Chosen One Protective Services

The kids made their way through the halls, searching. Rusty had his assensing on, feeling for power below him. It was tricky, because as he’d learned from Jadar, hard things like stone or wood tended to obscure their detection, made it harder to track down chakra sources unless they were powerful. And as the wizards went, Reevian was on the smaller end of the scale. That said, Rusty got a familiar tingling on his feet at one point.

“He’s right under us,” he told the others. “Try to remember where we go from here, so we can backtrack.”

“I just want to find the damn stairs,” Gunther groused, holding his elbow with his right hand, and keeping his busted wrist close to himself.

“If we keep going this way we’ll run into something,” Rusty said. “We’ve explored all of the north side, and gone back and forth from east to west. There’s got to be something in the south.”

“Been a lot of hallways and they haven’t been laid out straight,” Ken said. “You sure we didn’t miss anything?”

Rusty checked his mental map. “Pretty sure. We passed up some empty space, but nothing big enough to be stairs. They always build them big, here.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Alice said. “Like they made for giants, or something.” Her hands worked nervously at the sides of her robe, squeezing and releasing the fabric. She was losing her nerve, Rusty knew. They had to wrap this up as fast as they could.

“Let’s go straight south then,” Ken said, seemingly coming to the same conclusion. “We can zig zag if we don’t find anything there, and if there’s no stairs then we’ll go back up and wait for Reevian.”

That seemed to ease her tension, and Rusty led the way south.

Truth to tell, he was starting to find the idea of going back upstairs and collapsing to be more appealing by the second. He’d just been worked over by a lady three times his weight at least, and his bruises were starting to ache. It was a miracle she hadn’t broken anything… no, no, remembering the fight and slowing it down, he could see several points where she’d drawn back to hit him in his crotch or face, then stopped and gone for a different area instead.

She’d been holding back, and he wasn’t sure if he was relieved or embarrassed about that.

“You know, this is something we could do. With an enchantment, I mean,” Roz whispered in his ear. “Like look over her fights and make our muscles remember how to move more quickly against what she’s doing.”

That would help against her, Rusty thought. But not everyone’s going to fight like her. And remember what Terathon said? How much would it suck to lose this trick midway through a fight?

“Pretty bad, but it’d help you at the beginning of a fight, yeah?” Roz said. “And if you take the bad guys down fast enough, it won’t go down in the middle of a fight. Just think about it, daddy-o.”

I will. Later. Thanks, Roz.

“Anytime, Russ.”

The word pulled on his mind, and he forgot his pain for a moment. Cyrus was the only one who called him Russ, and this stirred up a flood of memories. Rusty was glad he was in the lead, and the others couldn’t see his eyes tear up. This wasn’t the first time he’d missed home, but now, after taking a beating, and dealing with the cold and demanding wizards for a couple of weeks, it was maybe the strongest bout of homesickness so far.

But it wasn’t anything that he could worry about right now, he knew that. They had to see things through, or he’d never get back home. None of them would.

A few minutes later, they found the stairs down. They were guarded by two men wearing strange, segmented armor that was almost like bands wrapped around their chests and limbs. The men stared at them, didn’t answer any questions, and didn’t stop the children as they gave up trying to talk and just passed by.

“No unicorns on those guys,” Ken said, once they were at the bottom of the winding flight of stairs. “But they had some kind of carved pattern on the side of their helms. It looked like a bush or something.”

Rusty hadn’t noticed, he’d been busy helping Gunther get down without jostling his arm too badly. But a quick memory review later, and he nodded. “It looked like lotus flowers. I mean, I saw that once in a book, they looked a little like that.”

“Guess I need to read more,” Ken muttered. “Okay. Now we just have to backtrack to where we felt Reevian.”

Rusty looked at the curve of the hallway, and compared it to the picture in his mind of the floors above. “We’ll want to stick to the left as much as possible, until we’re near the center of things. Let’s try that unless something else comes up.”

“I’m glad you been keeping track of this. You got a really good memory,” Alice told him, as he lead the way.

He was glad he was in the lead, so she couldn’t see his face.

“Maybe we start messing up now and again?” Roz said. “Just to make sure they’re off the scent, you know?”

It feels like lying, Rusty thought back. I don’t like lying to them. We’re supposed to be a real fellowship. We should be able to trust each other.

“Tell that to Boromir,” Roz muttered, but he dropped back behind Rusty’s peripheral vision and kept quiet for the rest of the walk.

This was good, because it let Rusty focus on the new scenery.

