Peridur and Eleanor Ch. 06

The Children of Dream

Grunash stirred on the floor of his hut and raised himself to standing with a grunt. It had been decades since he last experienced such restful sleep. Though he knew the elves were partially responsible for this, it was difficult for him to admit it even to himself. "For what orc can show vulnerability and remain strong in the sight of the War Father?" he thought.

He sighed and made his way over to the hearthfire, which had burned to ashes in the hours he walked through dreams of his beloved. Rekindling the flames, Grunash clashed a pot and spoon together, heating a meal of tidbits leftover from the night before. The elves stirred from each others' embrace and rose to join the shaman by the fire.

"Good morrow," Eleanor said, holding out her hands for warmth. Grunash grunted in response and thrust a bowl of meat and bread crusts at her, which she welcomed and nodded her head in thanks. Grunash repeated the process with Peridur a moment later.

"Eat now, Bloodless Ones," he said. "You will need all your strength for the foe we shall face today."

Peridur consumed the repast with relish. "About this foe," he said, after swallowing a large mouthful. "You've been fighting against it for eons. Would you share your knowledge and wisdom of it, so that we might be better equipped to triumph?"

Grunash marveled once again at how this elf reminded him so strongly of his Aelthic and tempered his naturally quarrelous reaction to the elf's question in memory of his lost love. "I will do this thing," he said and reached into a pouch that he always had at his waist. Removing another handful of the dust which had transformed the Soulbound into their primal wolfish selves, Grunash instead cast it directly into the flames that heated his cookpot.

As the powder met the heat of the fire, a cloud of shifting shadows rose within the tent. Grunash produced a hand drum from beneath his cot and began a steady hypnotic rhythm upon it. Within the cloud, figures began to move, and the elves realized they were viewing a collective memory belonging to Grunash and the entire race of orcs that the powerful shaman was bringing to life through his magic.

"Orcs were not the only race spawned after that long ago day when the gods wagered amongst themselves," he said. "Though we are the most hardy and resemble the Great Mother and Father War through our connection to the power of our emotions. These strengths give orcs an advantage both in traditional battle and spiritual warfare."

Within the cloud, orcish warriors screamed challenges at each other in ritualistic trials, their words remaining silent in Grunash's memory, but their passion plain to see. One by one, the warriors fought, then fell, not into death as Eleanor first thought. As the shadows twisted and spun, she realized the orcs collapsed after their labors into cots lined up together in many tents, the gathered multitudes of an orcish army. Within moments, they were all fast asleep.

Grunash's drum continued to beat as, within the vision in the apex of the tent of the fearless orc army, a darker shadow gathered. Insect-like legs emerged from a hole formed in the fabric of reality. A twisted centipede with the head of a dragon pushed into existence from this darkness, an obscene birth from the void.

"The god of dreams is both father and mother to his children," Grunash recited in time to the drum. "Once they guarded a dream from their maker as it made its way into the minds of the living, gently guiding it from conception to reception, and sheltering its development. They did this as a gift to all sentient beings."

The monster in the vision twisted its head this way and that, as if scenting for something only it could perceive. After a few moments, it focused on one particular orc warrior and struck so quickly that it would have been invisible, except for the tip of its scorpion-like tail which lingered as it disappeared through the center of the orc's forehead.

"But no longer," said Grunash. His pupils dilated as the orc in the vision began to thrash from side to side, tormented from within by a creature in its dreams.

"When the god of dream won the wager on Aelthic and the aurochs," the shaman said. "In their rage, the goddess of love and the god of war cursed him to perceive the world as a loveless place and to imagine that his enemies were waiting to attack him around every corner."

"His loneliness and paranoia changed the guardians of dream, his children, both in shape and function. Where once they looked like serpents, slimmer, fantastical counterparts to the great elemental dragons of nature, now they took on the nightmarish aspect of insects within a corpse, feeding on the remnants of despair."

Within the collective memory, the warrior cried out in his sleep, awakening a few of his fellows in the cots around him. One stood and shook the sleeping orc, but he would not awaken.

