Battle Mage 6 by Dante King

Author:Dante King [King, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0BCXFJMN4
Published: 2022-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The villagers put away their weapons, picked up the empty coffin, and resumed their mournful procession, with Mayor Potyr leading the way. We waited until the last of the mourning elves had walked past us, then we followed them along the bumpy wagon track that led through the fields and into the forest.

“Do you think we can trust these outlaws?” Shayna asked.

“I’ll see if I recognize any of them,” Vanessa said. “My father had a few close friends who were high up in Vyrelon’s military. Perhaps Potyr’s cousin was one of them. But anyway, I do think we can trust them, considering what we know about what’s been happening in Vyrelon, with the traitor mages and their influence here.”

“I’d be inclined to agree,” I said. “It sounds like these people were purged from the court because they refused to go along with what was happening—the corruption of King Aeldryn and his court by the forces of Darkness. It’s probably far wiser to trust them than it would be to trust anyone currently in the Keep of the Four Winds.”

After an hour of walking through the dark forest, the woods gave way to the edges of a vast swamp. The croaking of millions of frogs was so loud it made speaking almost impossible. Foul gasses belched up from the depths of the swamp.

The swamp was far from dark, unlike the shadowy forest that bordered it. Instead, the murky water and the lumps of muddy turf that formed a crisscrossing maze of paths through the swamp were lit up in dim, eerie tones of blue, green, pink, and violet. These lights shone from clusters of bioluminescent fungi and other glowing plants that grew in clusters from the black, stagnant water.

At the water’s edge, the villagers cast the coffin into the water. Sluggish currents beneath the deceptively still surface slowly and gradually pulled the sad vessel into the center of the swamp.

We stood in respectful silence, watching the coffin float further and further away until vanished into the shreds of color-infused fog that hung in low clumps over the swamp.

After the villagers had completed the funerary ceremony, they dispersed. Only Potyr remained, and he came over to us.

“Follow me closely, mages,” he said. “It is very easy to get lost in the Swamps of the Dead if you do not know the way, and those who get lost in this place… well, they tend to stay lost, if you know what I mean. There are things here that not even your magic can save you from. Huge alligators dwell in these waters, and they can swallow a man whole before he even realizes the beast has lunged out of the black depths at him. Then there are the wyrms, frightful serpents big enough to feed on the giant alligators. For such creatures, you would be a mere snack, devoured in the blink of an eye. And then there are the ghosts of the lost dead, who hunger always for companions in their eternal misery…”

“The ghosts of the lost dead?” I asked.

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