Witches Be Crazy, page 16
“Nobeard was right.” He uttered. “You are all literally nothing.”
The golden chalice in his hand suddenly passed through his fingers as if he had turned into a ghost. Some of the nymphs leaped from their seats attempting to reason with him while others tried to appeal to the same subconscious desires that built the entire fabricated scenario.
“Foolish Blacksmith, you’re throwing away the only opportunity you’ll ever have for happiness.” A pompous and familiar voice taunted from behind him.
Dungar turned to see the figure of Rainchild standing with his arms casually behind him, the man’s mouth twisted into its usual self-important smirk. He reached out for the man’s neck, but his hands passed right through Rainchild’s body in a similar manner as the chalice.
“He’s right, you know.” The squeaky voice of Mayor Walph Dooble called out from Dungar’s left. “You always were a black sheep, Mr. Loloth. Why would you do away with the only place that would take you?”
Suddenly he was surrounded by all of his old neighbors from his home all gazing upon him with looks of disdain, contempt, and pity.
“You should have stayed there.” One of them called out.
“We don’t want you back.” Another declared.
Dungar couldn’t take it anymore. He spun around and made a dash for the nearest passageway, but stopped short when he found the quivering figure of Jitters blocking his only exit. The frail old man slowly raised his shaky head and stared into Dungar’s vibrant blue eyes with his own grey lifeless ones.
“I was your only friend, Dungar, and you were mine. How could you leave me to die all alone in this village?” He besought in a voice every bit as weak and frail as the body it came from. The cane fell from his hands as he collapsed to his knees. “Now you are every bit as alone as me when I lay on my deathbed.”
Dungar could only watch helplessly as his oldest friend breathed his last before collapsing at his feet.
“Shame, we could have used him at the new arena.” Herrow’s voice snidely mused from somewhere nearby. She and Dritungo were the next figures to show up to torment him. She folded her arms complacently as she unsympathetically loomed over Dungar as he knelt by the body of his friend.
“Well maybe not.” She continued. “It makes for a better show if the contestants at least run around and scream a little before dying, this pathetic fool here probably would have just had a heart attack. Boring.”
“I destroyed your arena.” Dungar reminded her. “And you with it.”
“Oh is that what you think?” Herrow laughed before raising an eyebrow. “That was indeed quite a show you put on, and it set me back quite a bit in my business endeavors. But you didn’t actually see my body, did you?”
Dungar clenched his teeth and fists as he rose to his feet and glared at her.
“Yes yes, you’re very scary.” Herrow mused in a bored voice. “You can’t exactly assault a figment of your imagination though. As for my arena, we can always rebuild bigger and better than ever. It’s quite a lucrative business, you know. I certainly have the funds to do it.”
Dungar couldn’t listen to another second of this. He knew that none of them were real, that they were just manifestations conjured by the tree to torment him. But whether or not it was the actual person standing there saying these things to him didn’t mean what they were saying wasn’t true.
His own home never really was a home to him, it was simply a residence. He knew he never fit in with the townsfolk, but until now it had never really hit home the way it currently did. Nor had it occurred to him that in all likelihood he was never going to see his friend Jitters again. Even his triumph at the arena was ultimately little more than a minor setback for a much larger issue.
On the other hand, this was probably exactly what he was supposed to be thinking. All these manifestations were meant to mess with his head. They were conjured with the express intention of making him doubt his place in the world and drive him insane. This realization brought him to the conclusion that, completely irrespective of the validity of anything they had to say, he was not in a proper state to confront these issues. The only issue that needed confronting at this point in time was getting out of this bloody tree.
He took off down the nearest passageway, not stopping for any of the new figures that would appear around him. He didn’t know where he was going; he just knew he couldn’t stay in place. As he rounded another corner, he saw a figure up ahead facing away from him.
“Hey!” Dungar called out as he headed towards them. “Who is that?”
As Dungar got to within a few paces of it, the figure turned around and revealed itself to be none other than Sir Pent.
