A Realm of Shadows by Morgan Rice Page A

and women and children, whom
he dearly missed but was nearly too blind to see now; he could live without the
variety of food, finding a way to subsist only on foraged grasses and berries,
food he was too old to truly taste anyway. But what he could not live without,
what made him feel most alone of all, was the loss of his books. Those savages
had destroyed them all, and in the process had torn apart his soul.
    Well, not all of
them. One book, hidden deep beneath a stone vault, Softis had hidden and salvaged.
It was this book, The Chronicles of his Fathers, an oversized, leather-bound
book with pages so worn from use that they nearly fell out, that Softis gripped
to his chest now as he walked. It was all he had left to live for.
    Escalon, he
concluded, was haunted. It was both a blessed and a cursed land. It had always been
haunted by the threat of dragons, the threat of trolls, the threat of Pandesia.
It was a place of great beauty and yet, paradoxically, a place where one could
never truly rest easy. There was some riddle to this land, something he could
never quite figure out. He had been turning over the legends in his mind for
nearly a hundred years, and there was something, he felt, that was missing. Something,
perhaps, that was even withheld from him, some secret even too great for him,
for his forefathers. What was it?
    Perhaps it was contained
in some missing book, some missing scroll, some missing legend he had not yet
heard. There was something, he was convinced, that solved it all, that made
sense of the mysterious origin of Escalon, and of what had both cursed and
blessed it.
    Now, as his eyes
dimmed and he faced the waning of his life, it was no longer life he craved, but knowledge . Wisdom. The unraveling of secrets. And most of all, the
answer to that mystery. Softis knew how history would end. It would end how all
men ended. In death. In nothing. But he still did not know how the story began .
And in some ways, in his eyes, that was more important.
    Softis picked
his way farther through the rubble, this ghost town filled only with the faint
sound of his staff, of the gales of wind rushing through here and finding no
one. Finding a small, old stale piece of bread, he reached down and picked it
up, hard as a rock, wondering how many weeks it had sat there. Still, he was
grateful for it, knowing it would be his best find of the day. It would give
him energy enough, at least, for the walk. On his way to the mausoleum, he
would visit old friends, immerse himself in old times. He would close his eyes
and imagine his father alive with him again, telling him story after story.
That comforted him. Indeed, he was more comforted by ghosts these days than by
the living.
    As he picked his
way across the courtyard, Softis suddenly stopped and stood. He had felt
something. Had it been a tremor?
    He felt it again,
running up through his staff to his palm, something so faint he wondered if it
had even come. But then, sure enough, it came again. This time, the tremor was
a shake, and then a rumble. He stopped, feeling it now in the soles of his
feet, and he turned and looked up, out through the broken arch that was once the
formidable gate to Volis.
    There was something
on the horizon. It was faint, at first, like a cloud of dust. But it grew as he
watched. It became an outline, a dark shadow, an army forming on the horizon.
    And then it
became thunder.
    A moment later,
the stampede came. They came racing over the hill, sounding like a herd of
buffalo. They filled the horizon, the shouts audible now even to his deaf ears.
They charged and filled the barren hillside, all coming, he was amazed to see,
right for Volis.
    What could they
want with Volis?
    As they came
closer, he realized there was nothing they wanted here. Volis merely had the
bad fortune of standing in their way.
    They charged
through the gate, and finally, Softis could see them clearly. As he did, his
heart froze in his chest. These were no humans. Nor were they