Dreams of Iron

Home, sweet home. What an odd way to describe the place I had lived in for the last fifteen years. And yet… After all that had happened during that night, it felt like a very apt way to describe the village of Andawas.

Neither of us spoke about what happened on the journey back to the village. Only once we crossed the village border did Ipas begin to speak.

“Why did you lie to me?” she asked, her voice registering at barely above a whisper. “Why do you lie to these people?”

I stopped at once to give a short answer, “I didn't.”

Ipas likewise stopped in her tracks.

“There you go again!” She raised her voice that time. “You've lived here for I can only assume a long time and these people still don't even know who you are.”

“They know who I am,” I told her, walking on towards the tavern. “I'm Dan the tavernkeeper. I serve villagers and travelers food and drink. Sometimes, I have to break up scuffles. The villagers don't need to know anything else about me.”

“What happened to the legendary hero?” she asked me. “I see his body, but his soul is gone.”

“He died,” I said as I continued walking. “End of story.”

And for me, that was the end of the story. As far as I could be bothered to care, Halliyah Zikatta died at the Battle of Luwas, with the Demon Lord Ayya taking the initiative to kill him. Whoever lived inside this battered old body of mine, still hurting all over from the encounters with the bandit and the mimibox, that was not Halliyah Zikatta. That was what happened, and nobody, let alone some Lyko seer, would tell me otherwise.

As for her… I heard her say something that sounded similar to “Seven Heavens!” but I had walked quite a distance already, so I couldn't be too sure.

She clearly had no intention to give up. A small bit of me envied her determination. What I would have given to be so young again…

•

Despite our disagreements, Ipas agreed to help me out with a few things before returning to the Islands Beyond the Shore. Six days had passed since retrieving the necklace. Ipas and I took shifts, Ipas at night and I during the day, filing through all of Hilami’s scrolls. Surely, at least one of her random scrolls would have contained some sort of information about it. Even after searching for six days, we had no such luck. Not even our neighbors had anything of use to our search. Nobody in the entire village knew about the necklace. No legends, no wayward rumors, nothing.

Any time I had that I didn't spend working in the tavern or searching through dusty old scrolls I spent trekking up and down the Dorns in search of Hilami. Or at the very least, I wanted to find some hint of what happened to her. Even that search led nowhere.

The fifth night came, and with it arrived a dream. In the middle of the night, I stood at the edge of the village, as if I planned to set out on my nightly search. Instead of the Dorns awaiting me, however, the great city of the Ogre Kingdom, Freehold, stretched out from horizon to horizon before me. The city was grim, decorated with stone effigies of skulls, strange and disturbing creatures carved into awful, contorted poses, and the helmets of long dead warriors. The Watcher's eye opened up directly overhead, releasing a sword from within. That sword floated down towards me, bathed in the night's light, with the grace and elegance of the wintering songbirds.

Oh, to hear the music of the songbirds once again… Not a single one had been heard in this area of the world since the gods departed from this world.

I reached for the sword, its arrival now accompanied by the aforementioned chorus of songbirds.

Did… did I do that…? No… That was such a silly thing for me to suggest.

The sword glided into my grasp, my fingers fitting around the handle perfectly. My admiration of this blade, a shiny silvery color instead of the usual dusty bronze, was short-lived, however, as with just one blink of my eyes, it vanished without warning. I turned to face the village. It, too, had disappeared. Only darkness remained. I went back to face Freehold, only to find it caught up in a great and terrible whirlwind of fire. What had caused everything to turn so horrific so suddenly?

“Do you dare to pay the price?” an old woman's voice called out to me. Hilami…? The voice did in fact sound quite like her. Before I could answer, a blast of hot wind, intense enough to fry meat, attacked me.

I woke up pouring with sweat, clearly a product of a random heat blast. Being soaked with sweat always prevented me from sleeping for a while.

Checking in on Ipas seemed like a good idea, so I went to the dining hall. There, the Lyko seer continued to closely examine and scrutinize every last scroll in Hilami’s collection. I could have swore she already read every single one by this point. Hilami didn't own that many scrolls, I thought.

“Let me guess, you had a dream and you need someone to interpret it for you,” she said as I approached her. She did not even turn to face me.

“How did you…?”

“Lykosi intuition,” was her immediate answer. “That and the fact that I can smell your sweat from across the tavern. But sorry, I'm a seer, not an interpreter. However…” She dug through a pile of scrolls, some fresh and new, others old and even falling apart in places. From within the pile, she produced one of the oldest scrolls I had ever seen, one barely being held together by thin strips of papyrus. “This might be able to help you. It's a brief guide to dream interpretation. I reckon your friend may have used that scroll quite a bit.”

“Thanks,” I said as I took the scroll from her. Dream interpretation wasn't my top priority, however. I had to try to get back to sleep.

•

On the sixth night, I decided on a whim to take the necklace with me. If Hilami said it would be helpful to me, and she specifically pointed out my sword before she disappeared, then it stood to reason, at least in my mind, that the two needed to go together. That dream interpretation scroll Ipas gave me the previous night was not of much use either. The scroll's advice suggested a very basic sort of “Oh, the gods are commanding you to go here and do this and defeat that enemy” kind of dreams people have had for thousands of years.

Quite silly, all of that was.

However… Some parts of that dream remained elusive to me. Why, after it began so well, had the dream turned dark on a whim? Why had I heard Hilami’s voice in the dream? What did it all mean?

Otherwise, the only thing on my mind was to find some hint of Hilami. Well, that and who-or-whatever decided to make that infernal noise. The noise sounded faint and off in the distance at first, perhaps coming from the other side of the Dorns, in the Ogrelands. Even so, something about that noise sounded and felt unusually close and irritating on the ears, quite similar to a hellish chorus from the deepest pits of Arakkia. The longer I searched the Dorns, the louder that chorus grew, the more I could pick out individuals from amongst the crowd.

Even further… Wings, not at all soft and feathery like those of birds, but not quite as rough and papery as those of dragons either. The owners of these wings were something quite different and, depending on the situation, much worse. At least one could have avoided a dragon by avoiding the places where they live: treasure pits, large caverns, and active volcanoes. These winged beasts, the terrons, actively sought out their targets, especially if they were being piloted by someone.

Almost as if to confirm my suspicions, a fireball screamed as it fell out of the sky, landing close enough for me to feel the blast, but by sheer fortune far enough away for me to avoid getting harmed by the blast. That fireball was soon joined by another, and another still.

It all meant just one thing.

Demons.

Another fireball landed much closer to me.