Lore/Story Scourge

This chapter wound up being much longer than I was expecting.

Chapter XXXIX
Where the Quake Resides​

He couldn’t tell whether he was in a dream or not. All he knew was that he was surrounded by the color green - bright green grass half as tall as he was surrounded him on every side, bright green vines dangling from the cavern’s ceiling, and bright green moss growing on the rock next to his head. It was bright green wherever he looked.

He raised himself off the grass-covered floor to find himself surrounded by life. Trees were growing… Yet how far underground was he, one hundred, five hundred, a thousand meters? There were giant flowers scattered around the huge cavern, which seemed to stretch into more equally large tunnels that led far out of sight. Even stranger, the entire place was lit with a bright glow that seemed to originate from nowhere. What kind of place was this?

“Uh… Robin? Julie? Anyone there?” Jonas said quietly. He had expected his voice to echo back at him from all directions, but all he heard was his voice - once. There was no echo.

“What?...” He heard Robin’s voice faintly to his left. When he looked, he saw his brother pulling himself up from the floor of waist-height grass.

Jonas breathed in an irritatingly potent scent that smelled like rubber. He coughed, and then replied. “It’s me. I’m over here.”

Robin heard him, but instead chose to gaze in awe at the massive ceiling above him. Julie never responded.

“Where’s… Where’s Julie?” Jonas asked uncertainly. Robin grunted, which Jonas took to assume he didn’t know. “And- Where’s my wand?” There was no reply. “Robin? Where’s my wand?” When he turned around, Robin wasn’t there. “Uh… Robin?”

Robin did not reveal himself. After an ominous minute’s silence, and more calls, Jonas tried to imagine what Robin would do if he were in a huge plant-cave, and he heard Jonas calling his name. Robin would have replied. Why wasn’t he? Wasn’t Robin standing right there a minute ago? Also, where was his bag- and his wand?

Jonas could feel it - he was confused, lost, unarmed, and alone. With those thoughts, he did the only thing he knew how to do: He waited. Sitting down on an uncomfortable rock, he waited with forced patience for help to arrive - for someone to arrive, whether it be Robin, Julie, maybe that Creator of the Weapons, or even that scary guy wearing blue, whatever his name was. He waited for half an hour, full of hope...but when the only movement was from a pebble tumbling down the moss-covered cave wall, he was convinced that nobody was there to help. He was alone.

If the pressure of the situation wasn’t applying before, it definitely was now. To spite himself further, he made a list of everything that was going wrong, keeping count using his fingers: his brother and sister were nowhere to be seen; his wand was either lost in the tall, thick grass at his feet, or in a different place entirely; there was nobody to help him; then there was the simple fact that he had no idea where he was, or where to go.

What would I do if I were Robin? he thought half-heartedly. I would probably… If I…? F-forget it, I… I don’t know.

He didn’t know.

What he did know was that if he didn’t move soon, he would eventually die of thirst, since there was not a single drop of water in sight - but then arose the question again: how can this place be possible? Do the plants have some uncanny ability to go days, weeks, maybe even months or years without water, and if so, how? There was no way to answer that, because he, as much as he hated to admit it, didn’t know how to tell. He ignored the phenomenon, closed his eyes, and took one step in a random direction.

The moment before he opened his eyes, he felt two things, an ominous breeze from somewhere ahead, and a sharp thorn piercing through his shoe.

“Ow!” he shouted into the plant-filled cavern. Several vines on the wall shifted restlessly. Jonas kicked his foot out to rid his shoe of the small yet very painful thorn bush he had stepped on.

With his eyes wide open this time, he took each step very carefully on his way to the passage on the right. The passage itself had the exact same feel as the place he had been; thick, damp vines covering the rock walls, and grass half as tall as he was that felt like mud as he slowly waded through it. Five minutes later, he took a left down another passage that was exactly the same. Right, left, middle, left, middle, right, left. He repeated that in his head after he had taken only an eternity’s worth of cavern exploring, but he knew there was no point - there was no exit or anything of interest where he had started, so why bother remembering which forks he took? At least with Nivla forest, he knew it had to come to an end, but this place seemed to stretch on forever in a labyrinth of overgrown tunnels.

Another hour passed in a flash, and Jonas was slowly beginning to dread what was coming next, the exact same feeling he had had shortly after they had somehow teleported to Nivla woods instead of Ragni. At least he had Robin and Julie then. Where in the world they had gone? As much as he was in the mood to ponder that question forever, he knew standing there wasn’t going to help. He looked around, and saw the exact same scenery that surrounded him for every second of his time down here, and he began to wonder whether or not he was going in circles without realizing it.

Jonas quickly began to lose track of time. After approaching what felt like the millionth fork in the tunnels, he, rather than continuing, collapsed into the grass and stared at the seemingly miles-high ceiling. He had the unsettling feeling that something was listening closely to his sharp gasping. His breathing gradually eased over the minutes that he rested, but when he felt calm, and was about to get up and continue-


“No! I want it! Give it to me!”

The boy couldn’t have been more than five years old. He sat on the silky wet grass not too far outside of Troms, gazing jealously at the fine bow in his brother’s hand - which was as large as the person holding it. Why couldn’t he have it?

