Sons of Ironstorm - Book 4: Griffon's Stand

A Maze of Light

Lawrence couldn't help but take a half step back from the wiry, muscular figure that now stood before him, wrapped in a deep hood and heavy, dark cloak.

"Father?" he repeated hoarsely.

In response, the figure lifted his hands to throw back the cloak's deep hood. And in doing so, revealed himself.

It was indeed Jerald Ironstorm, almost exactly as Lawrence remembered him as a boy. Handsome, dark skinned, with intense brown eyes that looked like they could carve stone, a shock of dark brown hair and that grim, that oh so grim look that Lawrence remembered his father wearing when he was about serious business.

"Be at peace, my son," Jerald replied, with a glance to the side to where Muranis could be seen, still working his hands over the adjunticator's core crystals.

"It is indeed I, your father. The Maker has granted me leave from His presence for a short time to help you in obtaining your Weapon of Power. But we haven't much time; soon the lord of the Abyss will make his final adjustments to the exclusion field the Stewards put in place to protect the adjunticator and he will have the power to attack you."

"But ... but there are so many questions I want to ask you, father. So many things I want to say.. ." Lawrence began, his heart abruptly in his throat as he looked at the man who sired him, and who had been dead for eleven long cycles, killed while saving his mother from the vile clutches of Urud the Usurper.

"And if we had the time, I would gladly answer them all, my eldest." A ripple of tension worked its way down Jerald's jaw. "I would listen to you speak until the universe itself was dust." A quick motion with his hands and the former war king of Talemon once again hid his features within his hood's dark interior.

"But we must be about the Maker's business or all will be undone!" He abruptly turned away from the bewildered Lawrence.

"Quickly now, lad. This way." And he began to move off, deeper into the strange folding of light and space they now occupied.

Forced into action by his father's motion, Lawrence moved quickly to follow. Only to pull up when he caught sight of another lean figure some distance deeper in the folded space moving carefully yet quickly.

"Wait, father. I see someone else in here with us."

Jerald paused just enough to look over his shoulder.

"That is Ciramax, son of the elvish High King, Ciradaan," he explained. "Taken before his time by the Shadow. He has offered to serve as a decoy when the lord of the Abyss takes notice that you've been moved. Now hurry; we need to be as far along as possible before we are spotted."

Nodding in understanding, Lawrence joined Jerald and together father and son slipped through altered space, intent on whatever hidden goal Jerald had in mind. As he moved ahead of his now thoroughly anxious son, the former king began to explain in a low voice.

"The lord of the Abyss was quite right when he said the Stewards had built the adjunticator to tap into many different layers of Reality to keep Ramnor and Rimnor circling each other through the cosmos. And the layer in which the Weapon of Power was cast by the abrupt closing of the Norak Gate by Te'fa, the Tree's last Wielder, is, indeed, limbo. The adjunticator taps limbo to bind all the other layers together. And so we will use the Stewards' final, and greatest creation to bring your Weapon back to Reality's prime layer, the one we live on."

"How ... how do you know these things?" Lawrence pressed, stunned by the knowledge his father was revealing to him in terse, succinct sentences.

"A gift from the Maker, given to assist me in assisting you," Jerald curtly replied, taking a left, then a right before proceeding forward once again, guided by some hidden path.