The Vanishing Castle: An Epik Fantasy Short (The Great Ranger Book 2) by William Tyler Davis

Author:William Tyler Davis [Davis, William Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-10T23:00:00+00:00

Sleep was like an insolent child, only allowing Coe but a few winks before startling him awake in the dead of night. He lay there on the all too comfortable mattress, thinking, wondering whether Rotrick could still see the castle’s outline or its lighted candles. Or perhaps, the castle had vanished again, back into whatever plane of existence it hid.

Coe also wondered if he had done the right thing. Should he have allowed Rotrick to come along with them? Should he have stayed camped alone instead? The trek the next morning would be difficult for Rotrick to follow. Coe would not leave any obvious, whether visible or not, trail. No, the Great Ranger was too good for that.

These were the thoughts that plagued Coe’s stirring mind well into the morning hours. He had a hate for questions without answers. And hindsight is just another word for an unanswerable question.

Breakfast was waiting for them on the same table the next morning, catered by the enchantment. The Great Ranger waited anxiously for them to finish like a leopard ready to pounce on its prey. The dwarves packed every leftover morsel of food into their packs, and the company was off.

Following this false king they knew to be the Great Ranger, the party traipsed down the other side of the mountain from which they had come, approaching a pass between the next two peaks in the range. As it was, this chain of mountains wasn't on many maps. They weren’t named, not really. Only the small villages and the gypsies and other nomads that roamed this land had names for them. They all were different. The closest thing that Coe had ever heard that described the mountains, and the name he liked the best, was the Hazel Tops. They weren’t so much a barrier as they were an indication to go another way. Nothing but desert lay beyond them to the ocean on the other side of the continent.

The Great Ranger didn’t let up for some time, so Coe had to be the one to call for rest along the way, still playing his part as the weathered old man.

“So, how did a man of meager means come to employ an elf?” the Great Ranger finally asked. He took a swig of something, water or wine, from his skin.

Coe sat upon a rock. It was more uncomfortable to rest on this rock than it was to walk, the jagged hard edges of stone dug into his backside. He wasn’t sure if it was the thin frame of the old man that was to blame, but he cursed the halfling all the same.

“That is an easy answer,” he said. “Wellum was on his own way to your castle. He, too, had heard this legend of the gold. He offered his services free of charge, assuming we’d help him to find these riches. I hope that is still the case.”

“I’m not sure I would have taken this man’s bargain,” Wellspoken said softly, doing his best now to mimic the proper voice of an elf.

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