Dungar groaned when he saw who it was. “Another one of you, eh?” He grumbled.
Sir Pent didn’t say a word when he turned to Dungar. He just smiled then balled up one of his gauntlets and cracked him square in the face.
Dungar recoiled, stumbling backwards several steps before falling onto his back. As he clutched his nose, he looked up to see Sir Pent looming over him. The knight wore the same armor as he did in the desert; except it was now encrusted in filth and bore a massive dent right in the center of the chest plate. Eerily, he gazed down at Dungar with a similar set of glowing green eyes as those of the nymphs.
“No, Mister Loloth.” Pent stated in a calm, monotone voice. “Unfortunately for you, I am very much real.”
SIXTEEN
Never Wound a Snake; Kill it.
If it weren’t for his throbbing and bloody nose, Dungar would never believe that it was the real Sir Pent looming over him. Yet there he was, plain as day and solid as ever. He appeared to be in perfect health too, despite the massive impact he received when struck by the snake. Looks like Sir Lee may have been right after all. At least about the man’s resilience anyway, his parentage was still indeterminable.
The only part about him that was different was his eyes; they were no longer the cold, dark eyes that Dungar remembered, but rather bright, green, and ethereal looking. Clearly there was some more of the tree magic present here, but it still didn’t explain why the man was suddenly able to touch him. Physical feedback from his hallucinations seemed to have ceased once he became privy to them, so the only remaining explanation would be that this was somehow the real Sir Pent.
“How in the blazes are you alive?!” Dungar demanded as he got to his feet.
“When the snake hit me, it was with so much force that I did not land until I reached Lake Deeplu.” Sir Pent explained as he removed his gauntlets. “I managed to stay alive long enough to wash up on the shore of this island where I was healed by the tree. In return I vowed to protect it for as long as it would sustain me. It also promised me that one day it would deliver you to me, and now it appears that day has finally come!”
As he finished speaking, Pent grabbed each side of the collar of his armor and proceeded tear it in half. A series of metallic grinding and screeching could be heard as the folded metal futilely resisted being ripped apart by the knight’s impossibly powerful arms. After he had wrenched the armor from his body, the knight dropped it to the ground where it made a loud crash before he calmly walked towards Dungar.
“Oh that’s just not even fair.” The blacksmith sighed.
Effortlessly, Pent picked Dungar off the ground by his clothes and hurled him through the wall of the passageway they stood in. He landed in a crumpled heap covered with bark in a grassy meadow on the other side of the wall. Groaning, he slowly hauled himself to his hands and knees and looked around.
If he didn’t know better, Dungar would have never believed he was currently inside of a large tree. He could see no ceiling, above him appeared to be just an overcast sky partially obscured by the hundreds of branches from the forest of trees that surrounded him. He looked back to where he came from. He saw no wooden wall, just trees as far as his eye could see, trees and the angry looking visage of the former knight walking briskly towards him.
Before Dungar could react, Pent reared a leg back and delivered a brutal kick right into Dungar’s waist. The force from the blow was substantial enough to lift his entire body from the ground briefly before gravity took hold of him once more and dropped him back down onto his back. Between gasps for air, Dungar gritted his teeth and rolled out of the way before he received another. Painstakingly, he hauled himself to his feet just as Sir Pent got to within his reach. With a roar, he straightened up and drove a right hook right into the temple of Pent’s head. The blow though, solid as it was, was little more than a mild annoyance that the knight easily shook off.
In retaliation, Pent drove his knee into Dungar’s midsection before delivering a hook of his own. Once again, the force from the blow sent Dungar hurtling backwards, this time into a tree. However, rather than hitting the tree, he instead passed right through it. The lack of impact startled him for a moment, but then he remembered the banquet and his run-in with the nymphs. He studied the forest he found himself in, taking in the dim while light being emitted from the pseudo-sky and examining the sturdy looking trees, one of which he passed through like air not even a moment ago.
