Page 51 of Kingdom of Spirits
They were not where they had been.
“What magic is this, spirit? Where are we?” He knew he shouldn’t have trusted that Trevain fellow.
“Where is Fara?” Tahlia asked.
Tahlia was panting and wide-eyed with anxiety. Marius longed to grab her and hold her tightly. But of course, he couldn’t or she would die. He remembered Ophelia’s words in painful detail.
“Be calm, my lady,” Trevain said, making Marius want to shake him. “Fara remains nearby, but not exposed to this dimension. You are in a version of my memory.”
He looked very pleased with himself that he had brought them there.
Marius glared. “Return us to our squire or suffer the consequences.”
“Time doesn’t pass in the living world while we are here. Calm yourselves,” Trevain said.
“So nothing is going to happen to Fara?” Tahlia asked, looking to Marius.
Marius gave her a shrug and focused on the spirit.
Trevain shook his head. “She must have some blood that isn’t heavily Mistgold.”
“Yes, she has a dash of human blood. Not like my level of the stuff, but a little,” Tahlia said.
Trevain raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “I never thought to see anyone escape the varjuline alive. But no, nothing will pass while we are here. She will never even know we have left and the world there is frozen, so to say, while we visit my memory. Now, welcome to my home, the way it was before the dragon riders invaded.”
Marius blinked. “We are in the Kingdom of Spirits?”
“We are. About eight hundred years before the current period.”
Tahlia whistled. “It’s beautiful. Why did it turn into such a hellish place? What did the dragon riders do? Do you mean the Order of Mist Knights?”
“This was before they called themselves that, but in a way.” His gaze cut Marius as surely as a blade. “I speak of the same families that those of the order come from, yes.”
Marius kept his tongue. He had heard versions of this history, and in none of them did his predecessors seem innocent. No, indeed his people had forced their way into this land and he wasn’t proud of what had happened after. He didn’t blame Trevain for his glare or the sharp tone of his words. But that was all the more reason to wonder why the ghost was helping them. He hated the order. Why was he giving them aid?
The verdant forests and lush farmlands shimmered until the group stood on a high hill overlooking a walled city crafted of massive rectangular stones.
“This was our capital. The jewel of our land.” Trevain jabbed Marius with a scowl. “Your kind flew here and stripped our king and queen’s coffers of silver and gold. Then you moved on to our mines, our livestock, our wild animals, and so on. While you were pillaging and doing exactly as you pleased, you spread a terrible plague.”
Trevain lifted his ghostly fingers in a circular movement. Rubbish piled up along the city’s streets and rats ran from building to building. The city’s inhabitants and those traveling outside the walls were dotted with dark splotches. Their skin looked papery and rough.
“One of us decided to sacrifice all and raise a monster,” Trevain said. “Some say he accessed Unseelie power.”
The Unseelie Fae lived in another realm entirely. Though the current Unseelie king had ties to Marius’s king—Seelie Fae King Lysanael—the two civilizations never crossed. Only the royals visited one another and only rarely.
Trevain continued his tale. “Others claim the monster was a summoned demon. No one knows the truth. What we do know is that this male, a guild master from my neighborhood, killed his wife and slowly bled himself to death. In the wake of his offering, a giant climbed out of the earth.”
A three-story structure on the western edge of the city trembled, dust lifting from its walls and thatched roof. A dark gray-green hand exploded from the thatch, followed by a massive head and body. A giant stood up, the building crumbling to ruins around him while screams erupted from the diseased masses. The monster had glittering golden eyes and just the look of him turned Marius’s stomach. It wasn’t that he was hideous and frightening. He was, but the true horror came from the fact that the giant felt familiar somehow.
Why in all the hells would a monster feel familiar to him? He had never once seen this creature.
The giant stepped over the castle walls and grabbed a Green-flanked Terror and his rider. The dragon went limp and colorless. As the monster flung the rider to the ground, the rider’s scream went silent and golden boils popped up along his face and arms. These new boils were like a strange mimic of the black spots on the natives of the kingdom.
Trevain waved his hand and the kingdom faded into night. “The giant’s plague took revenge on the dragon riders who had invaded. None of those with mostly Mistgold blood survived. Once the giant succeeded in his champion’s task, the task set on him by the guild master, he returned to sleep beneath the ground.”
Tahlia grimaced. “High Captain, I believe you have seen the bones of this giant.”
“I have, yes.”