A Wizard’s Dream

  The sound came first.

  A low, distant growl that rolled across the plains like a great beast waking from a centuries-long sleep. The walls of Struttsburg were thick, old stone cut from the bones of the Black Hills and laid in place by giants long since tuned to dust. But even those ancient stones shivered now. Pebbles leapt and danced upon the ramparts. Shields on the arms of sentries rattled with a nervous clang. Helmets turned skyward. Bows paused mid-tightening. Even the jester in the eastern tower ceased his crude laughter.

  It sounded like a storm-but it wasn’t.

  “Storm brewin,” muttered a voice on the western watch. “Feel it in my bones, I do.”

  Draumbean heard the words without needing to look. He passed behind the man like a shadow through mist, the hem of his velvet-blue robes brushing the damp stone. His footsteps made no sound. His hands were clasped behind his back, the long fingers interlocked I thought, and his orangish beard-braided and beaded with iron charms-was caught in the rising wind, streaming behind him like a banner of flame.

  No one noticed him. They were too busy searching the heavens, expecting the sky to split open and drown them. Poor fools. They had no idea.

  “That’s not thunder, lad,” Draumbean said at last.

  He had stopped by the main gate, his voice sudden and sharp enough to snap a dozen necks around at once. For a moment, the walls held only silence, broken by the distant roar that would not fade,

  He turned, eyes narrow beneath a heavy brow. “Prepare for battle.”

  The command was not shouted-it didn’t need to be. There was something in the weight of it, the way it punched through thin ice. The murmurs died. Soldiers who moments ago had been guessing at the weather now turned as one, their eyes scanning the plains beyond the wall.

  And they saw it.

  Across the great expanse of the Sullen Valley, a shadow stretched, creeping forth like spilled ink. It seeped from the mouth of the mountain pass, slithering between crags and gullies, advancing not by pace but by presence. A darkness made movement. Not fog. Not night. Something else.

  Draumbean moved to the edge of the battlements and gripped the stone. His knuckles whitened, but his face remained unreadable. He could see it clearly now. The shadow was not just shade-it was mass. It had shape. Wings.

  The sky seemed to break open again, not with thunder, but with the beating of thousands of wings. Black forms surged into the air like a swarm disturbed-each one clawed and ragged, the silhouette of an abomination, wings like broken sails. The soldiers gasped.

  “Arrows,” someone shouted.

  Draumbean’s eyes narrowed. No, not arrows.

  The forms twisted, banked, and suddenly pivoted-all turning toward the city in eerie unison. Their descent was swift. Controlled. The air thickened with their shrieks.

  And then he saw them clearly.

  “Draug,” Draumbean whispered. Not to the men, but to himself.

  Not birds. Not bats. Flying lizards. Undead. Their scales sloughed off in patches. Many had no eyes. Their ribs were visible through translucent skin. Upon each rode a figure, fleshless and swaying, armored in remnants of kingdoms long gone. Some clutched rusted blades, others bore shields with sigils of the dead.

  The first broke formation. A single Draug peeled off from the swarm, hurtling toward the city-shattered teeth snapping in rhythm with each beat of its wings. On its back, a rider hunched low, cloaked in shadows, its skeletal fingers gripping the reins of bone and sinew.

  Draumbean did not move. He closed his eyes.

  The wind changed. He could feel it-not the natural gusts, but the other wind. The one that lived beneath the world, in the folds of magic and will.

  It came to him reluctantly at first. Whispering. Scuttling. Then stronger. He opened himself, letting the currents swirl into his gut, his blood, his bones. He raised one hand, fingers taut like a conductor’s baton.

  The Draug was nearly overhead now, screeching with a hunger, wings blotting out the grey light of day.

  Draumbean’s eyes opened.

  He spoke the word of power.

  The world blinked. Light screamed forth from his outstretched fingers, a bolt of fire racing toward the heavens, trailing golden smoke. For an instant it seemed to miss its mark, soaring past the creature. Then it arced and plummeted, curving like a bird of prey.

  The fireball struck.

  The explosion lit up the sky. The Draug burst in midair, its rider disintegrating in a cyclone of ash and charred bone. A cheer erupted from the wall.

  The soldiers shouted. Some wept. Others thumped their breastplates. “The wizard!” they called. “He’ll burn them all!”

  Fools.

  Draumbean didn’t join their celebration. His hand trembled faintly, hidden within his sleeve. He had cast a child’s trick. One death. One.

