Firegrass - 2. Intro

The drumbeat of hooves shattered the quiet of the forest like thunder before a storm. Two riders, driving their horses to the point of collapse, cloaks whipping behind them in their wake, raced at breakneck speed along the forest track. The lead rider had his left hand held outstretched, holding onto a leather thong that had a small gemstone pulsing and glowing rose red dangling from it. On the path ahead of the rider were footprints, three-toed and glowing green. The indentations of the prints would have been barely visible but for the magical limning. The glowing trail extended thirty feet or more ahead, along the track, and faded away behind them as the horses passed.

The forest was dense with young trees and underbrush, and the trail wandered aimlessly, so the pair had little warning before they burst from the forest at the base of a grass-covered hillside. The lead rider shuddered as they left the forest and pulled his horse to a halt. Their speed was such that they crested the hill before the horses could stop.

The pair sat for a moment, catching their breath and surveying the landscape ahead of them. The forest was gone, replaced by gently rolling hills covered in the rich gold and lush green of verdant grasslands, stalks waving in the light breeze that danced around the land. Specks of purple, blue, and yellow were scattered throughout, signs of flowers too small to be seen as anything but splashes of color, and only then with others of their kind.

The trail continued on down the hill, following its gentle slope, a dark brown slash in the welter of plant life. It widened as it went, connecting with a road, the lines marking the edges of its wide paving stones visible even from a distance. The road stretched from the horizon to the right to edge of a huge walled city.

They were a study in opposites, the riders, light and dark. On the left, a barbarian swordsman, long raven hair braided and falling nearly to the back of the horse he was astride, a solid mare, white as snow save for a few flecks of grass that stuck to her flanks. He wore a cloak of forest brown, edged with black fur, concealing but not hiding the sword slung across his back. He was tall and lean, muscles obviously from hard work. He wore leather bracers around his wrists, metal bands around his biceps, a necklace of runes around his throat, and little else. Even with the light breeze his bronzed skin glistened with sweat, accentuating the black spiral tattoos on his shoulders.

His companion sat in stark contrast, his stallion black as night, his hair a blinding white, long and unbound, the light breeze trailing it behind him, gold and silver spirals twined though locks, a headband of bronze, inset with violet stones that matched his eyes across his forehead. Slighter in build, though not by much, his cloak was a rich dark green as was the vest he wore, dyed to match the cloak, with intricate knotwork across it. The colors accentuated the light gold of his skin. His bearing and clothes marked him as a barbarian prince.

Though the men seemed relaxed, their horses panted heavily, taking the time the pause gave them to breathe and rest. They had been driven unmercifully the past day, pushed past the point most horses would fall, saved only by fitness and good breeding. Still, they were at their limit. Like most sensible creatures they were unmoved by the sight before them. The men were far more interested.

"Why did we stop?" asked the dark haired barbarian. He pulled a cylinder from out of a saddlebag and held it to his right eye, surveying the landscape that unfolded before them and the city beyond it. The spyglass twitched and jumped as his attention flicked from place to place, examining anything he thought might be suspicious.

"I think we crossed something," his partner said. The necklace he was holding had lost its glow. He turned and looked behind him. Where there should have been a massive forest there was instead a small copse of trees. The path they were on led into it and disappeared into the shadows. He frowned as he saw this.

"Damn," he said. "Ben, we've crossed realms."

Ben turned and looked, scowling at the path behind them. "Can we cross back, William?" he asked, as he turned back to peer at the city through his spyglass.

"I think so," William said, looking at the path and the small patch of trees. "If not we'll have to find another way back. I hate these pocket dimensions."

"Can we still track the girl and the monster?" Ben asked absently, his attention mostly on the landscape in front of them.

In response William held the necklace up in front of his face. It was a simple one, a long leather thong with a pendant on one end. The pendant was a milky-white round stone, shot through with veins of glowing rose and twined with copper wire. A few small threads of rose and light blue, waving as if caught in a light breeze, emanated from the stone. The threads pointed towards the city below them.

"Yes," he said after a moment's examination of the waving threads, "but not well." He wound the necklace up and carefully dropped it into a pocket in the lining of his cloak. "I think we're wherever that monster thing comes from. Something's getting in the way of the tracer spell."

Ben just grunted in acknowledgement, his attention caught by the city. It was enormous, roughly circular, about three miles in diameter from what Ben could tell. It was ringed by a wall at least twenty feet high, and the buildings inside were laid out roughly in circles. There were five main gates in the wall, each with a wide road that ran to the center of the city. At the center was a flat-topped tower so wide that, even at seven stories tall, it seemed squat. Behind and attached to it, cutting through a few rings of the city, was a long rectangular building.