The walls had layers of wood down here, with occasional ivory inlays. Like the tapestries in the floor above, the inlays showed battles and what were probably pretty legendary scenes if you knew what their history was. There were occasional tapestries, but they were mainly cut with geometric patterns. The floor was covered with rugs, green with golden lotus symbols that shifted into plain black after they took the first left turn. The upper floor had long, straight hallways with windows cut in at strategic points to let light get through to enough of the corridors, but down here things were far more twisty and turny. Hanging lanterns that seemed to use flickering glowing stones instead of fire provided light, which was good because there weren’t as many windows.

And then there were the people.

Robes and tunics seemed to be the go-to clothing for them, save for the few guards, (male AND female, which would have been a real shock to Rusty if he hadn’t gone a few rounds with Jand earlier,) who wore metal armor and seemed to mainly stand at fixed locations and watch them pass with cold intensity. The hair styles were unfamiliar, and they were mostly brownish of skin. Something like a cross between the South Americans Rusty had seen, mixed with a hint of Alice’s hue. But the facial features had variances he’d never seen in books or television or movies, things like eyelids that seemed to close in two stages when they blinked, or lips that were naturally split to show their canines and their canines only.

But one thing they all had in common, was that everyone was wearing a symbol.

Many of them had the lotus marks sewn onto their clothing or embedded into a metal or ceramic badge that they wore prominently. But it wasn’t just the lotus symbols, there were more, ranging to things that looked like alien animals to hands holding axe-like weapons, to a rough symbol that brought to mind a set of scales.

And one woman, who took a look at them and quickly hurried the other way, that woman wore robes embroidered with a familiar-looking eye mark. It was the exact match to the patch on Alice’s robes.

Alice saw it at the same time. “Oh! Excuse me! Excuse me miss, do you know Jadar?”

The woman didn’t stop.

Every other stranger in the hallway paused, and stared at them. More so than they had been, anyway.

“I don’t think she speaks English,” Rusty said.

“No, I know that,” Alice whispered back, face flushed. “I just thought maybe she had a translation spell like the wizards do.”

“They are maybe of the same family or guild,” Gunther said. “This gives me an idea. Let’s look for symbols that match Reevian’s mark.” He nodded toward his waist, and the golden circles that sat at his hip, with the inlaid crystals forming a rough and broken line atop it.

And after a few minutes of searching, and more and more people slowing down to stare at them, they found a corridor that was entirely covered with blue rugs bearing a golden circle in the center of each section. It even went in roughly the direction Rusty had assensed.

Unlike the lotus-carpeted halls, these had nobody moving through them. And the people who had been silently watching them go seemed to relax once they stepped onto the golden-circled carpets, and went back to whatever mysterious destinations and tasks they were tending to.

And after the first turn, Alice whispered, “Do you all feel that?”

“Yeah,” Rusty said, and “I see it, too.”

There was a spell ahead. Something blueish, filling the hallway like a soap bubble fit into a squarish wire frame of a twisted wire bubble wand. It was translucent enough that he could see the other side of the hallway beyond, and as they drew closer, he could feel the pressure of it building.

“That’s gonna do something,” Rusty said, raising a hand. “Hold on for a second.” He studied it, found that it didn’t cover the full hallway. It was like a sheet, nailed at a few points and drooping inward where it wasn’t. He dropped his assensing for a moment, and saw small gold sockets on the walls, with what looked like pointy crystal shards sticking out from them. “Those,” he said. “Those are doing something to the magic. Like clothespins holding clothes on a line.”

“So what do we do about them?” Gunther asked. He was sweating now, the lines of his face drawn. It was taking a lot for the big kid to keep his cool, Rusty knew.

“I don’t know what to do about this. Let me check with my familiar.” Rusty closed his eyes, and Roz appeared, studied the corridor, then turned around and shrugged.

“This ain’t in the manual, daddy-o.”

“Shi—shoot,” Rusty corrected. “Um. I don’t know what to do here.”

“Let me try something,” Gunther said. “Do your assensing again.”

And Rusty had barely gotten it going when Gunther turned sideways, stuck out his left shoulder, and shuffled so that his badge touched the blue wall.

“Gunther!” Alice gasped.

“Okay, that was brave,” Rusty said.

“Kinda stupid, too. Real risky,” Roz told him.

“I want to get this over with,” Gunther grumbled.

“It’s doing something,” Rusty confirmed. “It’s retracting!” And the blue stuff rippled like the surface of a pond, and seemed to flow like liquid into the crystal sockets. “It’s gone.”

“Well go quick, I should stand here to make sure it doesn’t come back when you’re midway through,” Gunther told them.

And indeed, after they’d all stepped through and Gunther followed, Rusty watched it flicker back so fast that they surely would have touched it if Gunther had gone first by even a step.

“I wonder if it’s like a doorbell,” Ken said, eyeing the hallway behind them.

“Don’t care,” Gunther said, already walking ahead.