The situation was finally starting to make sense to Dungar, the bizarre magic of the tree and the arbitrary rules it played by. The entire interior of the wizard tree simply was what it was, an intricate labyrinth of empty rooms and passageways. The tree could conjure whatever it desired within them, but they only truly existed to those who were under the plant’s spell. A spell that Sir Pent, with his glowing green eyes and zealot-like devotion, was clearly under.
Dungar glanced at Sir Pent as the knight marched towards him, menacingly raising another fist. As his adversary lurched forward to deliver another brutal blow, Dungar took a quick step backwards into a tree. Effortlessly, the blacksmith’s entire body passed through it unimpeded. Sir Pent’s fist, however, halted as soon as it collided with the wood, resulting in a massive crack spanning the body of the devastated plant. The entire tree shook from the impact, sending its conjured leaves gently falling down onto the two men.
It was an odd, yet powerful feeling to have gained such control of the situation, and Dungar intended to take full advantage of it. Clenching his fist, he reached right through the ravaged tree and shattered Pent’s nose. Just as before, the knight recoiled from the blow very little, but the blood now oozing down his face and around his mouth proved all Dungar needed to know. The man was still vulnerable, just a little impervious to pain.
Normally Dungar would feel cowardly running away from his opponent and hiding behind trees only to pop out and crack him in the face on occasion. But rules and honor go out the window once his life falls into jeopardy. Also, if the knight intended to use dirty magic to beef himself up and swing the odds in his favor, then Dungar felt completely justified to use any underhanded tactic that came to mind to even the scales.
The scales had not become as even as he had hoped though. The blood trickling from Pent’s face seemed to have slowed to a halt, and the man’s resolve and endurance had not waned in the slightest. Dungar felt that he was a fairly fit man, but repeated bouts of surprise attacks and running away would start to wear on any non-magically enhanced individual after a while. He was far from exhausted, but his pace had become noticeably slower, and before long he could no longer outmaneuver the knight.
Dungar was attempting to make his way from one tree to another when he felt an iron-like grip take hold of his shirt and pull him sideways before he had his feet kicked out from underneath him. He hopped to his knees as fast as he could, but any attempts to get up were halted by five seemingly unbreakable knuckles.
Holding Dungar by the cuffs of his shirt, Pent lifted the blacksmith to his feet and stared menacingly into his eyes.
“Your cowardly tactics won’t work here, you sniveling craven.” The enraged knight growled. “Not so tough when there’s nothing to save you, hm?”
Pent did not wait for a response. Still holding Dungar with one hand, he took the other and clamped it around Dungar’s neck and watched sadistically as he slowly began to choke the life out of his helpless victim.
Dungar tried his very best to pry the man’s fingers apart, but it was no use. The knight’s hand was like a mechanical vice compressing his neck. Desperate, he pulled at the knight’s wrist, clawed at his face, and fell limp in his hands, but none of it was any use. The strong arms of Pent effortlessly supported his weight as his adversary continued the suffocation with his bare hands.
It was while clawing at Pent’s face that Dungar inadvertently grabbed a handful of the knight’s neatly cropped grey hair. As he grasped Pent’s hair, his mind went back to the arena and the similarly hopeless fight against the thin bird creature. Out of options, he decided if it worked once, maybe it will work again.
Gripping Pent’s hair with as sturdy a grip he had, Dungar yanked the man’s head towards him while simultaneously hurling his own head forward until the two met, Dungar’s forehead slamming into the bridge of the knight’s nose. As Dungar had hoped, the hand around his neck retreated back towards the knight it belonged to as Pent began to assess the damage on his nose that had now been shattered a second time.
Copious amounts of blood poured from the knight’s face, but as usual his resolve had not weakened at all. Gasping to regain his breath, Dungar looked up at the incredibly angered knight with worry. He had hit the knight with everything he had, there was nothing left for him to use.
Dungar hopelessly looked around the forest, desperate for anything he could repurpose as a weapon. No matter what he saw, though, it would be useless anyway, for he would not even be able to touch it. But as he looked upon his adversary, stepping around a tree as he came over to finish the fight, Dungar had the realization that it wasn’t him who needed to be able to feel the objects of the magic forest.