“Mom told us to take turns,” the boy’s sister reminded him quietly. “We’re lucky enough to even hold father’s bow, let alone try and use it.”

“Your sister is right, Jonas,” his mother said from nearby. “You’re barely old enough to handle a bow. And your father, he’s rather fond of this one, too.”

“But it’s not fair! Why does he get it first and not me?”

She sighed. “Because-” “It’s not fair!”


Just as suddenly, he was no longer sitting in the damp grass outside Troms - he was sitting in the tall grass below a massive cave ceiling, lost in an endless maze. What happened? It looked like a memory from his own childhood. When he struggled to remember, he could only barely recall what he did next, and he then wondered whether or not Robin still had that scar. He shrugged off that question, but there was no escaping the curiosity of why the memory arose, and why it arose so vividly. Well, he figured, I might as well look around to see if I can find an answer.

Further ahead in time, Jonas was walking through another passageway, growing more desperate by the minute. Why had they decided to go down here? What if there was no exit, and he was trapped forever, in a mess of odd plant life? He paused and readied himself to continue asking more questions until-


He was sitting on the polished wooden floor of the living room, looking mesmerized at the shelf just like his brother and sister - all of them seemed to have grown an inch or two since the last memory. The grand prize sat there, on the top shelf, a little glowing bottle of liquefied emerald. He recalled only too well the moment when their mother moved it as far as possible from the floor so that they - Jonas, Julie, and Robin - could not reach it. Why wasn’t anything in life fair?

But they had a plan, and all they needed was to move the chair close enough to reach the third shelf. It wasn’t hard; a moment later, the chair had been rather noisily leaned against the massive shelf. Julie climbed onto the chair and was just barely tall enough to grab on to the third shelf as they planned, and a minute later, when she stood proudly next to the wood-carved ancient Troms warrior, Robin followed, with Jonas right behind him.

By that point, though, they had already forgotten the plan. Julie shrugged it off and began ascending the shelf at a rapid pace, so quickly that Jonas stood still on the third shelf and watched as Julie was almost instantly at the top. The liquefied emerald was right on the shelf above her, and so she reached out - and she got it!

The moment of triumph was all that was needed for Julie to let go of the shelf and stand impressively, ten feet off the ground, with a little green bottle in her hand. Jonas clapped softly, though Robin looked worried and quickly descended the shelf. Robin ran out of the room to look for some way to get Julie down safely from the shelf when there became no need - she slipped and fell over the edge with the liquid emerald still in hand. Jonas was too stunned to do anything as she fell ten feet to the floor in slow motion. The resulting crash brought their parents into the room, with absolutely shocked faces on both of them as they saw Julie lying on the ground with an acidic green liquid spreading across the floor nearby between hundred of broken glass shards. Jonas, still halfway up the shelf, reached for and slid carefully down the edge of the chair, his parents too worried to notice him. Robin ran in a second later, and when he saw Julie on the ground-

“Quick!” his father said. “I’ll get her to the hospital! You find the butler and make him clean this mess!”

Jonas’s mother replied, “Yes, I’ll-”


“I’ll...find him...immediately…”

Jonas murmured those words out loud in the blunt silence. He opened his eyes and found himself on the floor - and still in that cave. There was a small feeling in his stomach that told him to lie down and keep dreaming, forever and ever until the end of time so that he wouldn’t have to worry about the cave again. The plan his subconscious had created was easily foiled when Jonas stood back up, and took a step forward to shake the feeling off. As tempting as the prospect was of carelessly dreaming away the last days of his life, Jonas had a new, odd feeling that what he was looking for was nearby. Was the Quake, after all this time, this close? Instead of choosing which forks to take, it was as though his instincts were guiding him with every decision. Unlike earlier, where every turn was taken in slow motion, now he traveled half the world in a minute. He was truly getting somewh-


“You don’t have to worry, I’ll only be gone for a week.”

Jonas watched as the man packed his bags on the clean living room table - but Jonas noticed that it wasn’t the living room he grew up with. This one was much smaller, and he had the strange feeling that he had been there recently - in real life.

“But you’re gone all the time!” Jonas said, except he realized that he wasn’t saying it. In fact, he could recognize none of this memory, let alone saying those words.

“I know,” the man replied gravely, “but our emeralds have to come from somewhere.”

“But,” whined Jonas. From his voice, he sounded like he was seven years old - but he curiously didn’t know who ‘he’ was. “Why can’t you get- why can’t you get emeralds somewhere closer by?”

The man, presumably the father, sighed loudly. “Ragni just doesn’t have many opportunities at the moment, we’re still stuck moving from our old gold coins to those new emeralds they’ve been mining out east.”

Jonas suddenly understood where he was in this dream. This was long before he was even born, in the now-haunted house in Ragni - the place he had been in before he found himself in that cave-


He felt as though he shouldn’t have jinxed it. What was the memory he had entered? As he rested on the now-irritating dry grass, he ignored all caution, and tried closing his eyes again to see if he could enter that memory again.

