The Warrior's Bane (War for the Quarterstar Shards Book 1) Read online

  The Warrior’s Bane

  War for the Quarterstar Shards

  Book One

  David L. McDaniel

  © Copyright David L. McDaniel 2018

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2018 by David L. McDaniel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-114-7

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for checking out one of our Fantasy.

  If you enjoy this book, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  War of the Staffs by Steve Stephenson & K.M. Tedrick

  “Offers an enjoyable romp for high fantasy fans.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

  To my wife and family for putting up with my occasional disconnect from the real world. I thank my children for reminding me that the story is what is most important. I thank my mom for reading to me at a young age, catching my creativity on fire, and for teaching me that no story is good unless your villain is an active part of the story: The better the villain, the better the story. I miss you mom and I hope Fyaa is a witch you would’ve loved. For Eve Hall for believing in me.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Read

  Dedication

  Map

  The Weathered Old Man

  Markenhirth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  BRW Info

  The Weathered Old Man

  The weathered old man picked his way out from amongst the scattered rubble he called his home. The rocky ruins were the remnants of what had once been a prestigious school that had produced great mages in the conflicting effort to preserve magic throughout the Known Lands. The realm, at its highest point, had contained two distinct types of magic that worked opposite each other, but a well talented sorcerer from this school could learn how to work both entities in unison. Those who did so, even in their effort to bring peace to the realm, actually brought about its destruction.

  The sun had only just crested above the low-lying hills of the small island where the old man lived. He picked his way amongst the stones that lay on top of each other, crumbled mortared stones that once had served as the front gate and the battlements of the fortress-like school. Even though his vision was poor, he knew his way around the area for nothing had changed in decades.

  Five children -- three girls and two boys -- waited eagerly as he slowly made his way towards them. They watched him quietly and with as much patience as their anticipation would allow. When he reached them, they all met him with excitement and called him not by his name, but greeted him as The Great Old Man instead.

  “Tell us about the Kronn Man!” they demanded in unison.

  The old man smiled in spite of himself. He loved seeing the children. He was happy to see that the girls were just as interested in the tales as the young, energetic and adventure loving boys. They visited him often, and he would only come out of his hermit-like hovel amongst the ruins for the children. By listening to his tales, the children could carry on and bring hope to the land, by not repeating what their unfortunate predecessors had done.

  The old man found that the adults there only came to bring insults and fear. They wanted him gone. They did not trust nor understand the old hermit with their children, even though he had never harmed a single child. He had never harmed the adults either, for that matter, but he did use what little magic within him to scare away the adults when they came bringing their crude weapons, taunts and fear.

  “Oh wise one!” one of the boys shouted in reverence. Of all the children, only this boy had been at every meeting. The old man suspected that this boy was in charge of deciding who would be allowed to see him and who would not.

  “I have a new group to hear your tale,” the boy announced as he bowed in reverence. “Please tell us of the Kronn Man.”

  “You know the rules then,” the old man said as he stooped to take a seat on his rock. The boy heard his aged bones creak, and the old man grimaced in pain as he sat.

  “We must recite the seasons of old,” the boy announced.

  The boy looked at his four companions and nodded and they then began to recite in unison an ancient poem.

  “The age of the Quarterstar contained five seasons:

  Trilea, the season of growth: where new life begins aplenty.

  Flamespan, the season of heat: time of festivals and life.

  Doreal, the season of harvest: time to reap the season’s bounty.

  Ethinar, the season of frost: if one is not prepared, it is a time of strife.

  And the Markenhirth Grimshaed, the necessary season of frozen darkness.”

  When they said the word darkness, they all made deep grim sounds with their voices.

  “Then it begins anew by bringing in the New Trilea: where all are full of happiness,” they finished.

  “Very good!” the old man said as he clapped, and he began to weave his tale with vivid animation as he spoke by moving his arms about as if he were not an old man, but a young man in his twenties.

  With a voice no longer frail, but strong and full of clarity, he began to tell his tale:

  “Dark storm clouds tumbled over each other as they raced across the sky and caused the wind to sway wildly the leafless and dormant Sippling Tree. The small willowy tree began to whip its skinny branches like spidery appendages making a web as the power held within its roots harnessed the magic of the realm and therefore was th
e magical center of Wrae-Kronn.

