits of mud as he sprinted madly through the mushy gray plains of Garrlohan. He could not escape the haunting voice that tortured the winds. He gritted his teeth and pulled at his hair as the blood-chilling moan rung louder, stabbing at his eardrums. He steeled his will and ran harder. He was on the verge of collapse, he was pushing himself too hard, but he could not stop now. The very air of Garrlohan rung with a bovine lowing that never ceased, but this was not the harmless groaning of some domestic cattle. This low was ghastly and haunting…the icy wailing of a vengeful undead, not of man or beast but Minotaur—the moaning of Xzoron.
Shade’s boot splashed in a puddle. His right quad cramped up. He grimaced and pushed through the pain. There was no room for weakness. Not now. The late evening sky hung with a thickening overcast that quickened the coming night. He felt a numbing drizzle touch his cheeks. He fixed his eyes upon the hazy sunset and ran like a condemned man towards the teasing light of heaven. He knew he could not escape nightfall and yet as the warm motherly touch of the sun left his skin he could not help but miss her soft kiss.
The Dark Elf covered his ears as Xzoron’s shrill maddening wail neared its peak. He could hear all the undead Minotaur’s rage in that harrowing cry, lashing out, scarring the very air. Generations of pent-up rage echoed in that chilling lament. He recognized the same ancient anger lurking in the silent empty eye sockets of every Minotaur skull he ran by. Skeletons lay strewn across the landscape, weapons rattling in their boney fingers, but they did not rise, not yet. It was not yet time to answer the summons of their new master.
Shade picked up the pace. His time was short. He did not fear the bones of men, but Minotaur. The Deadhorns as they had become more commonly feared. The Minotaur race reached a good ten feet tall up to the tip of their horns. The Minos who died here had carried giant hammers, mallets, axes and some had even wielded small trees. He saw the scattered bones of men and knew their bodies had been decimated by brute fury. Few withstood the warpath of a raging Minotaur. The accursed brutes could run at horse speed over short distances.
Shade could feel the anger of these ancient lands in the brown, dormant, Bullgrasses and in the tall stone monoliths sunken into the muddy earth. He used to marvel at their rage he felt humming through them whenever he touched one, but he could understand their vehemence. He knew what it was like to be hunted down due to the color of his skin. Men had been hunting and poaching Minotaur for centuries before the Mino Wars. The black curse laid on this land had wrested the plunder from the hands of its conquerors. Served them right, but such hollow sympathies would not aid him today. The land would never understand him, for here he too was a foreigner…a trespasser.
The setting sun was now only a sliver of light as the first massive stones of the ancient Minotaur city of Jahaeddra came into view. The ruined buildings were a series of four-hundred square foot monolithic stones, three standing and one large capstone to form crude Stone Age structures. Each building stood roughly twelve feet in height. At the center of town nine more mid-height monoliths, blackened with old blood, had been arranged in an ominous circle forming a cromlech the assassin knew to be the ancient place of Minotaur sacrifices. The scorched altar lay silent in front of Xzoron’s tomb from which the bovine lowing echoed into the night.
Shade turned his course slightly. He was not fool enough to run through the heart of the ruins, but his destination was on the far side of the outskirts. He began the long trek around the former Mino capital. A great battle had once been fought here. Jahaeddra was thick with bones, for it had been the Minotaurs’ last stand. The thousands of human bones paid grim testament to the wild berserker rage of a mere hundred Minotaur who gave their last breath to save their ancient homeland.
Xzoron was the only Minotaur wizard ever known to exist. Shade was quite familiar with the wizard’s history. Men at the tavern often spoke of the Curse of Garrlohan. Xzoron’s ways had been steeped in the black arts. He led his people through a series of campaigns against Doljinaar that came to be known as the Mino Wars. Eventually, the legions of Doljinaar marched against him and lay siege to Garrlohan, razing the crude stone cities all the way to the capital here at Jahaeddra.