The dream-traveling monster sprang out of the sleeping orc's forehead, invisible to the orcs in the tent, but not to the shaman and the watching Soulbound. On the thing's scorpion tail, the soul of the warrior was impaled on a barb through his chest. The elves watched with horror as the orc's spirit was pulled through the rift in reality where the creature had first appeared and the tunnel vanished as if it had never been.

"They are now the Abhors," Grunash said. He gently set aside his drum and the remembered vision faded into nothingness.

"What happened to the warrior who was taken?" Peridur asked.

"His body remained asleep until it withered and died from lack of nourishment," Grunash said. "His unconquerable spirit remains alive with all the others who have been taken by the Abhors through the eons of their existence."

"Where?" Eleanor asked, dread in her voice.

"In the cave," Grunash replied, solemnly. "Deep within the realms of blood. I have guarded the waking worlds against their encroachment for hundreds of years. But the time for containment has passed. It is there we must go and remove their blight from existence."

The Battle of the Cave

"What manner of warriors are you?" Grunash said, as he strapped his magical knife securely to his leg in preparation for assuming his animal form.

Peridur glanced at Eleanor before replying. "Our strengths lie in words and music rather than traditional warfare," he said. "And, the depth of the connection between us is immense- for we are the two who are one."

"Is this connection passionate?" Grunash asked but continued before Peridur could reply. "We can use that." He reached into the sack of bone powder he had replenished upon returning to his hut and dusted the elves from head to toe in it.

"The strength of the Abhors lies in their speed and ability to cloak themselves in shadow," he said as he worked. "You will be a match for them if you embody your primal selves. As a spirit creature, your heightened senses will confound any shadow and your base emotions will fuel your strength." The Soulbound's bodies shifted until two enormous wolves, one gray and the other white, stood in the shaman's hut.

"Show the Abhors no mercy," Grunash said as his canines elongated and fur burst out of every pore on his body. "The gods themselves have denounced them." A few moments later, a giant bear thrust its bulk through the too-small door of the cave in which it found itself. Two wolves followed as the bear struck out on a path he knew well from eons of travel.

So it was, the shaman Grunash went to war one final time.

As the shaman and Soulbound neared the entrance to the Cave of Blood, Grunash found his senses being drawn to a different path than the one he was accustomed to taking. The fetid stench of the Abhors came from the way ahead, but an even more powerful smell emerged from a stand of trees to their left.

Hesitancy had not troubled Grunash in the hundreds of years he had been fighting the mutated children of Dream. With scarcely a change in pace, the shaman switched trails and approached the cave from an entirely new angle.

Once they had cleared the tree stand, the orc and elves saw a clearing in which a small but swiftly flowing stream separated them from a new entrance to the Abhor's cave, one which Grunash had never seen before. He angrily blew air out of his nostrils at the sight.

Hundreds of sleeping souls in the shape of aurochs were being herded by chittering monstrosities into a mammoth hole leading down to fathomless depths below. Contrary to his belief that the Abhors had been dormant for some time, Grunash could clearly see countless tracks leading both to and from the area. The only unmarked areas of ground were where the stream flowed down from the heights above and around the clearing in a semicircle, washing the evidence of the dreamers' passage away.

How could I have missed something so obvious, the shaman thought to himself. But no matter. The Abhors' depredations end today!

Grunash rose up on his hind legs and roared a challenge at the creatures before him. The Soulbound raised their muzzles and howled, adding to the cacophony.

Nearly half of the dreamers being directed into the cave startled, reverted from mindless aurochs to their various forms, from elf to orc to human, for a brief moment before being catapulted back into their bodies which lay in slumber all across Arda. If any of the lucky dreamers considered that night during the rest of their lives, they dismissed it as nothing more than a nightmare.

But the true nightmare of what would come to be known to the elf chroniclers as 'the battle of the cave' was just beginning.

Deprived of their dreaming quarry, the Abhors in front of the cave rose up onto their hind legs and screeched, loud enough to cause Peridur and Eleanor to flinch as the monsters' fury assaulted their ear drums.

Through hundreds of minor skirmishes with the Abhors, Grunash knew their usual reaction to confrontation in the shadow realm- rearing back in disbelief and rage. As the elves hesitated on the ridge, he sprang into action, charging down the slope and throwing himself onto the nearest Abhor. His claws raked the monster's body from beneath its dragon head down its soft belly to its scorpion tail.

