Knight: Tracks of Darkness Read online

Tracks of Darkness

  By Dave Devine

  Copyright 2012

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  Table of Contents

  The Cast

  Foreword: Day 4

  An Essay by Mad Glare

  Knight: Tracks of Darkness

  Three Interpretations

  An Essay by Ana Thema

  The Cast

  Knight: Tracks of Darkness

  The King: The book never tells us who the King was; neither does it hint at his name. In fact, the book is just a series of paintings on each page. My guess is that the king was one of the elder rulers pre-dating the first Lucient emperors. Ana Thema may know more about him. This king is bitten in a nightmare by a terrible spider and he has less than thirty days to live.

  The Vizier: A powerful sorcerer. He is a close friend and confidante of the king. He believes that there is a way that the curse can be lifted and so, the king summons four great heroes and villains of their time to embark on a quest into the king’s own nightmares.

  Mav’ric the Riverblade: The Hero of his age. His fabled sword is like water and it can completely ignore an opponent’s armor. Mav’ric is the first person to respond to the King’s request for aid.

  Horace the Desert Arrow: An outlaw and a vagrant. He was once a great general in the king’s army and he has agreed to aid the king he once served.

  Kalaitos: A wicked grey elf; the last of his kind. He wields a blade called Swazinder, which means the grace accorded to man. The king is reluctant to let this elf into the realm of his dreams, but the vizier insists that the quest cannot succeed without his aid.

  Master On Darai: A faceless man, twisted and evil. His blurry sword exists in two worlds and it can sweep a man entirely from the memory of existence. If Master On Darai can cooperate with the others, he can destroy the spider utterly and save the king. But why would he want to do that?

  Jurel Forlorn: Dream born, which means he has never existed in the waking world. In some paintings, he is a man guiding the companions throughout Nür. And in other paintings, he is something else. I believe he is a Were-lion, and I hope this book is just that: an old children’s tale.

  Foreword:

  An excerpt from Fall of the Minotaur King

  Day 4

  “Well, there was a king,” I began. “I never figured out his name. And the king had a vizier at court that helped him rule.” She nodded her head. I may have figured out who the heroes in the story were, but I was unsure. The author (painter, rather) mixed his tale with both fictional and historical characters.

  “One night, the king had an awful nightmare. He was attacked by a terrible spider.” I pointed at the first painting of a monstrosity veiled in shadow with red eyes, some of them blinking. It towered over the king, casting a long shadow over his entire realm. The sheer scale of that monster next to the king was the source of many sleepless nights for me. “When the king awoke, he discovered a number written on his hand. It was the number twenty-eight. The next day the number changed to twenty-seven.”

  So the king had less than one month to live. This explained why the numbering in the book began with page twenty-eight and ended with one day remaining ere the king’s doom.

  “The king summoned his vizier who devised a plan: let us send four of the greatest heroes of our age into the realm of your dreams in order to slay the spider and lift the curse.”

  “Very good, Andre,” my strange visitor said. “Now who were the heroes that went into the king’s dreams?”

  I turned to page twenty-five. There were four men walking toward the king’s throne as the king and the vizier hailed them, greeting them warmly. I pointed to the man in blue silks slashed with white, in whose confidence, wore no armor. “Mav’ric the Riverblade?” I pretended to guess, but the man had to be Mav’ric. He was the hero of countless stories, spanning history and legend. This should not have been an educated guess.

  The man standing next to Mav’ric stood head and shoulders above the others. He wore a hood that shrouded his face and animal skins stitched together over baggy brown pants and boots made of stiff wrapped cloth. He was armed with a long bow and two quivers—one over his shoulder and another at his side. “Horace of Aredea.”

  The third man was not a man, but an elf. He wore a thin suit of form-fitting jet black armor engraved with silver spells etched into its make. He wore a perpetual scowl on his face. His eyes were burning with a hot white light and a long thin sword was sheathed in the void over his shoulder. “That is Kalaitos, a fictitious villain. His sword is called Swazinder which means the grace accorded to man. It rests in the void where it draws its unholy power.”

  “Your time here in the tower has not gone entirely to waste,” she replied, impressed. “And what about the fourth man? Why is his image blurry?”

  She was right. The fourth hero looked as though the painter, or another, attempted to blot him out of the picture or obscure his image. Perhaps it was the man himself who did it, fearing he would be recognized. Instead, the attempt left a frightening and ghastly image. It had the look of a man or woman holding a sword. I poured over the library for years trying to figure out who this person was.

  “Judging by the company he kept, and since the two heroes of the age had already been named, I suspected that this was none other than Master On Darai—the faceless man—but I never understood. By all accounts Master On Darai and Kalaitos were villains. Why would the king entrust such men to traverse the realm of his dreams?”

  The girl just shrugged. “Perhaps by sending evil to contest another evil, the kingdom would be twice saved.”

  “And Kalaitos,” I mused. “What he did was unconscionable. He—“

  “Destroyed his entire race?” she interrupted. “Yes, he did. Perhaps this quest was his opportunity to repent and be redeemed.”

  “Is there redemption for a wrong so grave?” I wondered.

  Again, the girl shrugged. “Regardless of their intentions,” she said, “four men had less than a month to infiltrate the realm of dreams and lift the spider’s curse.”

  I turned to the nineteenth page and said, “Thankfully, they met a guide. I don’t know who or what it is.” The painting depicted the four companions surrounding a dark creature with yellow eyes that walked like a beast on his fours on one corner of the painting then stood as a man after agreeing to guide them to the spider’s lair.

  “Why are we discussing this anyway?” I wondered. “It’s just a book for children. None of this happened. I don’t believe it—”

  The Weekend before the events in Knight: Tracks of Darkness

  An essay by Mad Glare, author of the world’s troubles

  I visited this moment several thousand times.

  The King and I lived in an era of peace and harmony. Back then, the capital of humanity was Omeneir, an island along the country known today as Caswell, seat of the Mercenary Queen. We walked the gardens together that weekend; he liked to stroll around the grand library of Omeneir and smile at nothing with this sagacious look on his face.

  “Any news from the east, Ben?” The King asked. “Anything interesting?”

  “A cat was stuck high up in Mother tree,” I reported.

  The king gasped. “Oh, the poor thing! Was he rescued?”

  “Yes, she was, sire. Mav’ric the Riverblade himself knelt before the tree and prayed before climbing it
s great heights and rescuing the poor little pussy.”

  “Ah!” the King cried. “Mav’ric’s legend grows. Anything else?”

  I gave him a general rundown of the affairs of the world:

  The dwarves were busy building Zambaur, a wondrous city that would later become the seat of the Lucient dynasty and even later, we would use it as a prison kingdom where all the nations of the world send their poor and their criminals.

  The elves, centaurs, minotaur and other fantastic creatures of the north roamed Eos freely. They were excited about our young race, and eager back then to share their wisdom and power. Men were still young, hopeful and forward looking. The city of Omeneir was our crowning achievement. The great library was there, and we hungered and thirsted after knowledge.

  Wizards were not persecuted or burned at the stake, or drowned in the Nevirending Sea. They were revered and adored. The Minotaur and their magical kin—the Minnietaur—were one. They were known simply as Minyator. The King himself was the greatest king we ever had; there was nobody like him.

  “Not even a skirmish?” The King asked. “Or a bandit raid somewhere?”

  The world had become quite boring. And boredom, as we all know, is the root of all evil.

  “Is it wrong to yearn for conflict? Adventure? Is it wrong that, in my dreams, my sword is wet with the blood of my imaginary foes?”

  “We can always muster the army and scour