Ten minutes seemed to pass since he closed his eyes. Jonas had willed himself to fall asleep again, strained to shut his eyes as far as he possibly could, and even tried muttering words to see if that would have an effect. He knew it wouldn’t, but he tried anyway. There didn’t seem to be any connection between his actions and his entering the memories. Or was there?

Jonas stood up to begin yet another bout of tedious cave exploring. Cave exploring… He wondered, where were the bats? The other animals that rested in caves? There was a strong will within him to simply stop asking questions for the sake of his already-too-great confusion. Wait, Jonas thought abruptly to himself, why does this part of the cave look different than the others?

It looked different because it was different. The mossy ceiling above him had lowered considerably, and there were a large number of boulders dotted around the path - which in itself had narrowed a slight amount. The sight of something different brought about a new confidence in Jonas, because, at this rate, anything strange was a sign that he was nearly there. He immediately sprinted forward to the tunnel, despite that it could be a trap. But why would it be? Jonas argued to himself. The maze is enough of a trap already.

He weaved around the massive boulders that obstructed the tunnel while he stared into the bright light that seemed to shine from the other side. If there was any way out, this was it. The light became ever larger as Jonas gradually walked towards it, and with it came a sense of safety, along with the peculiar feeling that someone might be waiting for him there. The Creator, maybe? If so, why would the Creator be sitting in a cave, doing nothing but waiting? It made no sense. The question entered Jonas’s mind, though: Who was the Creator? Could it be-?

His thoughts were interrupted by a slow, loud grunt that came from behind him. He wheeled around and saw one of the boulders rustling and standing, taking the shape of something vaguely similar to the enormous iron golems that patrolled the streets of Nemract every night. Except, this one was made of deep grey stone, was twice as tall, and, at second glance, looked almost nothing like an iron golem. It appeared to Jonas more like the monstrous evil knights in black armor he had heard of in children’s stories. When his parents told him the stories years ago, he always ran scared out of the room before the part where the hero escaped. With that thought came the sensation that he was trapped in a nightmare.

It lunged forward with its right arm swinging mightily at Jonas, who fell to the ground just in time. A moment of silence passed, and, as it turned out, the golemlike monster seemed to have lost sight of him - another mystery, as Jonas could clearly see the darkness behind its decorative visor where its eyes should be. Jonas tried crawling along the ground to avoid its line of sight, but then the golem looked down, with its towering stone structure leaning over him, now clearly noticing his presence. He narrowly missed another strike, and when it began to prepare for another attack, Jonas kicked off the ground and began running as fast as he could down the tunnel.

With all the exhaustion from his walking, combined with the fact that his throat was dry, and he hadn’t eaten since hours ago at the restaurant in Ragni, he wasn’t fast enough. Loud, dull footsteps thudded towards him at a frightening rate, and he wasn’t capable of dodging before-


-in real life. Or was it a dream?

The memory resumed so abruptly that Jonas received a sharp headache from the transition. This time around, however, he had an idea what was happening as he watched his father-who-wasn’t-his-father packing numerous things he had gotten from his traveling. Jonas knew this time that he was viewing the memory in the perspective of the brother from the haunted house story, and that he was very young in this memory - seven years old, in fact, the same age Laryn said he had been accepted to Ragni’s highest school.

“I’ve got everything I want to sell here,” the father said to his wife over the pile of things on the table. “If I were to guess, I’d say this’ll yield enough emeralds to last us two months.” He scraped everything off the table into a massive sack. “I’ll be heading out now, the wagon’s waiting for me. Take care.”

Jonas watched silently as the father strided to the door. “I’ll miss you,” the mother said just before he walked out the door. The father turned his head, but his back was still facing towards them, and on his back was a spear that looked vaguely familiar.

“I’ll miss you, too,” the father said as he walked out the door.

The moment the door closed shut and the lock clicked, the brother whined, “Mom, when will he be back? When? Can you tell me? Please?”

She replied calmly, but it didn’t hide her red face. “He’ll be away for a week, he said. After he’s back, he’ll bring with him a lot of emeralds. I can buy you that training spear you want… Okay?”

The brother didn’t even think about it. “Yeah!” he yelled deliberately loud, for the sole sake of being as annoying as possible to one specific person, who was currently leaning on the railing halfway down the stairs. His sister watched with irritation as he smiled broadly and skipped cheerfully up the stairs, shoving her aside as he did. She should have been thankful that her mother didn’t see the murderous gaze she gave to her brother while he ran unnecessarily carefree down the hall upstairs and loudly slammed a door shut. She knew he was trying to rub in the fact that he got into the school and she didn’t, but after seeing those new- those new friends he had made over there, she couldn’t have cared less. She remembered when they first visited-


Jonas woke up suddenly, and, when he remembered the giant golem that was about to strike once more, he rolled over quickly with his eyes still closed, but he was stopped by something leathery at his side. He looked down, and saw his bag slung over his shoulder while he lay on the dim cavern floor, in a completely different place than he was before he had fallen into the memory. A small uncomfortable spot on the right side of his leg told him that his wand was in his pocket - but since when?