"What do you think, Ben?" William asked, growing impatient. They'd ridden hard to get here in time to save the girl, and the sudden stop to survey things rankled, even if he knew it was prudent. At least she was still alive; the glowing gemstone showed that, if nothing more. "One of the Great Cities?"

Ben frowned and held his spyglass up to look again. "No," after another survey of the city. "I don't think so. It's not from the First Age, either. Second, I think. It's definitely big, but it doesn't match anything I've heard of the Great Cities, and it doesn't look right for anything from the First Age. Too primitive."

Something had swept through the city, destroying nearly everything. Even from this distance that was clear. The wall ringing the city had huge rents, looking almost as if some great beast had bitten chunks out of it. The streets within were heaped with piles of rubble and debris, and the buildings… the buildings almost looked as if something had taken a monstrous club and knocked the top stories off of nearly every structure. Only one thing seemed untouched, a great tower in the center of the city and an attached hall, a long rectangular building, clear even at this distance, that stretched from the edge of the central tower to a spot halfway to the city wall.

"Something destroyed it, William. We're too far away to tell what."

William sighed. "Great. How?"

"Can't tell," Ben said, pushing the spyglass closed and replacing it in his saddlebag. "Looks like all the buildings have been destroyed. Knocked down somehow."

"Wonderful," William said sardonically. "Another unknown force of great destruction. Tell me again why we do this?"

"Because," said Ben, as he urged his mount forward towards the city, "it beats staying home and playing cards."

At the edge of the city they stopped. The wall was in shambles, in worse shape than it had seemed from the top of the hill. It wasn't just knocked down, it looked like it had been torn asunder, great chunks of stone ripped from the wall and flung around. Entering the city wouldn't be a problem, as the wall had been taken to the ground in several places. Oddly there were no full blocks of stone missing or moved – the only cracks or seams visible in the walls were in the areas where things were damaged, and clearly were because of the destruction.

The two heroes surveyed the city, not yet dismounting. William held up the heartstone, letting it dangle in front of him on its chain. The stone pulsed a rosy red, strong and even.

"She's still alive," William said. He spoke three words of power and traced a circle around the hanging stone with his finger. The threads that came from it were no longer gently waving, instead sticking straight out, taut as if something pulled hard from the other end. Unfortunately the threads all pointed in a slightly different direction. The stone moved as if pulled, urging them forward into the city.

"Close, too," Ben observed, watching the stone. "Can you tell where?"

William shook his head. "No. It's bound to her, but the spell only makes the bound threads visible. At this distance..." He shook his head and broke the spell, carefully winding the leather thong around the stone and putting the necklace back into a pocket in his cloak. "Magic travels different routes than we do. I'd need some spellwork at the other end to draw a line, but the binding thread's too fragile to push something along."

Ben snorted and shook his head, obviously unimpressed with the limitations of William's magic. He dismounted, letting his reins fall to the ground, and walked forward to the edge of the rent in the wall, frowning. The wall had been torn down, there was no doubt of that. It didn't look like it had been battered down from outside, though, as there were huge chunks of the wall both inside and outside the city. The wall itself was three feet thick, far too big to have been destroyed by a lightning storm, and the destruction was wrong for a tornado, if there had ever been a tornado with enough power to knock down a wall of solid stone that thick. There were too few scraps around, making it unlikely that it had been torn apart by explosives or earth spells. The pieces left were just too large.

William had also dismounted and was a short distance away, at one of the remaining solid sections of the wall. Close examination showed it had suffered from time, the surface was rough and pitted, and in many places covered with lichen and moss. It took him a moment to find a clear section a few handspans across, large enough for his purpose. He took out some white colored chalk and, eyes closed, muttering liquid syllables, drew a small seven pointed star. The chalk glittered as he drew, the lines perfectly even, and momentarily flashed a bright white as the figure was complete.

William put his hand in the center of the star, a space just large enough to fit and pushed mana into the figure. It grew as he concentrated, pulsing silver and gold as it stretched. Moss and lichen showered down on William as the star grew, the lines sweeping the surface of the wall clean as they moved out, until the star reached from the ground to well past the top of William's head. With a word and a gesture the star started to spin, moving slowly counter-clockwise. William let his sight shift into higher planes, trying to See what he could.

Ben walked up next to William, watching him work. The star was glowing, each point a different shade of brown. The center was a dark brownish green. Ben frowned, trying to make sense of it.

With a sigh, William let go the hold he had on the star, releasing his hold on the spell and letting it fade. The spinning stopped and the glow faded slowly, leaving nothing but the seven pointed figure, now etched into the stone wall.

