Chapter Nine
Farren
“Yep. He’s going to be in his element,” I smile and then sigh as I look around. “Maybe we should just start checking the rooms around here? The kid could have gone into one of them?”
“It’s worth a shot,” Zev agrees. “I think we should do it together though. I don’t want to split up. I know that this place seems abandoned, apart from the kid that shouldn’t exist, but it may not be. Plus, I don’t plan to let you out of my sight ever again.”
I shrug, my heart warming at the fierce protective edge his voice holds and reply, “I’m good with that.”
He nods, like that’s settled and then nods to the door closest to him, “Shall we try this one first?”
I grin and hold my sword up. I'm not going in there unarmed, nor am I going in unprepared to attack anything that may be in there that wants to attack me.
It occurs to me that I probably shouldn’t be as excited as I am about exploring this mysterious and potentially dangerous castle.
I really am though. This is awesome.
Zev carefully opens the door, and we both peer inside. It seems to be some kind of sitting area, and of course, as soon as we step inside, the fireplace blazes to life.
“Thank you,” I mutter to the magic or the castle, or whatever is providing us with light and heat. I’m becoming less certain that it is, in fact, sentient. I think it may just be its magic.
The fireplace is massive, Zev could easily stand up inside it, and most likely still have headroom. Not only that, but you could fit five of him, standing side by side in it, and Zev is not a small supernatural.
“Well, there’s nothing in here,” he says as we wander further into the room.
I gently pick up a teacup that’s been knocked over at some point and place it right side up on its saucer.
“This place is stuck in time,” I mutter. As I study the table in front of me, with its teacups and plates that have dust on them that must have once been food, I add, “It’s like everyone just suddenly got up and left.”
“They probably did,” Zev says. “The question is, where are they? Are they the fallen outside? Did some of them escape? Did they all escape? Is that why there aren’t any bodies in here? There are so many unanswered questions.”
I nod, “I mean, it’s possible that they are the ones outside.
They obviously had guards here, who would have been their first line of defence, but if they were struggling, I doubt that the people in the castle would have just let them perish.
So if they were under attack, then they might have gone out to help as well.
Especially since it’s pretty obvious that the guards got overwhelmed at some point. ”
“That’s true, but a castle doesn’t usually have only strong supernaturals within its walls. There are usually weaker ones and children as well, especially in a castle as big as this. They wouldn’t have gone out to fight.”
I nod, “They could have been evacuated first, but there wasn’t enough time to evacuate anyone else, so they all went out to help instead?”
Zev frowns, “That’s a really good point. We didn’t see any bodies on the way up here, did we? The only ones are in the guard houses and within the castle’s walls. Why?”
“Good question, and I have no idea. Is it possible that we just missed them?”
“That would mean that none of them ever died on that specific pathway though,” Zev frowns. “It would be practically impossible for someone not to have fallen and died on that pathway, leaving their bones behind. It was overgrown, but it wasn’t that overgrown. We would have still seen them.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t seem likely,” I admit. My eyes still scanning the room. “There weren’t any on the road that I arrived on either, and it was quite a wide one, which means it was once used for a lot of traffic, so there should have been bodies there too.”
“Unless the attack was only on the castle?”
I frown, “This place is big enough that I would assume that whoever lived here was in charge. Why would they only attack the castle?”
Zev shrugs, “I have no idea.”
“It still wouldn’t really explain the lack of bodies outside the castle walls.
Surely, those within the castle wouldn’t have waited until the people attacking breached the gates to fight back?
That’s not a good strategy at all,” I reply.
“You want the fight as far away from what you’re protecting as possible. ”
“Maybe someone dealt with them? They could have cleared the dead that were outside the castle walls?”
“It’s possible, but why wouldn’t they clear them from inside the castle grounds?” I ask. “Unless they couldn’t get in? But that wouldn’t make sense either because we got in with no problems?”
“That’s true, but we’ve arrived possibly hundreds of years after the battle happened. Maybe the spells have dulled enough that we can now get in? Maybe they were too strong to get through when it all first happened?”
“But if that was the case, how did the attacking people get in? Unless they were either already in here, or the lockdown happened after the battle started or after everyone was dead?” I ask, with a frown. That doesn’t really feel right either.
Zev starts to nod in agreement and then stops, his eyes widening with a realisation, “What if there was something that was in this castle, or on the grounds that they were more afraid of? I mean, we don’t know who is on the right side here, we don’t know what happened.”
My instincts stir, “You have a point, but this doesn’t feel like an evil place. Usually, when you step into somewhere like this, when it’s been the base of control for someone truly evil, then you feel it. It seeps into the walls and permeates everything. I don’t feel that here.”
Zev shakes his head, “No, I don’t either. It’s frustrating that we may never know what really happened.”
“Yeah, it is. Hopefully, we can find something that will tell us what realm we’re in. If we can find out that, we should be able to look it up, or even ask Xerxes about it when we wake up,” I suggest.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea actually. Well, there isn’t anything in here that is going to help us do that, and the kid isn’t in here either, so we may as well check another room,” Zev suggests.
I nod, and we head back out of the room.
We go straight across the wide hallway and open another door.
This room is much like the first, and although it looks like people got up and left things in a hurry, there isn’t anything in here that will be able to tell us where we are or what really happened here.
We go into a few more rooms like that, and the more that we end up exploring, the more familiar the place starts to become.
