Ash and Death on a Dangerous Road

The first tale of Maldurian the Delver

This is the first story within a loosely-connected series, “The Delver.” This is the beginning—so to speak—though every installment will be an entire story on its own. I will link the next episode below, or you can browse my table of contents. 

Enjoy, and Words go with you.

✹ ✹ ✹

It was morning, but the city still burned. The smoke, black and oily from the incinerated layers of urban grime, clung in the air and shaded the sun.

One man looked on from a distant ridge. He was by the side of the road, leaning on a staff. An old, tired man, bent over with the weight of his pack or else merely by his years.

This far away there was no sound from the burning city, no wind of rushing fire, no shouts of alarm or despair. But down below there surely was shouting. The flames raged. The inferno grew, striving to rival the sun itself; it was brighter and hotter and more vengeful and far more immediate than the distant fire of the dawn; this blaze was a new god, risen from nothing and without warning to preempt the sunrise, consorting with the fickle wind and demanding immediate satiation through the unwilling sacrifice of immolated flesh.

Yes, down below there surely was screaming. There had to be. Cities do not die quietly, and Orsanium was quite a big city. 

And the old man looked on, bent over his walking-stick. There was nothing else for him to do.

Twenty minutes passed; he watched.

Neither soul nor sign of one appeared on the road from the city’s gates. The old traveler turned around, and walked back into the hills whence he’d come.

After a few steps, he began to Speak under his breath.

✹ 

“There will be refugees,” said one man to his captain. His captain did not reply. They could see the great pillar of smoke down in the valley. Even from here they could smell it.

“Refugees?” asked another man. “From a fire? More likely people will go into the city to help, not away from it.”

“No. This is more than that,” said the first. “Right, Alcurin? Tell ‘im.”

The captain ignored them both. His eyes were fixed on the black cloud. 

When it was clear Alcurin wouldn’t speak, the first man went on. “Well, he was telling me last night: that’s no hay-fire. There are things happening in Orsanium. Big things. Politics. That’s the war reaching us. Lots of folks will be heading our way. Desperate folks.”

The second man cut open a wicked grin. “Good.”

✹

The day wore on and the roads were quiet until dusk, when the solitary figure of the old traveler made his way up the switchbacked path. He walked, muttered, and endlessly shifted the pack on his back. A few times his stare drifted away from the ground and towards the gold ornament atop his walking-stick. 

The ornament caught the sunlight, despite the great cloud of smoke in the east. Its shine came to other eyes too; high in a hidden mountain overlook, Alcurin’s watchmen spied the old man. Like soaring hawks spotting the tiniest field-mouse in the grass, they saw the glint of gold far below them and their appetites awakened. 

For what else did they see, but a codger, bent beneath his hood and cloak? Their prey was alone, slow, weak, and burdened with a stuffed pack of possessions that were sure to delight their avarice. 

✹

The sunlight was fading from the hills, but the wind had been strong, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke. 

The traveler trudged on, down into a hollow with rocky walls at either side.

“Halt there, friend!” Three figures stepped out from behind a boulder a few spans ahead of the man. The one in the middle, with a sword rather than the clubs of his comrades, was the clear leader. He was half-a-head taller than the rest, with a sturdier tunic and even a thin chain of silver hanging from his neck. His hair was dark, his countenance firm, and he spoke with the air of habitual command. “There’s no need for you to get hurt,” said Alcurin, the bandit-captain, “so long as we have that pack off your back and that gold off your staff.”

The traveler had stopped in his tracks. He looked backward and saw two bandits there as well, blocking his exit. 

“No escape for you, my friend,” Alcurin said, “except to give us what we ask.”

The waylaid man looked to the either side, to the rocks. He traced their foundations and noted their nearly-sheer sides, looking up and up until their clifftops high over his head, where another pair of silhouettes looked down upon his frail frame. As the man looked up, the light caught his face under his hood, and Alcurin could see a matted gray beard and a mouth within it, mumbling. 

“What’s that?” he called to the traveler. “Speak up, dog!”

The old man stood still, looking at Alcurin from under his hood. His lips kept moving. 

