Jovan's Gaze

Prologue

Jovan's Gaze

By Aaron Dov

PROLOGUE

Tapping. I could hear the tapping echo in the empty hallways. Tap, tap, tap. Somewhere ahead water dripped endlessly, and the sound carried outward from each tiny, wet impact, through the long stone-walled corridors, barren and scarred by burn marks. The sound carried all the way to my ears, knocking on my eardrums one after the other. It almost itched, the sound of it. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

It agitated me, set me on edge. I drew my short sword, felt the weight in my hand. I knew there was nothing here. I knew that. I was certain. This place was empty. It was so empty, not even insects dared trespass. It was as though they feared the place, as most creatures did. As most people did. It was not just that the massive stone keep was empty. Skyreach Keep had been that way for years. It was that it was always so silent, so utterly silent. It was like having thick cotton wadding in your ears. The silence was smothering, all consuming. I was alone, with nothing to keep me company but my own breathing and rustling. Still, the sword gave me some small comfort, like a child with a candle in the dark. It protected me from the tapping sound of the water against the stone.

It was dark here. The magic candles that should have burned eternally had long since been snuffed out by the angry storms that harried this place. The malevolence which once ruled here, and the magic which fed on it, had fled along with those whose darkness fueled it. The candles burned no more. The darkness hung in the corridor like a stench, some thick blanket of death that only added to the sense of emptiness. It was sickening, a barren deathscape where the silence was deafening.

Yet there it was. Tap, tap, tap. Incessant and loud, the water dripped upon the floor like a grim musician beating endlessly upon some odd instrument. The wooden floorboards which covered the stone floor were still intact in this part of the keep, so the drops must be falling into a puddle to make such a noise. So where was the water coming from?

It had not rained here in weeks. It almost never did, even before the war. The ground outside the keep, and for miles in every direction, was parched, cracked, and dead. The trees, sentinels, husks, stood as a reminder of just how very dead this place was, and had been since the magic plagues first took hold. Nothing grew here. Nothing could. The parched land did not help. The utter lack of water certainly did not help. So what was dripping? Some small container, knocked over during a plague storm? Surely, after so long, so very many years, anything apt to tumble would have long since done so.

The plague storms shook this place regularly. The raging storms pounded on the keep's walls, shook the ground, and sent fire and worse through the corridors. Anything not well sealed and stowed safely was long destroyed. The rooms and corridors, the dungeons and workshops, the rooms where machinations both dark and cruel were set in motion, all of them had been burned clean by some manner of stormy vengeance or another. Fire, rage, the cries of the dead. All of these things swept through the keep, and the lands which surrounded it, regularly. Fire, but not natural flame. No, not here. In this place, the fires burned with the angry, mournful cries of the dead, the countless victims who had suffered unspeakable ends in this place. This was one of the worst places in all of Theris, the darkest spot on a land where now only darkness reigned. Dark within dark. Only the throne room itself remained intact, its evil so deeply sunk into the stone, it kept out even the storms.

If it was not rain that dripped, if it was not some forgotten vial or vessel, what then caused the drip? I gripped my short sword tighter, leveled the blade for a quick, upward strike. Had some other wanderer decided to brave the storms, hoping for some trinket or treasure? In fifteen years, only a handful of us had ever dared come in sight of this terrible place. None but I had walked these corridors in well over a decade. The storms had seen to that, taking those less cautious than I in their wake. The shadows seared into the wall in the very next room attested to what happened when the foolish and inattentive wandered past their ability to stay alive. Their twisted forms, catching their last painful seconds, attested to that. This place, scoured though it was of the people who had made it such a fierce stronghold, did not suffer the presence of fools.