“H- Hello?” Jonas mumbled when he felt as though the danger had passed, and the only reply was silence. He raised himself easily off the ground, realizing that he wasn’t hungry, thirsty, or exhausted at all. The first thing he saw when he looked around was the rock ceiling of the cave - barely taller than his head when he stood at full height, and with no vines or moss in sight. “Hello?”

There was a light just ahead, which looked exactly like the one at that golem-tunnel. Was another attack incoming? He couldn’t avoid it, because plain rock wall surrounded him on the other three sides, but he did have his wand this time. Perhaps if he used some sort of spell, he could get through without disrupting anything? He reached into his pocket and confirmed that his wand was still there. He pulled it out and held it at eye level towards the light.

“Teleport!” he shouted. The wand failed to respond. “Come on, teleport!” Yet again, his wand did nothing. Hadn’t Wedyf mentioned teleporting? Oh, right, Jonas reasoned, he only mentioned teleportation, not how to do it.

He began to carefully walk down the one-way tunnel, attempting to cast a good spell to travel faster and failing to do so. Thoughts of the memory started to pop up in his head; apparently the brother and the sister from the memory didn’t seem to get along awfully well, he thought. The brother also seemed to like his father, maybe, after seeing his reaction when he left. When Jonas’s thoughts transitioned to the father, he clearly recalled him walking out the door, great bags full of things to sell, along with a spear - where had he seen it before?

The answer seemed to come to him immediately. Before he knew what he was thinking, he had dug his hands into the leather bag and pulled out a small map that he had found in an equally small house in Almuj. Right there, in Ragni, drawn in the smallest, thinnest ink lines possible, was a spear that resembled the one in the memory perfectly.

There was barely any time given to contemplate, as at that moment, he tripped over something - or was it someone?

“Ow!” a voice shouted, and Jonas recognized the person immediately.

“Robin!” Jonas replied urgently. “Robin, are you okay?”

Robin got up off the ground drowsily, and said in a tired voice, “You’re Jonas, right? What happened?”

“Well,” Jonas began, strangely without any concern over the fact that Robin was, after what felt like hours of being completely alone, standing right in front of him - perhaps it was for the sheer joy of finally being able to talk to someone in this nightmarish place. He casually took a moment to remember that day. “Well… We were at that one scary house, right?” Robin nodded his head a bit, so Jonas continued. “And, to escape those guards, didn’t we jump through a gap in the floor, or something like that?” Robin nodded again, while checking his pockets to make sure his weapons were still there. Jonas resumed, “I woke up in some freaky giant cave with plants everywhere, and you were also there, but when I turned around, you vanished.”

“Okay, I remember the part where we fell,” said Robin. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about after that. I only remember you- stepping on my shoulder- just now.”

Jonas replied, “Uh… Anyway, have you found Julie yet?”

With a broad shake of his head in the dim cave light, Robin answered, “No.”

In desperation for answers, Jonas looked around the cave, and asked, ”And, uh… Do you know where we are?”

Robin sighed. “I have no idea.” Jonas looked slightly surprised at the answer.

“Are you-” said Jonas. “Are you saying...that you don’t remember anything about a giant cave full of plants? Odd memories? Anything?”

“N- Odd memories?” Robin said with confusion.

Jonas explained the memories that had arisen while he was in that cave: The incident years ago with the bow (“I still remember the pain when I think about it,” Robin commented), when they tried to take the liquefied emerald off the shelf (“What were we thinking?”), and lastly, the memory of the brother and sister that, as Jonas heavily implied, somehow popped up while actually having nothing to do with his past.

Robin leaned drowsily on the cave wall. “Yeah, I remember tha- Wait, did you just say that memory wasn’t one of yours?”

“No, it’s not one of my memories, I can’t recognize any of the faces,” Jonas said. He took a few steps down the tunnel, and Robin chose to follow. “But I think it was a memory from that haunted house all those years ago, when that family still lived there. What do you think it means?”

Sighing, Robin replied, “It could have been nothing more than a dream. I don’t know anything about this place.”

Jonas opened his mouth to argue, but… Somehow, for no apparent reason, the word ‘dream’ came to him in a different perspective - now, somehow, those entire hours in that plant-cave came back to him, yet they felt like nothing more than a distant thought in the corner of his head, almost as though it had never happened. Looking back to when he first woke up there, it was truly impossible to determine whether all those overgrown passages were real or not. He was unable to get himself over that feeling as he and Robin walked silently down the tunnel towards the light at the end, where they knew by instinct that something was waiting for them, whether it was good or bad. The light gradually drew closer in the minutes that passed. It almost felt like time had simply skipped forward during those moments - they were at the end of the tunnel just like that.

At the end of the passage, the air was certainly much warmer, and the light was finally beginning to come into focus, not as one light, but as millions of tiny glowing specks that surrounded them from every side. At that time, the tunnel gave way to a ginormous grotto - covered in grass, trees, flowers, and swarming with tens of thousands of beautiful bugs that buzzed merrily around them.