At a signal, the outlaws moved in and made a ring about him, just a few paces wide. Their chief moved in a bit closer. He could now hear his quarry’s susurration, but could make no sense of it. 

“Drop your pack,” Alcurin said.

A heavy thud announced the bag’s descent from the old man’s back. The mumbling didn’t cease.

“Now your stick.”

The hooded figure shook his head. 

One of the thugs spoke up: “What’re you playing at, old man? Do you want to die here, for this? We’ll have it all anyway. We don’t mind a corpse.” This got a chuckle from one of the others. 

“I’ll give you a proposal, uncle,” Alcurin waved his sword casually at the old man. “I’ll let you walk away with that stick of yours if you give us the trinket that’s atop it and don’t make a fuss.” 

The traveler pushed back his hood. His head was balding. His beard was unkempt. His eyes darted to and fro and his words were mumbling, muttering, rolling over and over one another. Alcurin came near, and the oldster’s fingers trembled over the surface of his walking-stick, grasping and releasing and moving and grasping again. 

“Are you deranged?” said Alcurin. “Are you an idiot? Show you understand me, or shall my men have fun with you?”

The man before him just kept muttering.  

The bandit reached out, grabbed the the staff and tried to pull it closer, but the traveler did not let go. Their gazes locked, one silent and one speaking to no one. Victim and prey stood eye to eye. 

Alcurin looked down at the ornament on the staff. Something about it poked at his memory. The golden piece was fitted to the rough wood, and was shaped like an open ring standing up on its end. The hole big enough to fit two or three fingers through; it was as if the whole staff was a bizarre, oversized sewing needle. He squinted at it, transfixed. There, along the ring, Alcurin saw tiny divets in the metal. Runes. 

Several things happened in the next breath.

For Alcurin, memories finally clicked into place. The whispered mumblings that had been skirting around his mind the last few moments were suddenly recognizable: the Veran tongue. An ancient language. The ancient language. Fear came before true understanding, and words slipped from his lips: “Who are you?” 

The question was scarcely in the air when the old man yanked his staff out of the villain’s grasp and brought its ring-top up to his own chin. The old man’s breathy voice passed through the ring, and his words became like thunder—

—“inhanos infilianumi ac!” —

 —and their sound clapped over Alcurin so loudly that he fell to the ground holding his head. The other brigands shouted in surprise and fear. 

The wizard—for now they knew this old man had the Voice, and could wield the Words of Power—jabbed the end of his staff into Alcurin’s stomach; there was a clap and a squelch, an explosion of bile so forceful that the structure of the man’s body between his ribcage and hips simply ceased to be. 

The bandit leader did not even scream. But when they saw their captain broken in half, the other brigands did. 

The wizard whipped his staff around in a circle and managed to smack two of them with its arc. The first, clipped on his shoulder, catapulted away as if he’d been struck by a charging bull rather than a wooden haft. The second, caught on the arm, spun around impossibly fast and collapsed into a heap of broken limbs. 

The remaining two, spared for now, scrambled away like frightened rabbits. The wizard looked up to the ridges where the other ambushers had been. One had already disappeared, and the other stood stunned, empty-handed and open-mouthed, as shock conquered his mind. 

The ancient Words still peeled through the hollow and cracked among the rocks, though their Crafter had paused his Speech. 

The old traveler now crouched down at the sundered corpse of Alcurin. Leaning against his staff he said in a soft voice:

“Once I was Valdoran the Old, but lesser men like you have named me Maldurian and call me the Delver.” The wizard watched Alcurin’s open eyes and gaping mouth as if he expected the body to reply. 

A sound distracted him, off to his left: one of the men he had struck—who had flown across the road and tumbled to the curb of the rock wall—was writhing on the ground. He was maddened: his arms clutched at his chest and neck, his heels were kicking and scraping at the ground so swiftly that they were making grooves in the dirt. 

Maldurian’s eyes saw this man and discarded him in an instant for the irrelevant distraction that he was, for standing just past the dying man was his comrade, still entirely alive. This man had plastered his back against the rock wall. He panted like a trapped and panicking dog.