"What did you see?" Ben asked.

"More than I expected," William replied. "There's still power here, even after all this time. The walls have protection woven through them, even extending across the gaps, like the magics in the wall were part of one big spell. There's not enough power to hurt us, but if we're not careful someone will know we've been here. There's more, though. It's strange, but from what I could tell the wall and the city…"

"…Are one solid piece of stone," Ben finished.

"Yeah," William said. "Or it was, at least. I could feel it, connected together. Everything's very uniform. The city's not alive, or anything like that, but it's very… homogenous, even now. The magic is strange too. The browns I expected, any city like this would have to be laced with earth magic. The green, though, that's unusual."

"Plant magics," Ben said. "Recognize it?"

"No," William answered, "I didn't. And just one type, there was only a single shade of green. It was strong, though, almost stronger than the earth magics."

"Any sign of the girl?" asked Ben

William sighed. "No, not within the range of this," he said, waving at the diagram on the wall, "It's a big city. I could try and follow the threads running through the city, but it could take me days, and even then could miss her if she's in a section that's cut off. I'm pretty sure this section's not connected to the central tower. I didn't sense anything, honestly. Nothing larger than rodents and birds."

Ben frowned again. "Were there any signs of the creatures, the one the innkeeper said carried off the girl?"

"No," William said, shaking his head. The ornaments in his bangs jangled quietly. "Not that I could feel, not close at least. It was all stone and grass, tied together, but no signs of any creatures. Did you find anything?"

"I didn't go into the city, but from what I could see the place has been thoroughly destroyed. Not by magic, and not by a storm or earthquake."

"Then what?"

"Look here," Ben said, walking over to the gap in the wall. "See up near the top? Those four parallel gouges?" The gouges he pointed at were up high, the topmost one eighteen feet or more above the ground, They were deep, several inches at least, and straight from end to end.

William looked. What he'd taken to be fractures in the stone now looked uncomfortably familiar.

"If you look," said Ben, handing his spyglass to William, "you can see them all over the city. Mostly around the edges of broken buildings, but there are some sections of the wall and a few buildings that have them."

William looked in the direction Ben pointed. Off in the distance, perhaps a half mile away, was the broken husk of a building, perhaps four stories tall, one of the tallest still remaining in the city. The top of the building was gone, and there was no way to tell how tall it once had been. From edge to edge, across the face of the building, was a set of four scrapes, scars in the stone face.

"Claws," said William.

"I think so," said Ben.

"Gods, claws that big. The paw on the creature must be nearly as tall as I am. Dragon, do you think?"

"No," Ben replied. "The destruction's too complete. The whole city was affected. A flock of dragons couldn't have done this. The city's too big. No sign of debris, either. Dragons would have left scales, chunks of claw, dung, scorch marks. A dragon large enough to leave those marks would have enough heat to melt some of the stone, and I haven't seen any sign of that. This wall is also three feet thick," Ben said, running his fingers along the ragged edge of the gap in the wall. "Something just grabbed hold of the wall and yanked pieces loose. No dragon is that strong. It's something else."

"Dead and gone?"

"No promises."

Now it was William's turn to frown. "That doesn't make me happy. Anything else?"

"No. No signs of any creatures. There are five roads into the place, and there's no telling how many holes in the wall."

"Do we have a plan? I'm not sure how much time we have. We were four hours behind that creature when we left, and I don't know if we made up any time getting here."

William fidgeted as Ben thought quietly for a moment. "The threads from your spell were pointing mostly at the center of the city. That central tower looked untouched, so I say we head towards it and check our progress as we go."

"Fine," William said, relieved to have a direction. "We should pen the horses back from the city. There's something about it I just don't like. It's too… quiet."

Ben took the horses back from the wall a hundred paces, then took a large roll of string out of one of his saddlebags. One end of the string was tied to a small hemisphere of jade which was covered with a tracery of lines and runes. Ben unwound the string in a circle around the horses, making a circle perhaps thirty feet across. The string ended in another hemisphere, this one of a creamy red stone, again covered with runes and lines. There was a quiet click when he put the two halves together, and the string briefly glowed yellow. Satisfied, he put the stone, now a single piece, carefully on the ground.

"Horses are penned," he said, walking back to the wall where William waited.

Ben and William both drew their swords the twin ringing sounds the only noise they could hear. William muttered a quick spell, making crimson fire dancing along the edge of his blade, while Ben took a small grey pebble covered with fine lines from inside a pocket in his cloak. The lines glowed silver as he stroked the thing with his thumb. William shivered for a moment as they crossed through the hole in the wall into the city.