Jonas Kane (Part V)
Having ended his life just about 12 years prior, Jonas Kane was not around to see again the one thing he dreamt of constantly, excitement in Travance…
Aubrey inherited Jonas’s fortune and while she had never found the time to locate much of it, there was enough in Travance to hold her over for as long as shed like. She stayed on and ran the Dragons Claw Inn up until the very end. When the heroes of old Travance flocked to the proper, she made them feel as welcome as she could. She would not join them, for she had no skills for battle. She was however part of the emergency plans to get the weak and injured to safety in the event of disaster.
The emergency plan was enacted within five minutes of the battle… From the porch of the Dragons Claw Inn she heard the screams from the battlefields and they were terrifying. Two younger adventurers came fleeing back towards the Inn. Just as they had passed the old Adventurers Guild building, shambling but fast moving figures grappled them to the ground and began biting down on them hard. Aubrey turned to the weak masses huddled in the inn. “We have to run!” she yelled. However just as the words left her lips, a figure leapt up and seized her, biting hard into her neck and pulling out her vocal cords. As the blood gushed out, she quickly began to lose consciousness.
As this was happening, she could hear something, or feel something rather… something perhaps invisible, something perhaps not there. It was as if something monstrous was watching her die, pacing and sputtering and waiting impatiently for her soul to leave her body. She could feel her bones contorting, and her right leg moving underneath her to prop herself up… and that would be the last thing she felt before leaving this world forever…
Winks Part 5
Oringard had never fallen.
Growing up, Lyra Sharpthorn, aging matriarch of the Sharpthorn family, had listened in wonder to her father’s stories of this city that was their home. Stories of the great spirit Orin, who in times of need would awaken and protect the city from overwhelming danger.
Hearing the screams and other unspeakable noises outside, those stories were hard to believe.
Lyra never thought she’d end up the de facto head of the family, though being named after her grandmother maybe she shouldn’t be so surprised. Until his death over ten years ago, she had started to think her father would be around forever. Even then, her older sister was the more organizationally minded of them, but Ada moved to the Proper to work with Baron Piper as one of his intelligence agents. Her older brother Gix wasn’t serious enough to lead the family, and her other two younger siblings had always looked up to her anyway, so it was a task Lyra took on with pride.
“Gramly, what’s going on?”
Blinking herself out of her reverie, Lyra looked down at the rest of the family, all gathered in the main room of their large home, where once again three generations of Sharpthorns lived. She turned to the one who spoke, and in her haze she couldn’t even recognize who it was. Is that one of my grandchildren? One of Ada’s? One of Green’s? The entire family had been pulled back as soon as they started hearing about the horrors that were encroaching not just on their city, but all over Travance, all over the world. Well, the entire family minus two. Ada stayed with the Baron, and as soon as they had gotten the message from Keladry that she was going to the Proper as well, Gix had gotten his old polearm down from the wall, fashioned in the same style as their Auntie Bryk’s, and left to go meet her. It didn’t matter that he, like the rest of the siblings, was closer to fifty years old than forty, he’d always been a fighter, and so off he went. Lyra wasn’t sure if she’d see him again.
Her younger brothers, Green and Twelve, were doing their best to help her, shushing the little ones and trying to get everyone settled. But they kept sending glances her way, expecting her to say something, to take charge. They had already boarded up all of the windows and barricaded the doors, with the original thought of just trying to ride out whatever was happening. But as the noise outside got worse and worse, Lyra was thinking it was time to use the secret passages underneath the house that her father had established to get everyone out of the city.
She steeled herself to get everyone’s attention, but at that moment there was a loud crash from upstairs, and another from the kitchen, and the foundation of the house rumbled. A groan echoed through the building, and then two dozen goblin voices cried out in alarm as the ceiling crashed down on them, bringing down most of the rest of the house in what seemed like an endless torrent of rubble and wreckage. Most of the voices were silenced instantly, and Lyra couldn’t even get her own scream out before she suddenly found herself on her back, pinned under heavy beams, her legs crushed and a long wooden plank stabbing through her chest.
Coughing blood, Lyra tried to see if anyone in her family had survived, but her fading vision couldn’t penetrate the wreckage. Slightly turning her head, however, she could see through what was left of the wall and watched helplessly as the hordes of dead surged through the city, wreaking havoc. Before she lost herself completely she had one final thought:
Oringard had never fallen.
Until today.