  It controlled the flow of magic as it sat alone atop a large snowy cluster of granite rocks. The tree looked as if it had been embedded into the rock purposely without any soil, to make it impossible for it to survive, let alone grow. Yet somehow, survive and grow it did. In fact, it thrived as it protruded from the frozen mountain face and reached up into a lightless dark sky.

  This tree grew in spite of its natural conditions and it controlled the seasons of the world through its magical roots that were like living veins within the rock below it. At this place, below the tree, a river began its journey. This river, for most of the year, began its journey here and, churning with white foamy water, rushed out from the lowest point of the rocky mountain face. However, for fourteen days during the Markenhirth Grimshaed, the river froze over and remained frozen and crystalline.

  The tree had grown here since the beginning of time. Some say a man sprouted from this tree, a soulless man, not only looking for his soul, but for his very being. This same man, some believed to be known as the god of the humans while others believed him actually to be Kronn himself, the keeper of the realm. However, if he truly were Kronn, how could someone so powerful lose his being, for wouldn’t he be more powerful than the elven gods who created this world?

  He had wandered the realm like an empty soul. He wandered the realm regardless of the season, naked and hairless, a man with pale white skin and dark eyes searching for something, something no one else ever knew, but could only guess.

  He wandered the land for many years. He even returned to the tree and tried many times to destroy it, but to no avail. No one knew why he tried to destroy the tree. It was a crucial element to the five seasons of the land. Many believed that he tried to do so because without the tree, the realm would die. Others believed that he himself was the reason for the fifth season, the Markenhirth Grimshaed, the season that only lasted fourteen days, fourteen days when all of Wrae-Kronn became a frozen wasteland that sent the tree into hibernation.

  Then one day, many, many years ago, the man merely disappeared and left the land and the tree to do what came naturally.

  For many, many years thereafter, all the seasons completed their cycle naturally, but one day the Sippling Tree went into its hibernation period and did not awake for an extended time, fifteen days, not fourteen. The wraith-like agents of the frozen underworld, called grimshadows, roamed the land during that time and took advantage of the weakness of the Sippling Tree. They celebrated their brief freedom by ravaging the land and taking back what was once theirs.

  Twenty-nine days after the Sippling Tree went into its dormant stage, it came back to life and summoned the grimshadows to return to their frozen wasteland. When all the grimshadows had returned, the Sippling Tree closed the opening at the Markenhirth Mountains and allowed the warming temperatures of Wrae-Kronn to intercede with their natural processes.

  However, the damage to the magic within the land had already been done on that fifteenth day.”

  The old man paused from his tale to make sure his audience was still with him. The four new children looked upon him with wide eyes of wonder, not only because of the words of the tale, but from the manner in which he told it. The fifth boy, whom had heard the tale many times, only smiled at his peers, as if to say, “Did I not tell you it would be more than what you expected?”

  Satisfied with the reaction of his audience, the old man began anew.

  “The Markenhirth extension caused a few events to materialize which were not only prophesied, but which all feared would soon come to pass and show themselves as a signature of troubled times to come. The first and most notable of these events was the temporary opening of the Aaestfallia Keep, as the humans had renamed the Time Keep, a stone tower that when in the hands of the elves was a magical gate they used as a door to other worlds or other ages within the Known Lands.”

  The old man stopped talking again. He looked to the sky for a time and the children looked to the sky as well, but saw nothing. He looked out of the corner of his eye, waited for the right moment, and then looked directly at them again.

  “You will learn about all of that in good time,” the old man said baiting them, “but first you must learn about how the realm was invaded and terrorized by a wicked fire loving sorceress.”

  The children gasped, “A Fire Sorceress?”

  And he knew they were hooked…

  Markenhirth

  Year 0889 Ten days into the Markenhirth extension

  A single, thirty-foot stone tower stood in front of a massive snowdrift amidst the icy and frozen landscape. Massive pine trees stood around it as if they were frozen giants with long white cloaks guarding it from escaping its domain. The limbs of the pine trees wilted from the heavy snow and weighed them down, making them look as if they were beginning to tire from their age-old sentry duty.