The creature's outraged shriek grew higher in pitch for a moment before its body exploded outwards in a concussive release of energy. The spirit weapon, Auroch's Bane, glittered in the special sheath that Grunash had constructed so that he was able to carry it in his shamanistic animal form. The red gem seemed to absorb some of the energy created by the death of its ancient foe, and it started to gleam in the handle, emitting a bright light that drew all eyes to it.

Taking advantage of the distraction caused by the shaman's charge, Peridur and Eleanor threw themselves into the fray. The massive gray wolf approached an Abhor whose insectile legs skittered across the dust of the plain, leaving hypnotic patterns in its wake. The wolf snarled and leapt for the Abhor's neck, looking for a place to sink its massive teeth into its throat.

While her mate came at it from the front, the white wolf dodged nimbly between the dozens of other monsters who had been fixated by the red light of Auroch's Bane. With a growl, the white wolf attacked the gray wolf's target, clasping the creature's scorpion tail in her mighty jaws and pulling it viciously to the side. The lower half came off in her teeth, filling her mouth with the taste of muddy ashes.

Meanwhile, Peridur performed the same tearing motion with the upper half of the monster's neck and lower jaw. The Abhor seemed to sink into itself before exploding into errant dream energy. Peridur and Eleanor were knocked off their feet by the small explosion but quickly recovered, seeking confirmation the other was safe before turning to face the remaining foe, all of which were stalking the giant bear with the spirit weapon shining on his back like a red star.

Though his skills in battle were unmatched by any other shaman left in existence, even Grunash could not defend himself against dozens of Abhors. Despite his valiant efforts, the creatures were grinding down the bear's energy with lightning fast strikes of their sharp teeth and pointed tails. Bleeding from dozens of wounds, Grunash swung his claws back and forth, roaring his defiance first as a bear, but then, as his energy flagged even lower, he changed back into his orcish form.

"Father War," he screamed. "Prepare your halls, your son comes to you at last!" He reached to his hip and withdrew the Auroch's Bane, which was now shining so brilliantly that the Soulbound were forced to avert their eyes lest they risk blindness.

With a final war cry, Grunash used both hands to drive the sacred knife up to the hilt of the creature's head in front of him, taking a scorpion tail strike full in the back as he did so. His momentum carried him into the body of the Abhor he had stabbed, and the shaman and his last foe fell together in a final embrace.

Peridur and Eleanor were harrying the heels of the multiple Abhors in front of them, but were unable to get close enough to help the shaman, his thick blood falling to the plain and covering the handle of his knife, which remained in his enemy's corpse. As he fell, the elves found themselves back in their customary forms- their primal selves disappearing as Grunash's consciousness faded.

The Soulbound ran for each other as the Abhors turned their attention from the one intruder to the two remaining. Eleanor had the notes of a shield song rising in her throat, when the gem on top of Auroch's Bane exploded outward in a burst of energy so bright that left tracers in her eyesight.

For a moment, all was still in the realm of shadows. Then, the soul of a hero from ages past stepped out of the gem fragments. He had hair the color of the night sky and was dressed in leather, covered front and back with the menacing designs orc warriors bore on their armor. In his hand, he bore a spear made of oak with a bright blade shining on its end.

Despite these other signs, Eleanor didn't believe it until the warrior opened his eyes, revealing silver irises that gleamed as if they carried starlight within.

"Aelthic," she breathed and then many things began to happen all at once.

There was a roar and a rumbling which shook the ground and clicked Eleanor's teeth together. Then a veritable horde of Abhors poured from the entrance of the cave to join the monsters on the plain. Peridur and Eleanor stood back-to-back, he raising his deadly bow to shoot arrow after arrow into the encroaching monsters and she singing a song of protection and defense with the two who shared one soul as its center. The Soulbound stood like a rock in the surf while the Abhors broke against Eleanor's magical barrier in waves.

Aelthic assessed the battlefield in one glance and began to move with the grace of a dancer, slaughtering everything in his path. His spear spun effortlessly through one Abhor after another, more like an extension of his own body than a separate weapon. He sang as he moved, an ancient dirge to the god of War that Peridur had read in the histories but never heard performed as all who had known it had perished in the distant past.

