Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale by A. L. Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

with an almost
physical sense of loneliness. And for a while he sat there upon the
road, weeping, gazing down at the stone etching of he and his
family.

    5
    He pressed on. The afternoon grew
hot. He came upon a small caravan of folk. Paronagers, they were.
Not elven, not giant, not orken. Paronagers from the Dark Sea. All
dead of course. Their bodies ravaged by beasts, their clothes torn,
their possessions ransacked. They were still seated inside their
caravan. Their horse steeds dead, eyes bulging, bellies bloated,
lying across roadway.
    He stood for a while watching
them…
    Then something else caught his
eye.
    It were a little way off the road,
a peculiar spectacle that made him stop and stare for a little
while, intrigued, a quiet dread rising inside him. He fetched out
his spyglass from his bull-hide pack and brought the spectacle into
view. It were what he feared. A Creep Mound.
    He fetched his
lavender cloth and held it over nose and mouth and out toward the
Mound he walked. He dared not stray too close for such Mounds
heralded a region struck down with Cripp, or Mrunk, or Xayku, or
some other such deadly virus that could wipe out vast numbers of
folk with frightening speed. And he made certain he remained up
wind of it. It were a larger Mound than he might ordinarily see.
Skulls piled high upon cracked earyth . And on it there perched a
ghost raven, black of body and wing, grey of neck and head. It
turned its beak and watched him… but did not desert its
perch.
    Such ornithens seen upon a Creep
Mound told Gargaron that the skulls had come from victims of a
virulent germ, those who had died hideously and had then been
thrown to the Dead Worms so that their diseased flesh would be
stripped to bone.
    Could this
sickness have spread across the land from here to Hovel? Gargaron wondered. Had some uncontained outbreak
beaten news of its spreading to his village, had it swept the land
and killed all before a warning could be made
public?
    If
so , he thought, then why have I survived it?
    One thing about
it gave him heart: the sight of the bird. Such signs of life had
been rare since his departing Hovel. A
sign of life were a sign of hope , he told
himself. And as he stood there gazing back at it he heard the words
again of his wife: ‘ You have work here
first. ’
    Gargaron retreated to the roadway
and before he moved on he lowered his head. He spoke to the dead a
prayer, to the great Spirit Ranethor, praying that their souls had
found their way to the worlds beyond, and if they had not, then to
speed up their passage.

    6
    By nightfall he
had made it as far as Rillsland, a spot on Chandry’s Steppe where
the remains of an ancient craft of unknown material and origin had
long ago fallen from the stars. Here it still lay, half swallowed
by stony earyth ,
a tree as old as the hills growing from its twisted unspoilt metal,
roots snaking about it like worms. Dreamfyre the craft had been
named. And Gargaron had heard its stories all his life. He would
lie next to his father at night by fireside and gaze up at Great
Nothing’s dizzying array of cosmic bodies and be spellbound by his
father’s tales of mighty beings who lived out there, ones who had
constructed great star-boats to carry them across vast interstellar
void.
    ‘ Did they come
to visit us?’ he asked his father eagerly, his eyes sparkling in
the starlight as his mind projected Dreamfyre onto the night sky
above, sailing to earyth before a flowing tail of fire.
    ‘ Aye, I think they did,’ his
father told him, wonderment too in his eyes. ‘Sadly though, there
are many who preach they came to invade Cloudfyre. But I prefer to
believe they came to extend their hand in friendship.’
    Gargaron stood there, his water
gourd tipped to his mouth. He drank. And drank again. Then wiped
his chin. He surveyed the darkening land before him, Far Trail in
either direction wound off into dusk, vanishing from sight as if it
too had died and had chosen to quietly trail away