  A large ice wall surrounded the outer perimeter of the tower and exposed it in the center of ice-hardened rocky ground that was completely void of snow. The frozen rocky dirt remained exposed as if it had been constantly swept clean to keep any snow from collecting there. A simple outer stone wall also surrounded the tower to keep others from accidentally wandering too close.

  For years men guarded the tower, but they did nothing to keep the snow off it. No snow ever touched it. Somehow the wind always blew the snow in different directions, never touching the tower or the soil around it. Plain and simple, without windows or battlements, the tower was made only of dark gray stones stacked one on top of one another and rising as a circular structure that reached thirty feet in height.

  The elves called it the Aaestfallia Keep, but the humans just called it the Time Keep because it was nothing more than a portal with unknown magical properties. The only entrance was a solid stone door that had been sealed shut by the elves many years earlier when the they left their northern homeland to build a new kingdom on the western reaches of Wrae-Kronn at Lake Quarterstar. The elves had removed the Triestones, the magical element of the Keep, rendering it a dormant shell of a magical portal. The humans made a promise to the elves to keep it closed in order to protect them from the possibility of the magic somehow activating without the Triestones.

  It seemed conceivable to them that the magic could be reactivated by an outside source.

  ***

  “Garge? Where are you, Garge?” Detch called out as he walked noisily towards the Time Keep where his fellow warrior was standing guard.

  As Garge heard his relief approaching, his feet crunching on the frozen snow, he looked up and saw Detch’s head was slumped down to keep his hood over his face in an attempt to keep the snow flurries from stinging his skin. He looked up into the crisp frozen air once, only to verify his location, and saw Garge standing in front of the tower waiting eagerly to be relieved of his position.

  “I hate guarding this ancient artifact,” Garge said to Detch when he was close enough to speak. Detch shook his head.

  “At least we’re not fighting off the dragons like they are down in the Moonshaed Kingdom. For that matter if the Markenhirth Grimshaed doesn’t go away soon, the grimshadows are all going to get us any way, so I guess we might as well be fighting the dragons. Either way we die fighting.”

  Garge’s eyes widened a little, but then he closed them tightly for the cold air had burned his eyes as he did so.

  “Bring them on!” he said. “That is the kind of excitement I want. Dragons, grimshadows, I don’t care. I want to live as a warrior and die like a hero!”

  Detch offered the ceremonious salute, but Garge was too cold for drill and ceremony. He simply gave Detch a half hearted smile before he headed back to the guard shack to report to the Guard of Arms, warm up in his bunk and then wait for his turn for guard duty again.
It gave him great relief that he had three more shifts of four hours apiece before he would be required again to stand in the cold and hope no Grimshadows would confronted him during his guard duty.

  Garge approached a small stone building that extended out of the ground. The small door on top was only a wooden latch that allowed entrance to their guard shack, a tower that descended underground below it.

  He knocked on the small wooden door and waited only a few seconds to hear a voice from inside.

  “Who knocks?”

  “Private Garge,” Garge said in an impatient, but professional tone, before he gave the password. “Broken Axe.”

  “Enter,” the voice said from behind the door.

  Garge bent down, opened the door, and squatted without touching his knees to the ice hardened ground. He turned around and backed his way inside to climb down the wooden rope to the center of the room. The room was only a small circle, big enough for two people to sit comfortably, but Sergeant Tremm sat at the far end of the room at the table next to the fire. A massive iron door loomed ominously next to Sergeant Tremm’s desk. It would only be used in case of an attack, or in an emergency, when all of the warriors would exit through that it and go up a steep flight of stairs to defend their tower. All of Tremm’s clothes and belongings cluttered the area, including his weapon and his shield, which hung on the iron door. Garge had to walk around everything and be careful not to step on anything in order to reach the trap door at the center of the room.

  “Welcome back, Garge,” Sergeant Tremm said pleasantly.

  “Thanks. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  Sergeant Tremm watched Garge climb down into the lower room where he and his three other guard mates slept. He would give Garge a few minutes to get himself settled in and then he would go down there, make a check on the fire and see that Garge had secured all of his weapons and personal belongings. If he caught one soldier without their sword tucked neatly in their scabbard by their side, they would all have hell to pay. He liked being kind to his men, but he did not tolerate sloppiness.