Between the song and his deadly movements, Aelthic's progress took on a hypnotic quality and Eleanor found her limbs growing heavy in an approaching trance as she watched him. With an effort of will, she pulled her attention away from the hero as Peridur called her name.

"Look at the fallen," he said, drawing his bowstring back to his ear once more. She sought out Grunash, lying with frightening stillness among the ever-increasing corpses of his enemies, and gasped aloud. The incarnate souls of elves, orcs, and humans were stepping out of the bodies of the slain Abhors, much as Aelthic had appeared in the destruction of the gem of the spirit weapon.

As the souls achieved a tangible presence in the shadow realm, they took up the dirge of the god of War and added their strength to the battle against the waiting Abhors, which still numbered in the hundreds despite Aelthic's nearly constant slaughter.

The reincarnated warriors looked joyous as they sang and hacked their way through the monsters. And with each fallen foe, a dozen new allies emerged to continue the fight. In moments, the tide was turning in favor of the Soulbound. Nothing could stop Aelthic's progress nor the spirits who followed him.

Inevitably, as it seemed to Eleanor, Aelthic's mighty spear skewered the last of the Abhors and a sigh seemed to pass through the warriors gathered there. The silver-eyed hero walked to the center of the throng and raised his spear above his head. "Father War granted you vengeance against the monsters who cowardly killed you in your sleep," he said, his voice effortlessly traveling to all who stood on the plain. "Warborn, you have earned your rest."

As he lowered his spear, the souls began to fade from the shadow realm. One moment, Eleanor stood in the center of hundreds of warriors and the next, they were gone. She ran to the fallen shaman only to find that his lover had gotten there first, moving with his deceptively swift speed from one corner of the battlefield to the other.

Aelthic had gathered a thin foreleg from every creature he killed, when he managed that Eleanor had no idea, but as he rolled Grunash over, he presented the grisly trophies to the shaman as if they were a bouquet of the finest flowers. "I have avenged you," he said simply, kissing the orc's brow.

Eleanor was surprised to see Grunash's eyes were still open. "Aelthic," he wheezed, coughing up blood. "How I have missed you."

"I never left your side," Aelthic said, removing the Auroch's Bane from the Abhor's throat where it was still lodged. "Such was my grief at being parted from you, Father War granted my request to stay with you until it was time for you to pass over into the lands of death. I did so by inhabiting the gem of your spirit weapon, but I was not allowed to show my presence." The hero knelt once more at Grunash's side. "For some things are beyond the ability of even the gods to grant."

Grunash's eyes widened in surprise. "You never left me..." he said with a sigh, then the ancient shaman took one more breath and was gone. Aelthic folded the orc's hands on his chest over the remains of his enemies.

"Despite dying thousands of years ago," he murmured, so quietly that Eleanor almost couldn't hear him. "You, my beloved Warborn, will arrive in Father War's halls before me." He stood from Grunash's side with a final, gentle caress to the orc's face. "Though you will not have to wait long."

Aelthic turned to Peridur and Eleanor, who stood hand-in-hand, with the remnants of a once-proud race in pieces around them. "You must end this," he said. "The fight which I won so long ago created a schism between the gods. Father War and the Great Mother never relented in their amnity towards Dream for winning the bet and causing them to lose face in front of the pantheon of immortals."

"In revenge, the goddess cursed him so that he could feel no love from others," Aelthic said. "And the god of war cursed him to see conflict all around. In despair and confusion, the god of dreams retreated into his own private nightmare, from which the Abhors arose to prey upon the dreams of the living."

As the hero spoke, the earth shook once more and a pair of enormous horns began to rise from the dust of the plain. With a crash like thunder, the skeleton of a mammoth aurochs unearthed itself from beneath the Abhors' cave. It shivered and shook for a moment, then stood quite still, as if waiting.

"Wake the god of Dream from his living nightmare," Aelthic said. "Grunash waits for me in the halls of Father War, and I will tarry here no longer."

"Wait," Eleanor said. "I thought the halls of the god of war were reserved for his most favored children, the Warborn. How is it that you, an elf, will gain entrance?"