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  Above them, the sky churned with hundreds-perhaps thousands-of Draug. A cloud of rotting wings and cursed bone. They would blot out the sun. His fireballs would burn a few. No more.

  Something deeper shifted in the valley. The sound changed. The thunder broke, not as noise, but as presence. Something was parting the army.

  The serpent came next.

  The serpent made no sound.

  It did not slither. It glided, as if its bulk, monstrous and absurd, bore no weight at all. It passed through the ranks of the dead as a knife through water. Rows upon rows of shambling corpses gave way to it, their movements stiff and jittering, but in perfect unison-every one of them the colossal thing that came now to the fore.

  From the wall, even at that distance, the size of it was evident. The creature’s head was the width of a merchant’s house. Its scales shone in the gray daylight like wet obsidian, etched with glyphs that pulsed in slow rhythm-green, then violet, then black. Atop it, draped in robes darker than pitch, rode a figure whose presence made Draumbean’s skin itch and his bones clench against themselves.

  It sat as still as stone, not swaying, not shifting, though the serpent’s every motion rolled like a wave beneath it. Wind bent around it. Light dimmed around it.

  The soldiers upon the wall had gone quiet. They’d cheered when Draumbean felled the first Draug. But that cheer had dried in their throats, curdled by the sight now unfolding.

  “What in the gods name….” one of them muttered, but his voice failed him halfway through.

  Draumbean said nothing. He could feel it now-feel him. The one upon the serpent.

  It was like staring into a fire too long. Your eyes begin to water. Your mind wanders. You begin to feel small, then foolish, then helpless. His breath slowed. His lungs betrayed him. His limbs ached with stillness. A sensation crawled into his legs: rootedness. His boots clung to the stone as if they had fused to it. His robes snapped in the wind, but he did not move.

  And the power. Gods, the power.

  It radiated from the rider like smoke from a forge. But not fire. Not life. The opposite. It was chaos. Unbound magic. Raw, rippling, coiled like a viper in a man’s skin. No natural force could contain it. The air warped around the figure. Shapes flickered. For a breathless second Draumbean thought he saw wings, then tendrils, then a face with too many eyes.

  He blinked hard.

  The figure remained, seated upright upon the serpent, motionless, faceless in the gloom.

  He realized he was shaking.

  Not from cold. Not from exertion. From something far worse.

  Draumbean had known fear. He had stood against demon-kin in the Greenwood valleys of Tharamoor. He had held back an entire battalion of desert men with nothing but spells and spite. But this-this was something older than fear. Something deeper.

  His left hand began to tremble. Just the fingers, twitching as though plucked by invisible strings.

  He clenched it in a fist and still the trembling continued.

  “Not now,” he muttered. “Not here.”

  But his knees locked. He could not move.

  The bile rose without warning. Sour and hot. He tasted it at the back of his throat and forced it down, though it burned like acid. His pride, once carved from iron, began to crack.

  Coward whispered something inside him. You will kneel before it. Like all others.

  “No.” This time it was spoken aloud.

  He bit down on his own tongue. Hard. Blood filled his mouth.

  It helped.

  With a surge of fury, he threw the fear aside and wrenched his legs into motion. One foot forward. Then another. Slowly, shaking, he closed the distance to the rampart’s edge. He gripped the stone.

  The serpent had stopped now, coiled at the very front of the undead host. The figure upon it lifted a long, ornate scepter, forged from a material that drank in the light around it. It did not speak.

  It didn’t need to.

  It didn’t need to.

  Draumbean raised his voice. Not with magic, not with force-but with clarity.

  “So be it then!” he shouted, casting his voice over wall and valley. “You shall never take this city. We brave shall lay down our lives a thousand times before letting you desecrate these stones. So come! Come die upon these walls, filth! Let the dead bury the dead, and the living rejoice in your defeat!”

  The sound carried. A few soldiers behind him straightened. Others gripped their weapons tighter.

  “Let us wait no longer, demon!” Draumbean roared. “For the sight of you is starting to bore me.”

  The scepter moved.

  It was not a swing. Not a flourish. Simply a rise, lifted until it pointed at the sky.

  Then came the light.

  It exploded outward, not from the scepter, but from everywhere. It was as if the world itself had cracked open. Every direction, every corner of vision-white, blinding, searing light. There was no sound, only pressure, like the world exhaling all at once.

  Draumbean cried out, shielding his face with his arm.

  When he opened his eyes, the walls were empty.

