Fantasy fiction; Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction
Now it is to be said of Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha that they,
finding themselves parted from their people in the fog, and utterly
unable to find them, when the last sound of battle had died away
wiped and put up their bloody swords and set forth at a great pace
eastward. Only Mivarsh fared with them of all their following. His
lips were drawn back a little, showing his teeth, but he carried
himself proudly as one who being resolved to die walks with a quiet
mind to his destruction. Day after day they journeyed, sometimes in
clear weather, sometimes in mist or sleet, over the changeless desert,
without a landmark, save here a little sluggish river, or here a piece
of rising ground, or a pond, or a clump of rocks: small things which
faded from sight amid the waste ere they were passed by a half-mile’s
distance. So was each day like yesterday, drawing to a morrow like to
it again. And always fear walked at their heel and sat beside them
sleeping: clanking of wings heard above the wind, a brooding hush of
menace in the sunshine, and noises out of the void of darkness as of
teeth chattering. So came they on the twentieth day to Morna Moruna,
and stood at even in the sorrowful twilight by the little round castle,
silent on Omprenne Edge.
From their feet the cliffs dropped sheer. Strange it was, standing on
that frozen lip of the Moruna, as on the limit of the world, to gaze
southward on a land of summer, and to breathe faint summer airs blowing
up from blossoming trees and flower-clad alps. In the depths a carpet
of huge tree-tops clothed a vast stretch of country, through the midst
of which, seen here and there in a bend of silver among the woods, the
Bhavinan bore the waters of a thousand secret mountain solitudes down
to an unknown sea. Beyond the river the deep woods, blue with distance,
swelled to feathery hill-tops with some sharper-featured loftier
heights bodying cloudily beyond them. The Demons strained their eyes
searching the curtain of mystery behind and above those foot-hills; but
the great peaks, like great ladies, shrouded themselves against their
curious gaze, and no glimpse was shown them of the snows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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