AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’d known there was a door. Beyond a doubt, I had known it.
I had known it would appear at night. And I had known it would let me in.
But more than that?
I held the grail higher using both hands, and a beam appeared.
I turned slowly in a full circle, letting the long ray of light illuminate our surroundings.
We were in a colossal hall. Towering pillars rose around us like silent guardians. Their surfaces were covered with runes and carvings. The ceiling above us was so high, it was lost in the shadows.
The hall seemed to stretch endlessly before us, disappearing into the darkness, creating an illusion of infinite space within the mountain’s depths.
The atmosphere was grand, the architecture imposing. But the place was empty.
“Where is everyone?” Draven said, his voice low. “Is this your father’s court?”
I finished turning the grail’s beam.
“Stop.” Draven’s voice was sharp. “Look. There. The light.”
The grail’s light had grown brighter and the beam longer as I pointed it towards a particular area of the hall in front of us.
I moved the grail from side to side and the beam dimmed. When I moved it back again, it grew stronger.
“Well, that answers that,” Draven said. “We have a guide.”
I nodded. “We follow the grail.”
He winced. “Not something I’m keen on doing. But I suppose we have no other choice in this place.”
There were no torches. No lamps to light our way. No sunlight streaming in from skylights above. The grail was our only light. And for it to shine, one of us had to hold it aloft at all times.
Hours passed as we moved from one hall into another, following the beam of light.
The pillars around us seemed to absorb and amplify the echoes of our boots on the polished stone floor. At times, a low hum resonated from unseen depths beneath us, pulsating through the cavernous halls.
At some point, the night must have ended. We walked on through the day.
Once, the intermittent whisper of a breeze suggested that somewhere in this vast place there might be a way back out to fresh air and sunlight. Other than that, the air was cool and dry, without the hint of an earthy aroma one might expect to find within a mountain such as this.
We began to lose track of time. Walking on and on, through one hall to the next, down one long corridor into another vast, pillared room and into a corridor again.
We might have been going in circles, so similar were the rooms, so uniform were the designs of the pillars.
Only the carvings on the columns and walls seemed to have any variation. But after pausing once to examine them closely, I made myself stop looking. They seemed to share the same brutal themes of violence and degradation. Evidently the carvings were meant to show my father’s strength, his triumph over his enemies. But I couldn’t look at them without disgust coiling in my belly. They seemed only a horrific reminder of a past long forgotten but one which might easily come again.
Eventually, we stopped for the night, laying our bedrolls on the cool, polished stones.
We could not even make a fire. There was nothing to burn. No abandoned furniture. No wooden decorations of any kind. Only drab, hard stone.
Draven sank down onto his bedroll, pulling an apple out of his pack, and looked over at me as I positioned the grail a little ways away.
“I hate the thing,” he said casually, taking a large bite out of his apple. I watched him chew, enjoying the normalcy of such a simple thing. “And yet now it’s our beacon of hope.”
I shuddered. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Here’s a question for you. Why don’t we try to melt the thing right now?” Draven’s eyes were angry as he looked at the grail. “What’s stopping us?”
