Devil Tower

Thrain and Company: Chapter 7

Thrain and company: Chapter 7

"Thrain, Thrain honey wake up. Come look at your newborn daughter."

Thrain rolled in his bed and mumbled lightly, "Jessebelle?"

"Yes dear it's me. Now get up and say hello to our daughter Emily," Jesebelle said.

Coming to his senses Thrain snapped his eyes open and shot up. He looked around him; he was back in his room inside the morning keep, his beautiful wife in bed next to him cradling a young baby: his baby.

"How did I get back here? This is a dream right? It has to be."

Jessebelle only smiled at him and said, "Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it isn't real. Do you want to hold her?"

She offered out the baby to him. Hesitant he took her in his arms and looked upon her sleeping face. Her beautiful green eyes opened up to him and she smiled. Thrain shed a tear of joy and whispered quietly, "My little girl, she's healthy and beautiful."

Jesebelle leaned her head against his shoulder smiling as Thrain played with their daughters little hands. "You should leave that tower dear, leave it and come be with us in the real world."

"I can't, I have to stop this tower, for the kingdom; for us."

"We can still leave before it's too late; go to somewhere else where we can be together for the rest of our lives. You have given enough to this kingdom. Do you want to abandon your family like your father did: in service to the kingdom? Evercain is unworthy of you and all you have done for it. Abandon that foolish quest and come be with us."

Thrain shook his head slowly, "I don't understand why are you saying these things?"

"Because if you don't leave the tower now; you will never see us again."

The dream world around him instantly faded away and Thrain woke up back inside the tower, in the swamp floor. He looked around to see everyone, but Curth who was on watch duty, sleeping.

Dredging through the swamp floor they went from patch of land to patch of land as much as possible, to avoid the murky waters, in search of the next stairs. It took them, what the measured as, a week to find the next stairs on that floor. Amusing enough it came in the form of another spiral staircase enclosed by a dark evergreen bark; the same material as the stairs.

"You know I started to notice something," Iris said as they climbed. "I noticed that the stairs leading up to the next floor always give some sort of clue as to what the floor leading up them will be. For example the floor before the demons the stairs were rocks, and then we went into a mountains area. So I'm thinking with these stairs the way they are we will end up in a forest area of sorts."

"Iris that's a great find and all," Thrain said, "but in truth it's not all that relevant. We don't have many options but to climb the stairs leading up or turn around and go back down, so having the very slightest idea what's ahead of us in these scenarios is meaningless. Whatever we will find on the next floors we will find and have to deal with it to move on."

Seeing her dismay Rugal kissed Iris on the cheek to cheer her up and whispered to her, "Don't worry he's hard on everyone; especially since we been in here."

Although Thrain was right about how little it mattered Iris' belief that the stairs gave a clue to the next floor was correct. At the next floor they found it was forest of massive dark trees with dark evergreen colored bark. A dense fog coated out areas of the forest and gave off a strange smell.

All of them could sense (on different levels) that something was not right on this floor. They didn't know what it was they were sensing but they knew it wasn't good; so they moved forward cautiously, looking around at every step.