Page 42 of Morfran, Dark Lord Reformed

He responded by growling again and hurling the knife at a nearby post. It sank into the wood and quivered. Bronwen looked from it to him with a bewildered—and impressed, though she tried to hide it—expression.

“Come on,” he snapped, chucking his pack over his shoulders and giving his goat friend a disgruntled glare. “We’re going to the tower.”

A stunted silence, as if she were trying to catch up to his whiplash. “Right now?”

“It’s either that or we awkwardly wait around for my drive to kill you to return,” he grumbled, stomping away from Beni and her kids, the former of whom looked smarmy as she snuggled up against her babies. I should have cooked you in a stew when we first met, he thought in vain.

After retrieving her knife, Bronwen slowly began to trail after him, moving through the streets with a quiet grace. She remained at a safe distance from him, all her previous distrust simmering back up to the surface, judging from the sullen glares she was tossing.

“How far is the tower?” she asked. “It’s the middle of the night. Will we be walking for long?”

He didn’t speak. He just thrust his finger at a lone lighthouse in the distance. It looked like a piece of black slate jutting out of the rocky cliffside with a firefly flickering honey-gold light off the tip of it.

Bronwen bristled. “We were this close to the tower this whole time? I could’ve had my hex removed three days ago!”

“Not alone, you couldn’t have.” He kept his eyes straight ahead, dreading both walking with her and what was to come next. “You have to know a secret passcode.”

She squinted at him. “Just who is this guy?”

To be fair, Morfran had never met the man. He’d only heard the tales Ravana liked to boast to visiting royalty. Of how she had denied him his destiny. Of how she had ruined his prophecy. Of how she was the reason he was still locked away up there, and why he was powerless to ever escape.

When they came up to the base of the lighthouse, it was as Ravana had once told him. It loomed up forty feet, a cylinder of blue-gray stone wreathed in fog, with no doors or openings except for a square window at the very top. Beside the base of the tower was a mailbox stuffed with aged, weather-beaten letters. The lighthouse light itself was on, and to Morfran’s relief and dread, the window was also brightly lit from inside.

Bronwen had wrapped her arms around herself, looking forlorn and uncomfortable. “This looks like a mad scientist’s lair,” she murmured before glaring at him. “Did you lie to me? Are you trying to sell me off to some lunatic who eats newts and tries to revive dead cats? What’s this man’s name, anyways?”

Morfran ignored her. He just propped his hands on his hips, looked up, and hollered the passcode: “Vibrato! Staccato! Portobello! Rapunzo, I beseech you, let down your hair-o!”

His voice carried off into the night. At first there was a great silence. It was so quiet that Morfran wondered if the password had been changed since Ravana had last been here, or if somehow the inhabitant had escaped long ago.

Then there was the sound of a window being unclasped. In the black gloom of the night, a brilliant sheet of gold poured out the window, so vibrant it appeared to be glowing. Down, down, down it fell, right to their feet, where it dangled like a thick climbing rope that reminded Morfran of his school days when his physical education teacher always made his students squirm up to the top or else he’d dump their lunch on their heads.

Bronwen poked it. “Is this…hair?”

“Yes, and it’s the only way up the tower.” He gestured to it. “You first?”

She yanked out her dagger and spun it. “I don’t think so, goat man. You lost my trust back there. This is starting to be a habit of yours.”

“But why?” he snapped. “I decided not to kill you!”

She jabbed the dagger at him. Grumbling, he turned back to the hair and gingerly grabbed it, giving it a stout tug to ensure it held fast. It was cordlike and thick, with reddish tints. “This is so weird,” he murmured before hoisting himself up.

Forty feet was a lot of hair to climb, and by the time he had surfaced through the window, he was panting too hard to notice much of anything except that he was in a brightly lit room, and that the air smelled like…boeuf bourguignon escargot?

When he finally stopped wheezing, stooped down with his hands on his knees, he looked up.

He was in a single room that was quite cozy, with lots of warm candlelight and a boisterous fireplace and rich furniture. There was also weight-lifting equipment in the corner, a child’s bed littered with numerous plush animals, paintings of fanged, horned women on the walls, and a library’s worth of books with titles ranging from Men’s Muscle Magazine: Bodybuilding Techniques for the Ultra-Devoted to Beef Cuisine Recipes for the Ultra-Devoted to Master’s PhD in the Operation of Lighthouses. Also in the corner was a small oven, which Morfran guessed was where the salty smell floated from.

And then, as he stopped scanning the room, he spotted him: the most absurdly muscular man Morfran had ever seen. The fact that he wasn’t wearing anything except a skimpy loincloth only seemed to exacerbate the intensity of his hulking body. His hair was a shining gold, more gold than Gueldefore’s, but it wasn’t the hair on his head that Morfran had used to climb up the tower. It was the seventy-foot beard attached to the man’s face.

Alarm bells rang through Morfran’s ears, indicating danger, and yet the man was still staring intensely at him, the muscles above his eyebrows square and thick and manly. Then, without warning, the man’s massive arms went around Morfran and lifted him off the ground. Morfran flailed, expecting to be crushed like a cream puff.

“Are you real?” The man’s voice vibrated clear to Morfran’s feet, his arms tightening around Morfran’s rib cage, and Morfran was denied any possible way of responding that wasn’t a squeak of expired air. The man sniffed aggressively. “You smell like sushi and warm tidings,” he whispered. “You must be real. Welcome to my abode, brother!”

Morfran tried to slam his head against the man’s pecs, tried to squirm out like an unruly child, tried giving the man the dead fish response. None of it worked.

It was only when Bronwen finally climbed through the window, huffing and sweaty, that the man’s grip loosened at once.

“Aaaaahh!” The specimen of muscle abandoned Morfran and executed a beautiful swan dive as he launched behind the child’s bed, the commotion of which shook the entire floor like an earthquake.