Excerpt: Rash'eh Tales: Book 3

Prolouge
Lanthien stood looking over the parapets at the burning death and destruction…how many had died? How many had fallen in their lust to change the world? He looked next to himself and saw the one when loved whose face looked like it was a mixture of pain and sadness. He longed to go and comfort her, but could not…for to do that would break both of them and cause them to go into incoherent wailing and they needed to stay alive for those who were still left. They couldn’t understand how it had all gone so wrong, they couldn’t understand how things had gone so very terribly wrong….they had made all of their plans and they had done all that they could do yet the dragons…the dragons continued to kill them all. And now it looked like this would be the end of it all….after this there would be only darkens and death….and then silence of the great beyond. Lanthien could feel himself wanting to scream and run away, to hide somewhere and wait for the nightmare to pass, but he could not bring himself to. And then he saw the point of his despair….and dragon that rose up from underneath the parapets to his eye level, the blackest of all dragons with a wingspan so large it seemed as if the flapping of her wings would blow he walls themselves down. In hi terror he fell to his knees and began creaming at the dragon, for the pain that she had caused, for the death, for the ones he loved that she had killed, and as he looked at her, he saw her smile. He looked over for where As’ia had been standing and she started at him with a look of disdain that caused him to weep, and it took all of his energy to not simply curl up in a ball on the parapets. Then he noticed the shield was beginning to fall…the Old Mans’ shield that he thought would save them all…the Old Man’s shield that had bought them so much time…but now…now it would fall and he would die along with everyone else in the city. The tears rolled down his face as he plead for mercy and he heard the night mother laugh. The night mother laughed.
“Mercy? There will be no mercy for you, only death, but before we hurt you….” The night mother lunged as the shield fell and snapped up As’ia in one bite and Lanthien screamed.
“No!!” He tried to will his limbs to move but as he did the heard screaming from all around him and he looked to see dragons descending from all sides and killing everyone around him. The black dragon in front of him laughed.
“But before I cause you pain, we cause you true pain. Look at the ones who you could not defend. Look how easy you made it for us to find your race all in one place and exterminate them for all eternity. And it is all because of you Lanthien, you were the one who made this so easy for me.” And as she spoke Lanthien watched the carnage unfold until there was nothing left…till there was no one left alive. Then he felt the excruciating pain as the night mother buried her claws into his body, ripping at his flesh while keeping him alive. He could feel his strength fading, fading into the darkness and the last thing he saw before falling into the void was the luminous dragon’s jaws descending on his body…and then there was nothingness.
The Old man saw this vision for the thousandth time and gasped as he came awake. “It’s not real…it’s not real…” he kept muttering to himself. He could never be sure if it was his own overactive imagination that was causing the visions or if it was something his captors were implanting in his mind to break him...either way it was breaking him…he could feel his sanity…his surety slipping away from him as his certainty had diminished. The dark cage they kept him in did never let him know where he was or, what time it was….or what was happening. It smelled of all of the wonderful orders of an unwashed body who never let free from their confines. He practiced breathing again, and again, just to make sure he didn’t start screaming at the top of his lungs. He crawled from one corner of his box to the other to give himself a change of scenery…or at least that’s what he told himself it was for and he sat their waiting….how long had it been since hw as capture? A week? A year? He could not tell time after the first days of torture as whenever they brought him out of the box it was always in a different location…in a different place…and it was always at night and he couldn’t even tell in the barren black rocked wasteland what season it was….he knew it realistically it could only have been a week…but his mind screamed at him to break and give them what they wanted for this week had seemed like an eternity.
However he feared the box opening more almost then when it stayed closed…the creature Sha’dek…he was inhuman. He had human features but…the Old man almost began crying from the very thought of the creature…it scared him to even think of him…his cruelty, his rage toward humans was so complete and his torture was nothing but pure pain and suffering. How could those who remained stand against that? How could Lanthien and the others even hope to fight a creature so evil or the ones who created him. The despair ate away at his confidence until he began to shake and rock himself to find some comfort or solace from the nightmare he found himself in.
