[Author's Note - Hello readers! Thank you for checking out my story; this is my first attempt at a multi-chapter series, and I'm hoping it will prove enjoyable. I'm hoping to publish a chapter once a month, or once every two months. Please feel free to leave comments/suggestions, I'd love to hear what people might like to see from a story of this nature. Please enjoy your read!]
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The roots of the Nazar forests were said to be watered with the blood of intruders. All in the theocracy of Ludovisse grew up hearing the stories of those forbidding woods, strewn as they were to form the natural border between the holy crownlands and their dark sibling states, the northern fiefdoms of Maejesgelt.
The Nazar was a place of malignant magicks, monstrosities both real and imagined, as well as a harbor to the constant threat of witchcraft. So potent and cunning were these forces that men would circumnavigate the wealds altogether in their travels, though it might cost them an entire week's delay, a small price to pay for safety.
There was but one road which wound through the Nazar and out to the other side, a gnarled and twisted cobble path; the Letterman Road. So named because, in times of great need, couriers could pass through the Nazar via this road to carry missives of great import, and to this day the road remained a last resort for those looking to pass between Ludovisse and Maejesgelt in the most timely manner.
Niall had never expected he would find himself at the cusp of this foreboding passage. The day was dark, rain carried on the wind, sharp in the air. The young squire could smell it from his seat atop his steed Alcyone, the visor to his helm lifted for his hazel eyes to affix on the wall of dark trees that laid ahead.
Alcyone's hooves shifted, her head tossing with a snort. "Shhh, shhh..." Niall could feel her anxiety, and it was shared; his gloved hand came forward, patting against her neck in a soothing fashion.
"We'll be through to the other side in only a day." He promised, both to himself and to his steed. "After that, I'll give you a whole bushel of the juiciest apples I can find. How does that sound, Alcyone?" The mare's head lifted, ears pricked up at the mention of her favorite treat. Granted, Niall's dulcet tener voice always had a knack for calming her, and the squire would smile and chuckle at her acute reaction.
"Attagirl. The sooner we're in, the sooner we're out." Grasping at the reins, he would give a nudge to Alcyone's side with his foot, and that would set her clopping on toward that wall of seemingly impenetrable darkness.
With his free hand Niall felt behind him, fingers momentarily brushing over his saddlebags, within which laid the object of his mission; an ornament entrusted to his care, to be returned to a lord in Maejesgelt with the utmost expediency. It was a pressing matter, and as such it was a chance for Niall to prove himself worthy of advancement! Competence and quickness in action would surely bring him under the review of the council of his order, the Five Suns, and with both a well-executed quest and his years of ardent service, he may at last be elevated from the rank of squire to journeyman knight.
Niall had struggled since his fifteenth year to earn his place amidst the Five Suns. Now a young man of nineteen, he yet remained a squire who had studied under a host of different knights to learn the ways of their shared order. Perhaps he should have been glad to have advanced beyond the rank of initiate in the first place, a feat many of his fellow applicants failed to achieve, and yet he still felt passed over time and time again by those he studied under. In horsemanship, shrewd diplomacy, knowledge of arms and study of the chivalric oaths, he excelled...if anything, it was his lackluster marks in melee, and other tests of combat aptitude, that hampered his advancements.
The rain came down hard. In sheets of cherry-sized droplets, punching through the scant canopy of the Nazar wood and battering onto Niall's hunched form, he and Alcyone trudged miserably along. The Letterman road was thankfully raised, allowing the storm's runoff to form rushing rivulets that wash out into the surrounding underbrush, though that merely negated one of many dangers they now faced on the road.
Niall had expected rain, but nothing like this, the heavy downpour feeling as if it might throw him from his saddle as he felt the water soaking through his gambeson, the chain shirt which he wore overtop doing nothing to staunch it. The forest was almost entirely dark, bathed on occasion in stark white flashes of lightning, and thunder cracking through the sky like the voices of the Gods, scorning his mission. As if navigating the Nazar wasn't trouble enough.