It’s really fucking strange.
I know for a fact that I have never been here before, and although I have been in castles before, most supernatural realms are full of them, actually, the Earth Realm seems to have a few too, if I recall correctly. Hell, I lived in the cells under my father's one.
Despite that, I haven’t been in any that look like this, and even if I had, this feeling goes beyond just recognising it, it’s more than that, and I can’t for the life of me put my finger on why.
The familiarity hits an all-time high as we enter a smaller room that appears to be some kind of office.
“Ouch,” I say without meaning to as my hand lifts to my head. Trying to rub away the sudden pain there.
Zev appears in front of me immediately, “Are you okay? What happened?”
“I don’t know, I just got a sudden pain in my head as I looked around this room,” I reply honestly.
He frowns, “Maybe we should get out of here? It might be your magic trying to protect you from something.”
“Yeah, maybe. But this room is clearly an office of some kind. If we’re going to get answers anywhere, then they’re going to be in here.
I don’t want to leave when we’ve got a chance to find out what happened here,” I reply.
For some reason, it’s becoming increasingly important that I know what happened.
I think it’s probably because so many lives were lost, and there was so much suffering here.
Plus, there’s the mystery side of everything.
Nothing about this adds up, and I think if it were as simple and straightforward as it being an invasion and the aftermath of that, then I may not be as interested as I am now.
Don’t get me wrong, I would want to know what happened, but not as intensely as I currently do. At least I don’t think I would.
Zev studies me closely and opens his mouth to most likely insist that we leave anyway when the ghost kid pops up in front of us again, and makes me jump.
“Sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to make you jump,” the kid immediately apologises. “Please hurry though, they’ve been trapped for long enough.”
I nod, “Of course. Lead the way, but remember we can’t move through things like you can, and you need to go a little bit slower, or we can’t follow you.”
The kid nods, “Yes, miss, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Let’s go,” I reply.
He takes off, and Zev and I once again share a look.
“He’s not a memory then, he’s an actual ghost,” Zev says as we rush through the maze of hallways after him.
“But he’s coherent, and he’s obviously been here for a really long time. He’s not tried to hurt us,” I point out.
“Why would I hurt you?” He asks, glancing over his shoulder before he quickly turns back around and carries on running.
I again share a look with Zev. None of this makes sense, but I guess we just go with it for now and see what happens.
The problem is, if he does suddenly decide to go all vengeful and face chompy, I don’t know how to fight him.
He’s already dead, and he’s not supposed to exist, so I have no idea what I’m supposed to do or even what he’s capable of.
We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get to it and hope that it doesn’t actually become an issue.
As we follow him through the winding hallways, deeper and deeper into the castle, the lights flare to life, thanks to the magic of the castle and illuminate our way.
It’s not until he leads us through the servant’s quarters and down a set of wide stone steps that I start to get nervous.
Dungeons tend to be down in the bowels of castles, and I have a rather heavy dislike for them, for obvious reasons.
“Are you okay?” Zev asks me as we round a corner, and I’m faced with a line of barred cells, and I freeze.
The corridor of cells is long, and piles of bones sit in the cells closest to us, clearly having been abandoned and left to their fates when the castle was attacked. Water drips from somewhere, and the place is dark, only lit occasionally by the wall sconces that the castle has lit for us.
“Farren,” Zev asks gently but firmly, trying to get me to focus on him and not on our surroundings.
The kid has stopped and is looking back at us, his expression pleading with a slight hint of desperation. I know that it’s important that I see what he wants to show me, that’s the whole point of this dream after all.
I don’t think that he’s leading us into a trap, I mean, what would be the point? This is a dream. As far as I’m aware, it is possible to get trapped in a dream, but it is incredibly rare. Plus, I don’t get a bad feeling off him, despite the fact that he shouldn’t be possible.
Taking a deep breath, I nod and reply to Zev, “Yeah, I’m good.”
I’m grateful that Zev doesn’t question me and instead just nods. If he had, then I might have lost the small amount of courage that I’m managing to cling to.
We start to follow the kid further into the dungeon, and I deliberately make sure that I keep my eyes straight ahead and on him, not looking into any of the cells on either side of me.
The last thing I need right now is to have a panic attack.
The dungeon is a hell of a lot bigger than I initially thought.
Which, when I think about it, makes a lot of sense because of the sheer size of the place.
We follow the kid through twists and turns, down further into the castle, far deeper than I am really comfortable with, and the further down we go, the less put together the place becomes.
Whereas the first few layers of cells were made out of stone, this hallway has a lower ceiling and is made of hard-packed dirt in the hallways, and the cells are lined completely with the same black stone that the castle is made out of.
Although the cells are smaller, they seem to have been carved out of the rock itself, their walls rough.
These cells also have decomposing bodies of the previous occupants in them, but they don’t look quite like the piles of bones in the cells on the top floor, the ones that I actually looked in and didn’t avoid anyway.
These ones look like they’ve got a bit more to them.
They’ve still all been dead for a really long time, but I think they most likely survived longer than the ones on the higher levels of the dungeon.
I think that’s worse. So much worse. Their suffering was prolonged, although they were in a dungeon. I know better than most that those who are in cells aren’t necessarily guilty.
I force my thoughts away from that kind of thinking. I need to keep my focus on the kid and why he’s leading us down here. If I allow myself to think about anything else, then I’m most likely going to freak out about being down here.