“Look!” Jonas shouted, pointing towards the center of the room. Robin turned his head to where Jonas was pointing, and gasped audibly. An enormous, ancient oak tree sat in the middle of the room, with a trunk as thick as a house that reached high into the heavens above. The tree’s canopy of leaves easily clouded the seemingly sky-high ceiling. But the main feature of it all was sitting, half-embedded in the tree trunk just ahead, almost as though waiting for them. It was a spear, and it looked exactly like the one in the memory - which in turn resembled the spear that appeared on that map. It was shocking to Jonas to realize that the Quake, the mythical spear, the destination of his journey, was just seconds away.

 

Wow just wow... so long of a chapter

________________________________

My money is that Master L is going to be right there and attack them and Julie is going to save them.

 

wi adehfjdhaudfhuifndiwajeij-wqejf rvpurefwauvniifenva Its eh

 

True but I still remember most of this story

 

I haven't seen this a long while and still waiting for next chapter

BUMP

 

baaaneddddddddijjhhhhuhhh
jk

 

why you ban me non-senpai

 

Hello, I'm here for another post, and-

...

Look, a distraction! And plot twists! Unnecessary writing elements! Aha, I have you now!

Chapter XL
The Man of Deceiving Looks​

Where had he been all this time?

After looking at the giant tree in front of him, it was only too hard to imagine what he had been through since leaving the house in Nemract. Those pirates? They were long gone. The man in blue...Tollak, his name was? Jonas couldn’t remember seeing him in quite some time. The Creator? It didn’t matter. He and Robin were barely a few strides away from the Quake, where it sat waiting, embedded in the trunk of a giant tree that radiated in a magical aura. The grotto surrounding them failed to put up any resistance - in fact, it almost seemed delighted at the prospect of getting rid of that spear.

“So there it is,” said Robin with astonishment. Jonas nodded silently, feeling nothing but the cool breeze that seemed to originate from the tree itself. Silence followed, as it seemed that neither of them were willing to make the move. Finally, Jonas took the plunge, and set a trembling foot forward.

The walk to the base of the tree was easier than Jonas could ever have imagined. Not a single sign appeared that could signal a threat...except for the striking lack of one. It seemed too good to be true, trotting up to the resting place of an object which had been hidden from human eyes for the longest time. In a matter of seconds, he was reaching out to take hold of the most powerful spear in the world.

The gnarls holding the spear firmly in place drew back in a snakelike manner in response to Jonas’s hand firmly grasping the long, smooth spear handle. And just like that - he was holding the Quake. There was a moment of awe as the two of them gazed at the magnificent weapon, which surprisingly, after the euphoria began to fade from their vision, looked exactly like an ordinary spear. The Quake’s solid handle and thick stone spearhead gave the impression that it should be slow and heavy, but when Jonas waved it around a bit, it was like brandishing a twig. A long minute of silence crept by.

“Is something wrong?” Robin asked. His voice came off as slightly sharp as a result of the stillness of the grotto.

“I don’t get it,” said Jonas with a subdued voice. “This… It feels like nothing but a really light spear.” A moment of silence followed. “What happened to all the talk about containing unrivaled amounts of raw earth magic?”

Robin had one uncertain response. “Are you sure there’s not...some sort of catch? It’d be stupid if this entire journey were for nothing.”

“But there was never a catch mentioned,” replied Jonas. He held the spear downwards and jammed it headfirst into the soft soil, where it sank several inches, completely hiding the head. “Wouldn’t someone have told us?”

“Well, if I may answer your question,” replied a nearby voice casually, “it’s not in its battle state at the moment. Right now, it really is nothing but a very light...convincingly ordinary spear.”

Jonas and Robin began jerking their heads in every direction possible to find where the voice had come from. “There!” Robin shouted, pointing some thirty feet away.

Standing far to their right, leaning beside a disproportionately large root of the giant tree, was a man. Donning a stylish cloak and a ludicrous top hat, and smirking brusquely at the two of them, he didn’t look like anything more than a street magician at first glance.

“So,” he said with little concern. “You have an exceptionally powerful spear, now. It’s quite impressive that you’ve gotten thus far.”

“Who are you?” Jonas asked nervously.

“Who am I?” he replied almost mockingly. Laughing, he continued. “I am someone who strives to create a better world.” The man began pacing dramatically in a wide circle around Jonas and Robin. “I have worked very hard to make it as far as I have.” He pulled two daggers from within his cloak. “I am-” the knives were coated with a soft flame “-master of fire.”

“Phenomenal opening aside, there’s no need to give yourself another title,” a second voice replied. “And if either of you ask, I only chose to tag along so I could watch the show.” Jonas turned his head to see where the second voice was coming from. It was another man standing further away, wearing robes in the colors black and blue. Rather than the blazingly sharp swords Jonas last remembered seeing him with, Tollak held a pleasantly slim bow in his hands that seemed to whistle the melody of the rustling leaves.

“Hm…” Jonas muttered unwittingly. “What’s going on?”

Tollak strolled forward so that he was standing beside the other man. “Oh, we’re just here to get our hands on the Quake, to put us one step closer to accomplishing our goal. I don’t think I’ll go further than that.” He laughed lightheartedly. “It’s a great plan, at least for us, and... It won’t be quite as fun for you...possibly...at best.”