Once again the doubts and the fear pushed him to confess to them his deeds…as it was always the same questions, “what did you place around the city? What were you doing at the temple in the southland? How can we open the temple?” He had fought off the questions more out of luck then skill as there were times during the torture that had been so excruciating he literally could not tell them the information because his voice was so distorted from the screams of agony. More than once he had tried to answer the questions but by the time his will broke he was nothing more than a pile of mental confusion, a broken body, spirit and mind who could not even form coherent sentences. He had tried even once to simply yell through the box at his captors but that had lead to the box being tossed up in the air he believed between dragons…he could not be sure but he kept flying through the air believing that each toss would be the end as he splattered to the ground. But that only lasted for a while until he felt the box be put down and heard two large thuds. His box had opened and that cursed Sha’dek starred back at him and told him to make no more nose or he would show him what real pain as. The Old Man could see the dragon bodies behind Sha’dek and trembled in fear. His box was shut and he sobbed until he had no tears left.
Perhaps the hardest of everything was the fact that he could no longer feel his power…it was completely gone, while he had not died for some unexplained reason….he could not touch the power he had known for years and years. This made escaping impossible and idiotic to try as he could not even defend himself from anything, and so he sat…sat in the darkens of his own box. Then night came again, or at least he believed it had….for it seemed to be a different night then the one previous and Sha’dek came to him and opened the box. Without a word, he got out of the box, and followed Sha’dek until he stopped. Then Sha’dek repeated a few words and the Old man raise dup in the air, suspended by both his arms and legs.
“So we being this again, Old Man. If you would just answer my questions, then we could end this misery and you could be reward for your loyalty to the night mother, it only takes a few words…” Sha’dek said this as he walked around the Old Man, tracing his blade across his ankle causing it to bleed and making the Old Man shiver in pain. The Old Man fought with all of his might to not give up the secrets which had been entrusted to him…although the sweet release that Sha’dek offered as a reward seemed to be the only hope…the offer of death. But he fought against that thought and hoped that this night would not be the night that all of the secretes which kept so many hat he cared for safe would be revealed.
Sha’dek smiled at him when he didn’t respond, “Very well, I enjoy this more than almost anything else, to torture one of my enemies each day is almost more pleasure then any creature ever deserved.” And with that Sha’dek danced his blade of darkens all over the Old Man’s body till his cries rang out over all of the land, echoing from one rock to another yet the cries were never answered and for these cries no help would ever come.
As the Old man hung in the middle of the air, breathing heavily and bleeding on the ground, he watched Sha’dek clean his blade with a smile of satisfaction. “So Old Man, we shall have to do this again soon,” he smiled sardonically at him. The Old man did all he could to keep breathing as he struggled to stay alive. Then the most torturous part of the experience began, as Sha’dek knit his flesh back together with the darkens that flowed from inside of him. The Old Man let loose an inhuman scream as he felt the darkness flow into his body, consuming his very being as he began to be more and more sustained by it. As Sha’dek cut his power the Old Man dropped to the ground and he noticed that each day his blood turned blacker and blacker…it was as if the darkens was sustaining him and was becoming his life-force. He screamed and rocked himself, pounding his hand on the ground…he was to be good…to be one of the file prophets that could save the world…and he were he was being tortured, and held…being transformed into tone of the creatures of darkens…he could not stand it…he could not…
As he was drug by Sha’dek back to his crate and thrown inside…one question could not be held back any longer…”How long…” the old man rasped out.
Sha’dek looked at him quizzically, “How long will keep torturing you? That I do not know, I simply enjoy it so I’m hoping it will never end. “
The old man doubled over in pain as he felt the darkness flow through himself, “No…how long…box…inside…”
Sha’dek smiled cruelly. “Oh how long have you been in the box? See that is the best of all, you have only been in here a day Old Man, and just think if every day like this repeated how wonderful it would be, of I will keep you alive as long as I have breath.” The Old Man didn’t believe him, but then he saw the sun break over the horizon and saw that they had only traveled a day from the capital of Tarmiah and as the box shut he screamed in horror feeling the last of his hope draining from him.

One soul who has been tortured.
One soul who is tortured still.
While hope is gone, one hope still remains.
One chance for the balance to be restored.
One chance for the world to be made anew.
But hope is fleeting when the darkness shines,
And all may be lost or found.
For this is the beginning of the end.