Throwing caution to the wind, and using the only remaining play in his book, he took off in the direction of Pent in an all-out sprint. When he reached the knight, he bowed his body forward and drove his shoulder into the man’s stomach. He did not stop running though. The momentum from his body was sufficient to lift the knight from the ground as he continued to run, carrying his opponent.
Pent screamed and pounded his fists on Dungar, but he pressed on in spite of them. Each blow sent a shockwave of pain through him, but the adrenaline surging through his body and the desperation surging through his mind was once again enough for him to phase out the pain.
Finally Dungar hit his mark. He went from a full on sprint to a complete stop in no time flat as he ran into Sir Pent’s body which had, in turn, collided with a tree. When he had recovered from the shock of the collision, Dungar looked down to see a thick tree branch stabbed right through his chest and coming out the back of him. Carefully, he slowly stepped backwards away from the branch where he was relieved to discover there wasn’t so much as a mark on him from it.
Pent, however, was not so lucky. The sheer magnitude of the collision likely obliterated many of his ribs and caused severe internal injuries. But the several inches thick tree branch jutting out from the part of his chest where his heart used to be was certainly the most grievous of the bodily harm he had suffered. The lower half of Pent hung limply as his arms felt around his injury. His breathing was hollow and labored, and gurgled slightly due to the blood seeping from his mouth.
Dungar wasn’t feeling too great from the impact either, but it was nothing he couldn’t manage. He limped slightly as he strode towards the knight, who looked up at him with an unmistakable look of defeat in his glowing green eyes.
“Some might say this’ll be a bit overkill.” Dungar explained as he cupped Pent’s jaw in his hand. “But I’m not quite sure just what this magic tree is capable of healing you of, so I need to be thorough.”
One hand on Pent’s jaw, and the other on the back of the knight’s head, Dungar began to twist until he heard the telltale sickly snap. The hollow breathing ceased and the knight’s arms went limp at his sides. As soon as they did, the room returned to the empty spacious circle it truly was. With no tree left to hold him up, the body of Sir Pent dropped to the floor where it lay like a crumpled ragdoll.
“Blimey, Mista Dungar!” Jimminy’s voice echoed through the room.
Spinning around, Dungar met the gaze of his faithful companion as the skinny man exited the passageway he came from and jogged towards him. As he reached the center of the room, Jimminy stopped and looked down at the mangled body of Sir Pent, pausing briefly when his eyes located the gaping hole in the man’s chest.
“What’s going on in here?” The gravelly voice of Blaine called out from a different passageway.
“Mista Dungar killed a guy!” Jimminy enthusiastically called back to him.
“I thought it smelled like dead body in here.” Blaine stated as he strolled into the room. “Hope it wasn’t one of ours.”
Before he reached the pair, Blaine halted mid step and looked at Dungar.
“Wait a minute, ain’t he the one that ran off earlier? Check his eyes, Jaunty! Are they green and spooky?”
Obediently, Jimminy put his face right in front of Dungar’s and looked deep into his eyes.
“Well they’re certainly scary, mate.” Jimminy relayed to Blaine. “But they’re as blue as ever.”
Shoving Jimminy aside, Blaine put his face right where Jimminy’s was in front of Dungar, poking his finger into the burly man’s chest.
“Did they get to ya, landlubber? Ye didn’t drink the qoolide did ya?”
“Enough, Blaine!” The authoritative voice of Nobeard called into the room.
The pirate captain, accompanied by Finn, Ozzy, and Larry, had entered the room during the interrogation. He still wore his exquisite black overcoat; however the garment now bore noticeable blood stains, likely the same blood that now coated his swords.
“Glad ye could make it, matey.” Nobeard addressed Dungar. “Ye had me worried that I’d be forced to gut ye.”
“Easier said than done.” Dungar quipped as he pointed to the mangled remains of Pent.