Jonas frantically grabbed hold of the Quake and yanked it out of the earth. Instead of rising up as an ordinary, light spear, it had gained the form of a humongous metal hammer that nearly out-sized his own head. Taken aback by the change, he took a nervous step backward, wobbling under the weight of the hammer. A soothing warmth covered the spear seconds later, and Jonas, with mild confusion, was finally able to stand up straight and look his opponents in the eye.

He almost felt as though he should have seen this battle coming. There was him in possession of the Quake, a man who held two flaming daggers, the man in blue with a seemingly weightless bow, and then there was Robin, who carried a pair of dull knives he had been using for this entire journey. The strange man with his own burning daggers laughed coldly.

“Ha, do you really think the Quake and those pathetic knives can help you?” he taunted, walking slowly forward. “Everyone knows that the Quake is the weakest of the Weapons. You know why?” Jonas tried not to break eye contact as the man continued. “When the Weapons were-”

“Now, there,” interrupted Tollak calmly. “You don’t want to go spoiling the Weapons’ secrets, or there’s no point in taunting these kids.” He yawned. “Besides, when you consider the wielders, this is a fairly even batt-”

“Shut it!” the man shouted back. Tollak nodded slightly. He continued. “When the Weapons were initially created, they were little more than husks, tools with no power...but absurd amounts of potential!” The man smiled. “However, the only way the Creator could reveal their true powers was with-”

Tollak cut him off with a loud whooshing sound from his bow. “Excuse my interruption,” he interjected. “It may not be the best time to say that. There are a couple of people here who don’t need the incentive to dwell on those thoughts again.”

Jonas said, “But-”

“I’m not talking about you!” Tollak screamed. “I’m talking about-”

Tollak went silent. It was then Jonas realized that Robin wasn’t standing beside him. Rather, he was raising his knife behind Tollak’s head, and after a split-second action that Jonas was too slow to witness, they were flying in opposite directions. Tollak hit the ground hard, but Robin had rolled over in such a position that he could be upright in a second.

Jonas stood still, his eyes darting to every point of movement he could trace. Tollak was raising himself off the doughy ground, and Robin had quickly gained footing, but the man with the top hat was nowhere to be seen. Jonas had the Quake held firmly in front of him, preparing for it to take any hits for its wielder. Tollak’s dirty hair swept over his face as he held out his bow and fired an arrow out of nowhere. Jonas watched as Robin just barely leapt out of the way. The effect was almost frightening, watching arrow after arrow fly towards his own brother, who was having more difficulty dodging with each that passed.

An alarming sense of foreboding struck Jonas. Time seemed to slow down as he watched Robin trip and fall to the ground. Tollak reached out, grabbed an arrow, pulled the bowstring back….

“No!” screamed Jonas, nearly dropping the Quake in his haste to stop the arrow, even though he knew he couldn’t.


The shout was the loudest noise in the fight yet. She began to move in a frenzied panic as a loud crunching sound echoed from nearby. A pile of materials scavenged from the cave were spread across the floor, including some wood, a knifelike piece of hard granite, and some string from that nest of unusually aggressive spiders. She attempted to fasten a large object around her wrist, what seemed to be some kind of weapon fashioned from the materials she could find in the cave. She was about to re-organize the items on the floor when another loud scream echoed just a moment’s travel away. She took a quiver filled with what looked like sharpened sticks, dropped and stamped out the torch in haste, and ran towards the battle site.


Jonas had his eyes shut as tight as he could, he didn’t want to see what he knew had happened. It sounded like there was heavy breathing nearby, along with the odd feeling that someone was standing dumbfounded at the shock of what happened. He forced himself to open his eyes open just a tiny bit, just for him to repress a gasp of awe.

Robin was unharmed. The arrow had stopped dead an inch from his face, and within all the confusion, Jonas required a double-take to see the strong earthen spike that had jutted out of the ground and caught the arrow mid-flight. He looked down, and found that the spear clutched in his hands was softly illuminated, as though a lightning bug began to glow deep within it.

“‘Ey, c’mon, M!” Tollak shouted into the grotto. “You’ve got better things than to track down that whatever nearby!” In the moment of distraction, Jonas took the opportunity to hold the Quake aloft, and he jabbed it straight in Tollak’s direction. There was a second of hesitation, and then the ground collapsed at his feet before he had time to react.

“Oh, sh-” he yelled desperately as he went plummeting ten feet below the surface. When the dirt settled a moment later, Jonas heard him speak again. “That- stupid!…” yelled Tollak, with his voice greatly muffled. “M! Get over here!”

Jonas was knocked over with a hard kick to his head. He gasped when he landed painfully in a patch of dry grass, and the Quake went soaring out of his hands and straight into the hands of his attacker.

“I believe I am the one who is supposed to call you,” the man replied calmly to Tollak from behind Jonas. “Though I will admit, your timing was impeccable. We have what we came for.”

