Cloudfyre Falling - a dark fairy tale Read Free

barely listen.
And could only watch, as one by one… they died.
    He climbed to his
feet, looking about with goggling eyes. What, by Thronir, is this horror before me?
    The eyes of his Nightface looked
about in detached silence, feeling an odd sense of confusion, even
sympathy, for such an unprecedented number of dying
men-fish.
    Gargaron watched more ornithens
come hurtling down, thudding into rock and river; their necks,
legs, and wings snapping and cracking on impact. Then clouds of
suckyflies began peppering his skin, dropping down dead from the
skies.
    Next came a roar
as a thunderous tide of black water cascaded madly down river.
‘ Oh, to Old Wolven, ’ he gasped, ‘ what be
this? ’
    Hot black water spread like oil,
dead fish tumbling and thrown about in its clutches… flashes of
their silver scales could be seen as wave fronts smashed and
crashed and heaved against rock and bank.
    In a panic, Gargaron climbed
rapidly for higher ground, leaping up rock just as frothing waves
swept over the bank upon which he had only recently been asleep.
From his new vantage, he observed the carcass of half a hundred
beast and fowl, caught in this black tide, come rushing down the
wild currents, unceremoniously tossed and thrown and battered
against serrated rock. He saw limbs torn and broken, he watched
bellies be ripped open and intestines spewed into raging black
surf.

    2
    When the second shockwave struck
Gargaron thought it must be the sound of the Scarecrow Range
tumbling down. The range dominated the skyline northways’n’east.
But those snowcapped mountains appeared unshaken.
    Instead a deep, hideous grumbling
noise could be heard rolling eastways in an almost sluggish
movement, some juggernaut rumbling through the high woodland
plateau toward him, shaking violently leaf, branch, trunk and
rock.
    It were almost
upon him when, frantic, he threw himself behind a wall of shielding
rock. He braced himself as an odd sonic wave crawled across the
region, passing through earyth and rock and tree and air, and through even
Gargaron himself, pushing directly through bones and flesh and
organs, some powerful invisible force, causing him to shudder
violently, dropping him to his knees, making him gurgle, spit and
splutter.
    Then it went
sweeping away, west to east, slowly across Buccuyashuck (surface
water rippling and jiggling and frothing) before it moved up over
rock shelf and away across the eastern stretches of
Godrik’ s
Vale.
    From his knees, Gargaron had
watched in an almost catatonic stupor. But now he were off, running
in blind panic.

    3
    He charged through woodland,
astounded by hundreds of corpses that suddenly and inexplicably
littered the grassy forest floor. Foxes, angel-mites, sunflies,
squirrels, Gurbs, deer, ornithens, pixies, ground sloths, fern
weavers, rock dwellers, wood borers and grave dogs all. Sunlight
slanted down in wonderful warming beams but all it did were
illuminate the dead and dying all about him. All this sudden death
made him think of nothing else but that of his wife and
daughter.
    He reached the top of Cahsteks
Ridge, charged through Hovel’s old stone gates, built two thousand
years before during the days of the Soonsk, when the Xideyysa Gods
rode down from the stars on stones afire, leaving the vast
continent of Godrik’s Vale pockmarked with craters.
    Jagonard and
Corinarv, village sentries, did not stand guard. Matter of fact,
Gargaron saw them nowhere. Their absence alarmed him. Why should they find need to abandoned
post? Except as he pressed forward he saw
fresh puddles of blood, deep purple-black, cast across the worn
cobbles leading to a pair of bodies.
    Here they lay. Jagonard and
Corinarv. Slain and dumped upon rocks, while the spidergrass were
already supping at their blood and intestines.
    Horrified, gasping for breath,
Gargaron kept running.
    He came upon Hovel’s village
square; the buildings here were arranged in a circular fashion
around a central clump of stone megaliths