  No soldiers.

  No banners.

  No serpent in the valley.

  Silence.

  He turned slowly. His heart pounded.

  The wind had stopped.

  The sky was…. wrong. Gray still, but too still. No clouds moved. No birds. Not even a shadow.

  He was alone.

  The silence was wrong.

  It wasn’t simply the absence of sound, but the smothering of it-as if noise itself had been carved away from the world. No wind stirred. The torches that once lined the battlements were still aflame, but their fires danced without heat or crackle, like ghosts burning in defiance of natural law.

  And then he felt it.

  Not through sight or sound. Not even through the winds of magic that he had come to understand like a second skin. No, this presence was felt in the bones-an aching, reverberating pulse that crept along his marrow like frostbite in reverse. The air thickened. Not just around him, but inside him. Every breath came heavy, tinged with the weight of ages. He turned slowly, the motion too slow for his liking, and found himself no longer alone.

  It stood behind him.

  Tall. Impossibly tall. Not because its limbs stretched into the sky, but because everything around it felt smaller. The battlements. The city. The sky itself. A thing out of proportion with the world.

  Its eyes-if that was the word-were like two pits of abyssal light, dark purple without shine, orbs that swallowed color rather than reflected it. Its flesh-or what covered it-was a swirling shroud, neither cloth nor skin, but something in between, shifting in its own rhythm, breathing though the thing did not.

  The smell came next. And it was no ordinary stench.

  It hit Draumbean like a physical strike. Not rot. Not decay. Those would have been familiar comforts. This was… the smell of endings. Burnt books. Blood dried for centuries. Cold stone cracked by time. The scent of memory made corpse.

  And still he could not move.

  But he was no longer afraid in the same way. This was not terror of the flesh. His limbs were not trembling from fear-but held by force. A spell. Old magic. Older than language, perhaps. Older than gods.

  The voice, when it came, did not enter through his ears.

  “This mortal plane has had its time.”

  Draumbean flinched, though nothing had moved. The horror’s mouth-if it had one-had not opened. But the words were clear, spoken with authority that brokered no challenge. Each syllable rang inside his skull like the clang of a forge hammer, impossibly loud and disturbingly calm.

  “No longer shall the cattle roam freely upon the realms without consequence. Your fields will burn. Your rivers will run red with the blood of the slain. Your mountains shall crumble. Your cities-dust.”

  Draumbean strained, grinding his teeth together. The words seemed to take root inside him, worming through his mind like barbed vines. He could not speak-not aloud. But his thoughts could still move.

  He fought to shape them. It took more effort than conjuring fire or bending air. His brow dripped with sweat. He gathered his will like a trembling flame cupped in the palms of his thoughts.

  You… do not belong here, he forced, each mental word scraped from within. You are a stain. You will not win. You-

  The thing smiled.

  It didn’t curl lips or reveal teeth. The smile happened all at once-on its face, in the air, in the air inside Draumbean’s mind. A deepening of contempt. A gesture of amusement so profound it made mockery of language.

  “You misjudge your importance.”

  The voice coiled tighter, more intimate now.

  “My armies gather as we speak. Even now, your cities fall one by one. Your kin die in screams you’ll never hear. Your walls are paper. Your gods-absent. You mortals are an annoyance. Nothing more.”

  It took a step closer.

  Its height loomed, now unmistakable. At least seven feet tall, but Draumbean could no longer trust scale. The stones beneath the creature blackened slightly where it stepped-though not from soot, but from time. They aged, crumbled faintly, as If centuries passed beneath its tread.

  “I will walk over the bones of your world and take my place among the stars.”

  Draumbean poured every drop of strength into thought, forming each mental word like a soldier in a last stand. You are not a god, he managed. You are rot in robes. Nothing more.

  The creature did not reply. Instead, it reached within its own robes and drew forth something slender.

  A dagger.

  Its shape was unmistakably ritualistic-long, curved, obsidian blade veined with sickly violet. Runes along the hilt glowed with the same light as its eyes. It turned the blade over, slowly, admiring it. The way a man might admire fine craftmanship. Or a butcher might inspect a well-worn cleaver.

  “You dream too small.” The voice said.

  And then it stabbed.

  There was no movement. One instant, the dagger hovered. The next-it was inside him. Buried in his heart. The sensation was neither pain nor pressure. It was erasure. As if part of him had simply ceased to exist.

  Draumbean gasped.

  And opened his eyes.