Rolling over slightly, Jonas gasped for the breath he had lost from the blow. He could see Tollak pull his way out of the hole Jonas had put him in. The man was meandering almost arrogantly towards his partner, twirling the Quake absentmindedly in his hands. Robin gazed fixedly at a spot somewhere above and behind Jonas, who was about to roll over and see what Robin was staring at-

What looked like a sharpened stick pierced the air at ghastly speed, deciding to embed itself halfway through Tollak’s cloak on the far side of the grotto with a loud, echoing thwack. Everyone turned to Tollak.

“Wha-” began Tollak, but his statement was cut short by another projectile narrowly missing his left shoe. Jonas crawled on the lumpy ground towards Robin, who was kneeling a fair distance away. The man and Tollak did not take notice, mostly due to their focus being drawn toward a silhouette standing on a tree branch well above them. Another shot soared through the grotto with a cracking noise, this time going straight over the man’s head and taking his top hat with it.

The man looked slightly shocked at the sight of losing his hat. “Who’s doing this?” he demanded loudly. The response he got was another bolt snagging his sleeve. “I demand to know!” There was no answer. Rather than shout some more, he just snickered menacingly.

“Tollak, get the scrolls ready. I’m taking this place down,” he said sternly. Tollak nodded slightly, though he didn’t reach for or even look at his bag. The man raised his daggers high in the air.

The flames engulfing the knives slipped onto the ground, and began to slither toward its target on its own, taking a snakelike shape, with its target being whoever was firing at them from above. The snake slithered ominously across the ground and up the trunk of the giant tree, transforming the color of all the bark it touched to a sickly burnt grey. The figure on the tree had stopped shooting; instead, she was hastily searching for a way down as the snake slowly wrapped itself around the root of the tree branch. Soft smoke was emitting from beneath the snake as the wood it coiled over withered away, floating upward as smoke to cast a shadow over the roof of the grotto. The tree branch began to shake violently while more and more smoke and a faint sizzling noise filled the air.

“Quick!” Jonas shouted to the person above. “Jump!” The figure took a second to prepare, and with a great leap, cleared the enormous gap between the unstable tree branch she was standing on and a lower branch which leaned steeply downward. In a matter of moments, she had climbed far enough down the branch that it was only a matter of avoiding the rocks on the ground while taking the plunge. Jonas closed his eyes.

There was a loud thud of boots on dirt close by amidst the crackling flames, along with a voice. “Is there a particular reason you have your eyes closed?” she asked. Jonas opened his eyes immediately, and let words leave his mouth without even looking at the person speaking to him.

“What took you so long?” he said, raising himself off the spongy ground. “And where were you? You just vanished.” The instant he shut his mouth, a fiery blast rocked the grotto far above them, prompting ashes to hover around the grotto and give the air an obnoxious grey tint, making it even more difficult to breathe.

“Well,” Julie replied, failing to meet Jonas’s eye as she spoke, “I only had ten minutes to prepare, at best. Anyway, how’d you get into a fight that quickly? I know you have a bad habit of going after danger, but this must be your new record-”

Jonas stuttered, “We- We didn’t pick a fight. They just showed up as soon as we ha- as soon as we had the Quake. I...didn’t know what to do.”

She shrugged casually, tugging a roughly-made crossbow off her wrist and tossing it backwards along with a patchy quiver full of sticks. “Fair,” she said.

As she spoke, a massive tree limb came crashing down from above them, roaring as the fire engulfed it in a swirling mass of reds and yellows. In an bout of panic, Jonas grabbed Julie’s sleeve and threw them out of they way just in time - a coal-black branch lashed the dirt where Julie’s foot had been a split-second before. Jonas landed on the ground, gasping for air but instead getting a mouthful of ash. He coughed horribly.

“Where’s-?” said Jonas, attempting to regain his breath. “Robin? Where’s Robin?”

Robin was at the far end of the grotto, barely visible through the heat waves distorting their vision. Peering closer, Jonas saw that he was confronting Tollak, though for exactly what matter, he wasn’t quite sure. The strange man who had taken the Quake was walking away from the conflict, his weapons already sheathed, but after whipping out some kind of scroll, he swiftly blinked out of the scene with a distinctive whoosh. A charred branch landed where he stood moments later. Right after, Robin had Tollak pinned to the ground.

“Now tell me-” Robin choked, his hand reaching for Tollak’s throat, “how do we get out of this place?”

“Hm...” muttered Tollak, his eyes darting in every direction to nearby tree branches, all of which were on fire. “Look!” he shouted suddenly, pointing somewhere behind Robin. “Teleportation scrolls! Get them!” He wrestled for his handbag before Robin could react, seizing three scrolls of ancient paper. He lobbed them towards the fire, and as soon as Robin turned his head, punched him as hard as he could.

Tollak laughed excitedly over Robin’s muffled shout. As soon as the opportunity was given, Tollak reached over, clasped a firm hand on his bow, removed a scroll from his bag, and vanished. Robin turned his head and quickly realized that Tollak, his scroll-filled bag included, was no longer present. With no other option, he dashed for the scrolls Tollak had thrown - their only way out, as far as he was willing to take their chances. With Robin plunging madly into the blazing inferno that was rapidly consuming the grotto, Julie and Jonas were unable to do more than watch as Robin’s shadow fought for the scrolls from behind a wall of flame.

