Ethereal eyes blink open, but Fortu can’t immediately comprehend where or when he is, or even what he’s looking at. He seems to be floating high up in a bleak void, looking down on two distant but familiar figures. The first is heavily armoured and male, the other bent-backed and wizened but female and they’re facing something… huge and monstrous.
It takes him a moment, from his elevated vantage point, but he eventually recognises the two figures as the loathsome, pony-tailed; Sir Briefadel and, what can only be the undisguised form of the aristocrat’s supernatural Hag Mother; Hetzabah!
Just a nightmare or another one of his hyper-real visions? They’re coming more frequently now though and it’s hard, sometimes, to differentiate between the dreams and his actual memories. Some seem like glimpses of the future or past, but they’re never accurate. The places, times and people, are always confusing and muddled up.
Everything below is black as pitch or burning red. Looming shadows and boiling lava pits fill his entire line of sight and at its centre, in a huge, deep and smooth sided pit, is chained a colossal, crimson skinned and bull horned Demon!
Bigger than any creature he’s ever seen.
Bigger than the massive hooked horrors that had almost killed him in the Givrad Void.
Bigger than the towering Frost giant; Droofin, who had saved them in the frozen-world of Kik-Ri.
Bigger even than the gigantic burrowing ice monster that had tried, nearly successfully, to swallow his friends whole.
However, regardless of its apparent power, the Demonic creature is securely bound, with multiple iron chains linked to thick iron bands around its neck, wrists and ankles shackling it to the solid rock beneath its cloven hooves.
Something is wrong with it though. Despite being impossibly large, it seems emaciated. Sucked dry. Its thin, stick-like forearms are covered with translucent tubes, connected to weird, cold-iron needles piercing its immortal flesh and veins. Black/Red ichor still slowly dripping down and through them to somewhere beyond Fortu’s ghostly sight.
Suddenly, the creature’s huge head snaps upwards, away from the dream versions of Briefadel and Hetzabah, and the demonic beast locks eyes with the invisible, hovering dreamer.
“I SEE YOU THERE, SPAWN OF MY SPAWN!”
His real eyelids snapping open, Fortu jerkily sits up, takes in the cool darkness of the real world and feels his bedroll under him, slightly softening the reassuringly solid ground beneath. It’s only been a day since they’d escaped the barn fire at Eisen-Heart and they’re still a day’s ride away from Thorn-Flek. Controlling his breath, he sees the recently joined but stalwart Dwarf; Banaal standing guard in the mid-distance and allows himself to slump back down in the warm glow of Cookie’s campfire.
Slowly shaping the sulphurous word in his mouth, Fortu quietly spits out the strange name echoing around his head.
“Zartak.”
A name that, he innately understands, carries immense power and fiendish importance, yet simultaneously means nothing at all to him.