The young squire had the wherewithal to light his lantern before the rain started in earnest, though it's light did not reach far at all, and more than anything he felt it made him a beacon in these dour woods for any monstrosities that might be scouting in the midst of the rain. He was left with no option but to push forward. To stray from the road even by a metric of a hundred feet would mean potentially losing it. Shivering fiercely under all his armor, his hand would stray from the reins in brief moments to pat at Alcyone's neck again, especially as she became agitated with each rolling bout of thunder.
"Easy girl, easy..." He knew his voice didn't carry over the din of the storm, and a pang of guilt befell him, subjecting his mare to those awful conditions. That was before he heard the sharp sound of branches snapping just to his right rear, and his head whipped around.
Alcyone likewise heard it, and would snort with stress as she drew to a halt. Niall's hand raised the lantern aloft, the boy squinting into the forlorn darkness behind them, only to see...eyes.
Like two motes of azure flame, flittering in the darkness amidst the glistening scaly body of a beast. It would have been easy to mistake for a giant snake, had it not been for the draconic head and the two forelegs on its serpentine body, knotted with muscle as they needed to be to pull its form through the arboreal heights. Its skull was decorated with segmented plates and horns, with a set of awful jaws that dripped with both rainwater and a toxic black venom. Lurching from the treetops, it was a predator lying in wait, its long body curling downward from the canopy as it was caught no less than ten feet from Niall's position, moments before a strike.
"HYAH! Alcyone, on!" Fear struck him like an arrow, and the looming lindwyrm knew its ambush was compromised. A sharp whiny from Alcyone broke through the air at the same moment as a bolt of lightning split the darkness from above, fully illuminating the form of the lunging draconid, missing Niall with it's gaping maw by only a foot as his now-panicked mare bolts forward.
Niall had never seen such a beast! Even so, he had the good sense to figure it would not give up the chase even after it's ambush had failed, and as Alcyone thundered down the road he would need only to glance behind them to see that slithering predator at their rear, it's body passing along the wet cobbles like a fish surging up a stream. Alcyone would have easily outran it had they been in preferable conditions, but the road was crooked, the rain causing her hooves to slip and lose traction on the stones, all culminating to make this sudden route a true nightmare.
Branches hanging from the edges of the pathway seemed to strike out at Niall, clashing off his visored helm and whipping against his body while Alcyone veers left and right, always narrowly avoiding throwing the both of them headlong into the dense and waterlogged underbrush. The lindwyrm snapped at the horse's heels, gaining ground in moments of spiraling confusion and losing it in the midst of any relative straightaway, though Niall's luck wouldn't hold out.
He had only caught a glimpse of the dense tree limb that hung right over the path in front of them, bowed down as if just to catch his head, which it promptly did.
'WHACK!' The ground swept up and smashed against him. Tumbling from the path, and right into a chute of muddy runoff; there was no orienting himself in the harrowing fall, grunting and hissing as he's tossed down the passage and well away from the road. The lantern had flung from his hand, smashing against a rock during the descent with the oil inside briefly flaring in a conflagration that shimmered off the broken glass, though it was all swept into the wet darkness again as eventually he spilled out into a low clearing.
Ringing split his mind, an ice pick stabbing murderously at any coherent thought. Thudding at his temples like a hammer rapping to an anvil, numb hands lifting to feel shakily at the way his helm had been marred by the impact. Had he not been wearing it, his skull surely would've been caved; now the visor was bent askew, caked with muck and twigs. So much that he almost felt it might suffocate him, and so he grasped desperately at it and soon tossed it aside, revealing his face to the torrent.
The squire's chestnut hair remained tucked beneath a gambeson coif, his mouth agape with heaving breaths as he floundered to pull himself up to his feet, muscles screaming in protest.
"Alcyone! ACLYONE!" Far off, very far off, he could hear a whiny. Even as his legs felt like they might give out at a moment's notice, painful tingling running from his spine to all his extremities, he would stumble toward the mud chute from which he'd been spat out and look desperately for a way back up. Scramble as he did, no foot or handholds would present themselves.
In one fell swoop, the Nazar had swallowed him up.
"No, no no--Gods, no..." Niall's thoughts trampled over one another in blind panic. Would the serpent-dragon pursue Alcyone? Drive her into the thicket, so that it might rend her belly open? He worried more for her fate than he did the fate of her precious cargo, his rations, and all the other means of his survival that had been carried off with her saddle.