The grotto was seconds away from collapse. Fire was licking every inch of the ground it could reach, and by that point, all the grass that was left stood under Jonas and Julie’s feet, but even there the intense heat was quickly advancing. Loud, eerie noises were coming from the giant tree, something that sounded almost like the creaking of a gargantuan-sized door. The branches from the tree that at one point stood proudly above the roots were now decaying on the ground into a coat of grey dust to accompany the shriveling dirt.

“Julie!” Robin shouted from the distance in an unusually gravelly voice. “Jonas! The scrolls! Catch them!”

Two scrolls came soaring through the flames between them, half-burnt but still recognizable. They were flying closer - closer - and then they landed. Jonas felt one collide with his stomach, and the other landed roughly on the ground behind them. He reached down and picked up the scroll that had plopped on the parched grass in front of his feet, and Julie dove to the ground to take the other one. A distinct whooshing sound from nearby told them that Robin had already gone; they were the only two left. Jonas unraveled the scroll and looked at it. He could see a boat, along with a whiskey bottle, a tower, and a-

He felt the familiar sensation that he was being whisked away to a pitch-black space far away from any familiar location. An invisible force jerked him one way, where waiting for him was a window-like projection revealing a canyon landscape with bandits crossing a rickety bridge. Just as suddenly, he was reeled towards a grand city overlooking a lake-filled valley. The last thing he saw before he was cast downward back into reality was a dank, gloomy cavern that seemed as though it had never been touched by human hands. But before he could get a good look at it, the wind was knocked out of him as he hit a rough surface hard on his back, gazing upward at the blinding midday sun.

Already, he could tell that the people nearby, whoever and wherever they were, could sense something wrong. In the two seconds he had been lying there, the relaxed chatter had died down to concerned whispers. Jonas exerted all the force he could to shakily lift himself halfway off the ground for the moment he would last.

Everything seemed to be much more vibrant than it should have been. The moldy shoe lying on the dirt road over there was shining with more luster than any street lamp in sight. When he tried to discern any faces among the crowd gathered around, he could only see outlines of humans and villagers dressed in everyday clothing - or at least, as normal as the tattered clothing casually worn in Nemract.

“Wait, is that-?”

“They’ve been gone for-”

“May I ask who they are?”

“What happened to them?”

“They need a medic, soon as-”

“Then take them to the hospital, now!”

Whatever was left of Jonas’s strength faded away as he fell back to the ground. The citizens were already advancing forward to carry them to the hospital. He could feel two people attempt to lift him off the ground by his feet and shoulders, and before he knew it, he was lying in a hospital bed. Like the rest of the city, the bed was in poor condition, but it was very comfortable, and it had a clear window view to Nemract’s port. Julie wasn’t in the room, though with a loud clatter, the door burst open and two people hastily walked in. They were carrying a stretcher to the bed on the far side of the room from where Jonas lay.

“D’you think he’ll be all right?” one of them asked. Jonas discerned the voice to be that of Fletcher, the librarian down the street. The tone was anxious - too anxious to be ignored. Jonas leaned slightly in his bed, cringing from the burns but remaining focused on the conversation.

“Too hard to tell,” the other person replied - it was the armorsmith, though Jonas couldn’t remember her name. “But he’ll be here for a while, that I can tell ya.”

Despite the fact that he should have been relaxing, that was enough. Jonas wanted them to move aside so he could see just what they were talking about. The person they carried in was without a doubt Robin, but what could have happened? After what felt like an eternity, Fletcher and the armorsmith ran for the door (“Oi!” he heard the smith shout. “We need the nurse here, pronto!”), and Jonas took the one-second opportunity to look at his brother.

And he fainted.

 

K so I'm on mobile so I have to quote the whole thing so here we go.

First of all I was either right in my statement of Julie saving them or you decided to use my statement instead.

Next, who is M? Unless M is short for Master

Finally, hi

 

We need more god-like creatures in dis. But other than that I LOVED IT. FEED ME. FEEEEED MEEEE

 

Let's see, story started being posted on September, 7, 2015
You didn't release a chapter on September, 7, 2016
I'm disappointed now....
But anyway, the reason for this post is for a four letter word. And that word is....

BUMP​

 

I actually published the original thread on July 8th, 2015, but then...well, 9/7 happened. I didn't put out a new chapter on July 8th, 2016, but I did do a "hey look it's been one year" post.

Also I passed 60,000 words today :D

 

KK

 

8 days without a bump

BUMP

 

Probably coming sooner than Corkus.

 

Now if only I could understand what the table meant

 

Drafts perhaps? Theres perhaps his word count and a word count he has to hit?

 

I can confirm that the second column is set up in a very confusing manner (even though it does mean something).

You're right on at least one of those. "Drafts" isn't the word I used though.





I think I'm trying too hard to be confusing
It's my progress sheet
Timestamp - Words added - Words in chapter - Chapter # - Words in story

 

Well that's easier now, 309 words added on the 16th of February, 2400 words in chapter 41 so far and 61250 total in the story

 

Damn 17 days without a BUMP