Defenders of Ulthuan by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781844165582
Publisher: BL Publishing
Published: 2011-08-30T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Landing

Waves lashed the jagged, rocky coastline, relentless walls of cold black water funnelling between the broken islands that lay west of Ulthuan to hammer the sunken ruins of Tor Anroc. What had once been a glorious fastness was now little more than skeletal remains, its high towers smashed and its walls sundered by an ancient, but still bitterly remembered act of spite.

The lord of Tor Anroc and his sons were gone, lost to history and the remembrances of ancient taletellers. None now spoke of them, for their destiny was too heartbreaking to hear without one’s thoughts becoming moribund.

Only broken stubs of lost towers remained, jutting from the storm-lashed waters like the fingers of a drowning victim. With each passing year more succumbed to the erosion of the sea and collapsed below the waves.

A sullen grey sky pressed down on the tower, the day almost ended and the sun descending to the far horizon as a chill disc of white. Ghostly winds blew over the watchtower of Tor Anroc, a tall spire of dark rock raised upon the ruins of the sunken city.

From the tallest peak of the watchtower, Coriael Swiftheart looked over the bleak greyness of the western horizon. A shimmering, misty haze hung over the ocean, but such sights were not uncommon around Ulthuan and did not trouble him.

His armour caught the last of the sunlight and he shivered as another gust of biting wind whipped around the heights of the tower. Coriael listened to the noise of the ocean, imagining the sound to be the forgotten roars of dragons, and he recalled tales of ages past told to him by his grandsire by the fireside of their home in Tiranoc.

He had thrilled to stories of skies thick with the sinuous bodies of dragons as the magnificent warriors of Caledor had ridden them into battle. But as the volcanic fire of the mountains had cooled and the magic of the world lessened, the dragons slumbered for longer and longer, no longer rising at the clarion call of the Dragonhorn.

Coriael wished he could have lived in those days of splendour, when Tor Anroc still stood proud and strong. He longed for the heady glory of fighting in the glittering host of Ulthuan against its many enemies instead of watching the flat emptiness of the western ocean.

He gripped the haft of his spear, standing a little taller as he imagined himself standing proud in a line of spearmen, their courage unbending and their blades gleaming in the sunlight. Such was not the case, however, and though he understood the necessity of what he and his fellow warriors did here, it did not sit well with his hunger for glory to be stranded on this desolate and forgotten island as a mere watchman.

Far below him, a hundred other warriors of Tiranoc garrisoned the watchtower, guardians of the magical beacon that would give warning of any hostile force approaching the isle of the Asur. In addition to these citizen soldiers, a group

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.