The doors were a bit fancier here, and the engravings were all wood and what looked like silvery metal, no ivory to be found. The lanterns hanging from the ceiling came in clusters now, illuminating the halls brightly. The doors to either side of the corridor were all dark, serious wood, giving the whole place a more austere appearance.

“Almost feels like we’re going to the principal’s office,” Ken muttered.

And the second he said that, someone shouted from up ahead.

The kids froze.

Uh-oh. Should we cheese it? Rusty wondered.

But the shouting went on for a few more seconds, then petered out, and nothing happened.

“I don’t think that was at us,” Alice whispered. “Let’s keep quiet and see what’s going on.”

They found the source of the noise after a cross-junction. A door on the left-side corridor was open, and some guy was being really angry in that room.

And to his relief, Rusty heard Reevian replying.

None of the words he was replying with, nor the words from the angry guy, were in any way comprehensible.

The kids looked to each other. Ken’s face was full of sorrow. “Aw man,” he whispered, in between the angry noises. “I thought we might be able to get something good out of this.”

“He can’t,” Roz whispered in Rusty’s ear. Rusty jumped, turned his head to see that Roz was sitting on his shoulder. The familiar had given himself a pair of devil horns. “But you know, we taught that satyr girl our language. What’s to stop us from teaching ourselves THAT language?”

Yeah, and she didn’t speak it well. What if it garbles up what we’re hearing, here?

Roz vanished, and Rusty twitched again, as the familiar spoke into his other ear. Rusty turned his head and saw without much surprise that Roz had lost the horns and gained a halo. “That’s a good point,” the little guy said. “And besides, casting a spell right next to Reevian? Shoot, he’d notice that instantly.”

Good thing we’re not doing that, Rusty thought back…

…and then remembered that he’d never turned his assensing off.

He realized two things in that moment.

One, was that the other kids had fallen silent. Even Gunther’s heavy, pained breathing had stopped.

Two, was that a shadow had fallen over them.

Rusty turned to look up, knowing what he’d see, and sure enough, Reevian was standing there, glaring down at them, one of his eyes twitching with barely-held rage.

“Jand told us to find you,” Gunther said into the silence, and groaned as he held up his purple and clearly-bent wrist. “She broke my arm, and cannot heal it.”

The wizard opened his mouth, but whatever reply he might have made was drowned out by a command from the room, as the angry voice said “Sham ockt? Corvo canna du frac?”

“Ziff knil,” Reevian said through gritted teeth. “Erbor tik tan mell gis.”

“Zaaaaan. Til gisa kyen.”

The angry voice didn’t sound quite as angry when it said that, but Reevian’s eyes opened wide. The wizard’s face twisted, and he looked between the children and the open door. “Aff, Moras. Yen gisen, arka molay kran tur.”

“Aff.” The voice stated.

Reevian closed his eyes, and his lips moved. Then he looked down at Rusty and the others. “You are about to speak with the Tower Lord. He commands all within. Including us. Speak only when spoken to. Do not interrupt either of us. Do not meet his eyes for more than a second. Be meek. Do you understand me? Nod if you do.”

The four of them nodded in unison, and Reevian led them through the doorway.

The Tower Lord’s room was not what Rusty had expected. He’d expected something like a principal’s office, or a big company office like the kind he’d seen on television. Or maybe something like the throne room of Gondor. Or if he was a really smart guy, a room like Cyrus’ study, all cluttered and complicated.

The Tower Lord’s room was nothing like that. It was a bedroom, and admittedly the bed was large enough to fill the far end of the room, and there were much nicer tapestries on the walls and rugs on the floor, all bearing variations on the golden circle motif, but it was clearly a room that the Tower Lord lived in. There was no desk, but something like a lectern, and the Lord leaned on it as he surveyed them, looking very unimpressed overall.

Rusty was pretty sure the Tower Lord was right to be unimpressed. The Tower Lord was monstrous.

The first thing that struck him were the man’s eyes. They were black eyes, literally black where they should be white, with red sclera and black pupils glittering in the light. The Lord’s skin was ash gray, giving his face the overall impression of a campfire, the eyes like burning embers. He had black hair grown long and straight, and a neatly-trimmed mustache and short beard that ran up to sideburns on either side of his long, low head. Brows jutted out from his face like a mantel above a fireplace, and the lines of his face were so craggy that if he fell in mud he’d be washing it out for a week.

Around his ashen gray neck hung many necklaces, festooned with glittering charms, like Jand’s keyring writ large. Some of them glimmered to Rusty’s assensing sight, flickering with different colors, their pressure pushing against his eyes and letting him know that their spells were active.

Rusty had to look pretty far up to see them. The Lord was BIG. Seven feet tall if he was an inch, dressed in something like a Roman toga that blended into scaly leather trousers, with matching leather bracers clinging tightly to his bulging arms. Some of it was fat, but more was muscle, and he loomed over the children like a giant over a cottage.

