The Bard of Faith Part 7

Ariana had to wonder if the name Ghost Stones was given to the town before or after its death but either way it was a fitting name. They stood on the small hill overlooking the half crashed wooden wall around the small blacken buildings. The wall was covered in magical ruins back before the war keeping the town safe from foes, but once the ants came, it was a calling card for them to come to eat everyone living behind the walls. The magic of the ruins begged the Arcane ants to come for the squirrels inside it. They didn’t have a chance.

                “Everyone was lost in the town,” Raven told them.

                “Wasn’t there a Druid protecting the town?” Lacey asked.

                “From what I recalled,” Raven said, “yes there was, but during that time of the war we didn’t understand why the ants were here.”

                “He used magic?” Ariana asked.

                “Powerful magic,” Raven said with a cold nod.

                “By the Angels,” Lacey said, “that must have made everything so much worse.”

                “It did.”

                “I would say,” Ariana added in staring at the walls and the burnt-out buildings, “no one lived.”

                “We can’t stand here all night looking at the place,” Raven said, “or get this over with.”

                “I vote staring at it some more,” Ariana said, but Raven had already moved his war buck down the path followed by the Bard. Ariana watched them for a moment unsure she wanted to join them. The fear beating in her chest was making it hard to give the order to the Royal Doe to pursue them, but fear was something to be overcome. She had faced it before on many quests to steal items. In fact, she faced it every time she went to steal anything from someone. She could and did overcome her fear but why was this time different?

                Because the fear of keeping her from moving was unnatural, it was something else. It was a dark place in the world.

                She made the doe or herself ride up with her friends to the gates of the dead town, but the mounts stopped dead in their tracks. The animals wouldn’t dare pass through the horrors of the gates. The deeds of the dead still linger in the ground making it rotten of all life. They had to tie their mounts to the trees outside and go on foot.

                All three of them stood under the gates staring down the main road of the town seeing the bones of the dead and an eerie fog rolled over the earth. The fog moved around like ants beckoning them to meet their ends. There were no eyes in the ghostly smoke but if it had it would have stared right through them all straight to their souls.

                The foul acts committed here during the war was still hung in the air.

                “Where do we start?” Raven asked not moving.

                “I don’t know,” Lacey said.

                “What?” Ariana asked with both of them looking down at her. She stood between them almost using them as shields.

                “I don’t know,” she said again but more apologetic this time. “All I know is something is keeping the souls bounded here.”

                “Something?” Raven asked.

                “And we have no idea what,” Ariana said.

                “If the souls are bounded here for their deaths,” Lacey said, “then it must be within an object. If we find the object and destroy it should free them.”

                “How do you know this?” Raven asked.

                “How are you sure it’s going to work?” Ariana question instead.

                “I am a Bard,” she told Raven, “and ghost stories are one of my favorite things.” She turned to the thief and said, “I don’t know, but we have nothing else to try.”

                “We could run screaming like little children,” Ariana said trying to smile down at her.

                “We should find the Druid’s home,” Raven said. “We can start there to see if there is anything of use.”

                “Okay,” The Bard agreed, but no one was taking the first stepped for them to enter the place. All of them were praying to the AllFather would send an angel to watch over them, but even then, they didn’t seem to want to test their faith.

                To Ariana’s shock, she was the first one to walk forward into the town. The other two quickly followed but they took their time walking up behind her. They didn’t want to head into the fog, the welcome sea of a ghostly dead. Old stories ran in their minds about demons in the fog, but the low-level smoke fell at their fear and dashed for them like a Dragon launching to eat a squirrel.

                It whirled at their boots hissing at the leather but never reaching up for them. It stayed below covering the ground and hiding the bones.

                Ariana felt the breaking of bones under her boots, bones of the dead so long forgotten their last remaining part of themselves on this world were brittle and rotten. Every time the breaking sound rushed up from the fog, they all winced from the sound. It was hard to hear. It was even harder to cause.

                “Head for the Lord’s house,” Raven said nodding at the house at the end of the road. “It should have a map of the town.”

                There was no joke to be said from Ariana if she opened her mouth; all she would do was scream from everything around her. The house wasn’t too far the gates then again nowhere was too far from the gates and yet, with the fog, it might have been across the whole of Realm for them. They took their time to get closer to the house keeping their eyes on everything hidden in the dark places.

                They felt eyes on them, watching them, and studying them.

                A screamed rung from somewhere in the town. Was it close? It sounded like it was. Was it far off? It sounded like it was.

                And then Ariana stopped dead in her tracks watching a ghostly form run through the fog being chased by something unseen. The squirrel cried out moments before she was brought to the ground. Once the body of the ghost hit the fog, it was gone.

                The thief looked back to her friends to see the same thing happening all around them. The dead were reliving their deaths, over and over.

                “Keep moving,” Raven said, but the small child standing in front of them wouldn’t let them move. He was looking up at them with tears still running down his cheeks and dropping off into the fog adding to sea.

“He made us pay with our souls. He said he would keep us safe, but he failed,” was all the child said before the Arcane ants of the past took him from the world.

Author's Note

I’ll try to make this short for the both of us, but I feel, I need to add a little context to my stories on here. All the stories I post on this website are what I call “break stories.” They are either stories I go to when I get stuck in long from novel or stories, I write to explore a world. So, what does this mean? It means I enjoy these stories, but I don’t put everything into them. So, why am I posting them? A fair question and the reason I’m posting my stories on this website is to have fun, to show you my growth but most of all to give you a little taste of the worlds I work in. What does this mean for you? It means you can judge the work as you wish and by all means help me with plot, characters, and building the world, but I ask you to ignore grammar problems as best as you can and the style in which these stories are written. My page on here is my sketchbook and you guys get to see all the rough, nasty parts of my writing.