The Headless Librarian

We stopped to catch our breath in the long hallway below the ruined wizard’s tower. Ahead of us were two iron doors, not the wooden ones we had seen throughout the rest of the complex. The doors were locked, we discovered, and had a symbol of Herioneous that looked like it had been hastily carved into the door. Herioneous was one of the good Gods. That much I knew. I hoped that meant what lay beyond the doors was good, too. A girl could hope, at least.

Varis got his lock picking kit out again and got to work with the ease of someone who had been doing this for years. I reminded myself to ask him what his profession was before we met him, because more and more I was beginning to think he was a professional thief instead of a “treasure hunter,” though I guess, depending on who you talk to, they would be considered one and the same. When he managed to unlock the complex locking mechanism and opened the door, we found ourselves in a massive library! Finally, the books I had been looking for! The library smelled of mildew and … books. Normally the books would have had my full attention, but this time my gaze

went to the creepy dead guy with no head. The man, with bone-pale fingers and a black, tattered robe, looked—if a headless man could look—in our direction and threatened us with shaking fists. Six small, floating skulls with light emanating from their centers took up post to the left and right of the main corridor of the shelves of books. The headless figure advanced down the middle.

Gar must have been thinking what I was thinking, because he ducked down to the corridor to the right. Praxis and I quickly followed suit. As the floating skulls came closer, we saw that they weren’t all the same. All were the skulls of animals, but one was a monkey, another, a goat, and the last one looked to be feline in nature. Whatever they were, they were dead now, and dead things, as far as I had seen, wanted to make everything else around them dead. As soon as they came into range, we each attacked one. In just one hit, the light went out of their hollow eye sockets, and their skulls dropped to the ground, breaking on impact with a loud boom. I was glad we weren’t near them when they exploded.

Streams of light were coming from the corridor on the left, and we looked to see Varis, all by himself facing two skulls on his own. One of us would have come to his rescue, but the headless man had started focusing his magickal attacks on us! He pushed us apart with an unseen wave that knocked us into the nearby book cases. As soon as we were back on our feet, we heard the sound of the skulls exploding from the corridor where Varis was. From his grunts, it sounded like he hadn’t managed to avoid their destruction.

Meanwhile, the headless man was draining us of our energy little by little, and when he would get near us, he would lash out and hit with surprising strength.

Looking slightly worse for wear, Varis joined us to finally take down the headless man. Varis didn’t hesitate to rifle through the man’s robes once he was truly dead, and he managed to find quite a few magickal items and a journal with waterlogged pages.

After tending to everyone’s wounds and laying out bedrolls, we settled in for the night—the boys in their beds and me, finally, with my books. I didn’t get much sleep, but I did find some interesting stories.

The journal that we found on the headless man was difficult to read, but I had managed to find some pages that weren’t destroyed. In a sprawling hand, the man recounted his life before the flood. Before the flood! In life, he hadn’t been such a nice guy. He seemed determined to unleash evil creatures into this world, and hoped to harness their power as his own. That reminded me of some wizard I had heard about—you know, the one that had constructed the very tower that we were in right now.

There were bits and pieces of what I guessed to be rituals, written in a language that was unknown to me. There were even depictions of ugly beasts with horns, mouths full of jagged teeth, and claws as long and sharp as blades. We had seen some terrible things in our journeys, but I never wanted to see creatures from these drawings face to face.

After the drawings and rituals the handwriting changed significantly, though it still seemed to be the writings of the same person. I found one page saying that the man’s own curse had been more of a blessing ‘to be able to continue his work,’ whatever that meant. I thought at first he must have been turned into a Skall, but his skin clearly wasn’t scaled. It was just the pallid grey of a dead man. Unfortunately, it was a color I had grown used to seeing, and it was usually accompanied by the moaning and grunting of a dead thing trying to tear me apart … or eat me.

When my candle threatened to gutter out and I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, I shoved the journal in my bedroll and made a mental note to make sure we collected a few more books before we left this decrepit library.