For a second, all Rusty could think was this is an orc. He’s got Sauron eyes!

Then he remembered Reevian’s warning, and looked away.

“Shin de hara, Reevian,” the Tower Lord said. “Kei corr astik gis.”

“Aff, Moras,” Reevian replied.

“One among you is the Chosen,” the Lord said, studying them with those fiery eyes. “You will slay Ringaldr. This is your task, and why you were born. Yes?”

Ringaldr! The dark lord had a name, finally. The realization slowed his reactions. Rusty saw those dark eyes find his again, realized that everyone else had nodded, and did the same.

The Lord nodded back. “Are you all prepared to do whatever you must to slay Ringaldr?”

This time Rusty nodded with the others.

The Lord’s face shifted. The kids gasped, as the muscles ground like tectonic plates shifting, the anger palpable. “And why should I believe you?” he growled.

The silence hung in the room. Even Gunther held his breath, stopped gasping.

The Lord was the first to break the silence. “You are soft. Weak. And I do not know if we have time to harden you properly. Ringaldr moves, strikes our camps, and fades away, while you learn things that you should have been taught from birth. Every night that you sleep in my tower, your room is paid for in the blood of my people. What use are you? Your world is easy!” he slapped the lectern aside, and Rusty took a step back as the wooden thing hit the wall and shattered, and the Lord took a step closer, his hands flexing. “How can soft, untried CHILDREN from a people who have never truly SUFFERED slay our GREATEST FOE?”

“Okay, we maybe got a Steward of Gondor situation going on here, Rusty,” Roz said, quickly. “I think he wants answers!”

“It’s what we were born to do, sir!” Rusty blurted out. “You said it yourself!”

The burning gaze turned on him, and Rusty recoiled as the Lord thrust his faces inches away, bending down half his length, to do so. “THEN YOU SHOULDN’T NEED SO MUCH TRAINING!”

“Then do it without us.” Gunther said.

The Lord went still. “What did you say?” he whispered.

“You say we our world is easy. That we’re soft. OUR Dark Lord killed my people. Killed SIX MILLION of us. And we fought back, and we killed him, eventually.”

The Lord’s face uncontorted, and he straightened up. He scooped a charm from around his neck, stared at it, then back to Gunther. “Six… million? That can’t be…” he cut himself off. “Hm. So you say you are not soft.”

“If you think we can’t do it, send us back and stop wasting everyone’s time,” Ken picked up what Gunther had put down. “How will yelling at kids waste any LESS time?”

“Sir, we’re going as fast as we can,” Alice said. “And my people know suffering. We used to be slaves. We fought back as we could, until enough people joined our cause, then we won free. We still got sufferin’ today, ain’t everyone is willing to let us be. But we’ll keep fightin’ until we’re equal to anyone.”

The Lord’s eyes flicked between them. “And you?” he asked Rusty.

Rusty shrugged. “My folks are farmers in Texas. It’s not an easy life, but it’s honest, and we keep to it even if we could have done softer stuff for more money. We live right, and we live good, and we’ll fight anyone who tells us different.”

“Okay, so you ripped off that from what your Dad said to your grandpa whenever grandpa gave him grief about not enlisting, but that’s still good,” Roz told him.

Evidently it was good enough, because the Lord shifted his eyes to Ken. “And you?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not the Chosen One, but I’m willing to die for these three,” Ken said, hooking a thumb toward them. “If that’s not tough enough for you, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

The Tower Lord considered them, one hand creeping up to stroke his beard. Then he nodded to Reevian. “Take them back, fix that one’s arm before he passes out. You have three days.”

Rusty looked to Reevian, saw the sweat running down the wizard’s face, the relief evident in his sagging frame, as he bowed slightly, and said “Aff, Moras.”

The Tower Lord nodded. “Nil corae, Reevian. Pes culo ra Hivom ola vi mrem.”

Reevian turned white. “Aaaa…. Aff. Moras.”

“Shent!” The Tower Lord swept his arm around, palm out and open, then turned his back.

Reevian didn’t speak, as he led them out, only grasped Gunther’s wrist and worked a spell that flared green to Rusty’s sight. He also took care to stand in the blue spell across the hallway, waving them to pass through, as he led them back up the stairs, and they all began the long climb upward.

“Sir?” Gunther asked, as they stopped at a balcony to rest midway through the climb, and Reevian stared out into the distance, his eyes focused on something far out of view. “What will happen in three days? Will we be done?”

“No,” Reevian said. “In three days, you will leave the tower for a time.”

The kids glanced to each other.

“Sir?” Rusty mimicked Gunther. “Where are we going?”

“To the front lines,” Reevian said, turning finally and gazing at them with naked dread in his eyes. “The Lord has tested your words. Now he will test you in battle.”