There was no one else in the hollow now. The echoes of Words had died, the screams of terror swallowed up by the uncaring stones.

The wizard stood. The lone bandit could scarcely stand the focus of his gaze. The graybeard walked toward his last attacker. The man on the ground was lessening his writhing, his face and hands gone purple, his eyes gone red.

The bandit watched as Maldurian stepped over the dying man without a glance.

A hand moved out towards the brigand—his anguished face let out a whispered plea—and wizened fingers touched his shoulder.

The outlaw’s chest shuddered, as if a chill ran through him. Then a quick breath, too shallow. 

“Wha’—... s’—happening.”

“Ah,” the wizard’s eyes seemed to brighten at the words, “I am surprised you can speak, but I suppose I have already touched three others, so the effect is somewhat lessened for you… Fascinating, isn’t it? But you can feel it in your lungs, yes?”

The bandit clutched at his own chest. “... I … ghr—” His jaw opened for more air, but nothing followed but a silent gasp. He fell to his knees.

The old man went on: “Have you heard of Tayleng the Healer? He did excellent work. Excellent. Brilliant Wordcrafter. The man was obsessed with the human body. He could do more than just Heal wounds, he could make the body better than it ever was. Truly. He’s an inspiration to me. I only wish he’d committed to that concept.”

There was a cough and a sucking sound from the bandit. Above him, the wizard watched him with a far-off look on his face.

“Tayleng spent years trying to find the right Words to cure diseases of the lungs. There were missteps, however. I found a note of his that explained a certain experiment whereby the lungs entirely stopped accepting air. Tayleng couldn’t see the potential, but I’m glad he wrote it down.”

The outlaw’s irises were drowning in pools of white, the white getting lost themselves in a sea of bluing skin. 

“I spent months in that rat-house of Orsanium, but I was nearly at a breakthrough, you see. I’ve made it so that the lungs can survive without any air at all! No air, yet they won’t inflame or decay… but I just haven’t learned how to get the rest of the body to function without them. That’s what you’re feeling now. Hey!”

The wizard saw that the other man was beginning to lose consciousness, so he crouched down and clapped the man’s cheeks until his gaze focused again. 

“This is important! You see, your lungs are fixed, it’s just the rest of you that is broken now… I can make it so we won’t need to breathe, so we won’t need to sleep, or eat, or tire, or thirst, or die. I can fix us! Well, not you. But us. Mankind. I will build a New Man. And I will do it soon.”

Another gasp. A rattle. An intake of air through the throat. Then a fleshy sound better left in the body. 

“But those monks—” the wizard spat the word— “at Orsanium, they wanted to destroy my notes! ‘Heresy,’ the fools called it. They wouldn’t listen. They never learn. I had to show them. I had to show them what I could do.”

The suffocating man reached out and clutched the edge of the wizard’s cloak. 

“Oh, I can’t do anything for you,” said his killer. “I haven’t gotten that far in my studies. But don’t worry. We’ll fix it all soon. Yes. You understand, don’t you?”

The hand lost its strength and fell to the dirt.

“You must understand. I will save everyone. No more death. Your own death merely serves a purpose. You are just one, and why should I care for one when I can save all of mankind. Soon, I’ll put an end to everything that ails us. And once I’ve created man’s new beginning, then—” 

His victim fell silent. A shudder ran through the corpse. The wizard sighed, disappointed at losing his audience. 

“They never learn.” 

He looked up at the sky. There was no blue, for it was shrouded by the smoke that hid even the hilltops. Beyond the pall, reds and oranges brought an early sunset to the world. The wind began to lessen, and ash began to fall. 

“I had to show them.”

✹ ✹ ✹

✹ ✹ ✹

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to read the next installment of “The Delver,” then click below.

✹ ✹ ✹

If you like what you’ve read here and want me to keep making stuff like this, you can help me do that by liking, commenting, or sharing this piece. You can also see all my writing by visiting this page.

✹ ✹ ✹

If you’d like something equally magical but a bit more uplifting, check out “The Encircling Cells,” a short story I wrote back in the spring. These two stories, like all the fiction on Falden’s Forge, are set in the same story-world.

✹ ✹ ✹