The next thing I remembered was Gar shaking me awake. The rest of the boys had packed up and were ready to go. We rifled through the library and picked out an interesting selection of titles, loading them in Varis’s endless bag.

After that, we made our way through the maze of corridors back to the ice dragon’s lair. As expected, our guide wasn’t waiting for us at the mouth of the lair. Who could blame him, though, as we had been gone for two days. He probably assumed we were dragon food and left. After following the path back to the Skall’s cavern, we found dead Skall and a mess of blood and gore. We followed the obvious tracks back to the coastline.

As the snow-covered ground began to even out, we started to see smoke billowing up from the water's edge. We hurried to reach a good vantage point. The slavers camp where we had freed Skall had been rebuilt … and it was much larger than a few small tents. The smoke we saw was from several small fires with cloaked figures huddled around them. At the shoreline was Fool’s Errant and a much larger and more heavily armed galleon. This was not the same ship we saw before as we approached Khelek. Fool’s Errant’s sails were tattered and stained from blasts, and the wood of her hull looked black from gun blasts in several places. She was apparently still seaworthy, but has sustained a bit of damage during the obvious takeover.

I thought immediately of our crew. If they weren’t on the ship, they were likely in one of the tents below, bound and gagged as slaves … or worse. We immediately started throwing around ideas of how to either infiltrate the camp or to avoid it all together.

The camp was situated in a large, open area with no trees or any natural landscape to provide good cover. Against the stark white of the snow, we would be easily spotted for sure. The camp looked to be huge—fifty to a hundred people at least. It also looked well organized, as we saw groups of three and four people patrolling the outskirts of the camp in overlapping shifts.

How would we get our crew back? Could we hope to free any of the slaves? Would we be better off just trying to flee in a dinghy? We didn’t have much time to think, because someone was coming. We did our best to hide, but we soon realized that the approaching people were friend, no foe.

Six of our crew, including my two hobbie pets, were here! They had managed to escape during the chaos of the takeover and avoid being captured on shore. They were wet and hungry, so we shared our food and tried to give them some warmer clothes as they told us what they knew about the camp and the rest of our crew. The larger galleon had come upon them hard and fast and the Admiral was barely able to avoid being rammed head long. As soon as he turned turned Fool’s Errant about, the larger ship had fired their light cannons and was preparing to board. Knowing they were clearly out-gunned and cornered, several members of the crew jumped overboard while the rest stayed and tried to defend against the enemy’s crew. Endahar swore he saw the Admiral jump from the ship, but didn’t see him come ashore.

As our crewmen perked up, we started to form a plan to take out one of the scouting parties. As it happened, one looked to be coming our way. It was just four, so we thought it would be an easy fight. We didn’t plan on killing them, but just subduing them so that we could get some more information about their encampment out of them.

Well, they were not the easy enemy we were expecting. If there were fifty more of these dark-skinned elves waiting below in camp, we should definitely avoid them. I almost died, again, and the rest of my friends didn’t fare much better. It was hard to hit the dark elves when they created a bubble of darkness you couldn’t see into or out of, and they hit hard!

We questioned one while the other three were knocked out cold. The one told us their leader was the “Wrathborn,” whoever that was. She was probably another dark elf. I had read a little bit about how the dark elves society worked and knew the women were the ones in control. Well, if these male dark elf scouts were the weakest among the bunch, I didn’t want to meet this “Wrathborn” lady.

After our scuffle with the scouts, we began to think that avoiding the camp altogether looked to be the best idea. We would try to board their ship by stealing a dinghy and then threaten the shore with bombardment once we had overtaken their crew. There were a lot of unknowns in the plan, but we were working with limited information, and the information we had told us to avoid as many dark elves as possible!

I was not looking forward to implementing our plan, but it was either be ballsy or be a slave … or dead. Being ballsy still could end in our death, but it would make for a much more courageous death than just giving up and allowing ourselves to be captured. At least that’s what the boys said.

If this is my last journal entry, I blame Varis.

~Zaly

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