Chapter Eleven

Siege by Crows

"And of the rest of the journey, there is little to tell. We arose at dawn, and took the path I had planned to take. East to the Fremmenik province, then south to here. Bio stayed in the Wilderness, but he said that he'd always be there to help us. He also said that he had escorted a barbarian warlord along the same path some days earlier to Rekella, one that went by the name of Gunthor."

How long had we sat on the roof listening to Kysin? The scene was lit now entirely by the glowing orbs of Thormac's staff collection, the sun having descended a fair while ago.

"Well, I for one am too tired to think and dwell on what has been said this night. I bid you all a good night." Thormac descended the ladder and was swallowed by the pure darkness below. His words seemed true for all of us, because we all followed his path downwards, into the underground bunkhouse.

I was lying in bed, barely awake, staring into the dark ground somewhere above my face when I heard Kryarn's hushed voice from across the room.

"Zanathir! Are you awake?"

"Yeah, almost."

"Do you still have my friends list?"

"Yes, Ill give it to ya in the morning. Go to sleep."

I heard him get out of bed and walk over towards me. I heard his footsteps coming nearer, then a thud and a hushed yelp of pain quickly followed by Kryarn talking, very loud and fast,

"No don't hurt me I won't hurt you get off me stop please don't send me to lumby get off me now! Oh... sorry Kysin, it's just real dark..."

Kysin muttered an unprintable word. From the bed beside me, Adrilor chuckled.

"Whas happening?" Came Parrea's sleep-ridden voice.

"Just go back back to sleep the lot of you." Hawkfeather.

"Zana, can I have my friends list back now?" Kryarn was standing right beside my bed.

I found the list, and gave it to him.

"Dude, did you use this list to..." Kryarn lowered his voice to a whisper in response to Kysin's hissed 'Shut up' "...get Parrea and Kysin? Then why didn't you get Morak as well?"

"He wouldn't come." I answered. "Go to sleep."

"Ok, I'll talk to him. I'm going to the roof."

Alright Kryarn, just be safe, quiet and don't step on the little scorpions. His footsteps crossed the room, this time without tripping over anyone or anything, and ascended the ladder.

I think I fell asleep sometime after that, but I don't remember. The next thing I really knew was light flooding the bunkhouse, coming from the torches in the wall brackets. I sat up in bed, and looked groggily around me. Kysin and Adrilor had disappeared entirely. Parrea was still in bed, looking exactly how I felt. Hawkfeather was standing over... Kryarn. A bleeding, injured Kryarn.

I got out of bed and grabbed my whip, steadying myself against the wall as the scene swum before my tired eyes. I walked over to Kryarn and Hawkfeather, but something green lying amongst Kysin's possessions (borrowed from Thormac) grabbed my attention...

'Thief' I thought of Kysin as I reclaimed my pendant from his belongings.

"Do you have any food?" Questioned Hawkfeather as I approached them. No, I didn't. I knelt and looked at Kysin. It looked as if something had stabbed him, hard with many large sharp needles. Blood was pouring freely from holes in his skin. He looked very close to Lumbridge...

"Does anyone have any food?" Hawkfeather repeated his question, more urgently. Parrea had joined us by now.

"The table!" She said, and walked towards it. Apparently there was an inscription written along one edge of the large table, because Parrea observed the edge carefully before rapping three times in the center of the table with her knuckles and saying clearly, "Four cooked sharks."

Kryarn screamed. His bloodshot eyes were staring at the ladder, and the open trapdoor above...

There was a crow perched on one of the ladder's rungs. The average garden crow, the farmers curse. It might've been just me, just an imaginative illusion, but I thought I saw it staring intently at Parrea as she summoned four cooked sharks from the table. As soon as Kryarn screamed, it spread its wings and flew off into the early morning.

Parrea brought the sharks over to our injured friend. "Here eat this. It'll make you feel better." Kryarn took the sharks, and ate them all. In front of our eyes, his condition improved dramatically. Well-cooked food is a strange miracle.

"The crows... they attacked... they came from the west and they attacked me..." Kryarn spoke. "Since when do crows attack people anyway? And Morak's being very strange... Met him wandering around in the Underground Pass. He'd been listening to Iban too much, freaky place that pass is, and Iban's voice gets in everywhere even through earmuffs 'cause I tried them to block Iban out... He believed everything Iban was saying, and had sworn his allegiance to Zamorak, and to guard the Pass when I met him. We became friends, of sorts, he even helped me defeat Iban just so he could rule the underground pass alone... For the love of light I dunno why anyone would wanna rule that place... And he's not coming, he's being stranger than usual, more secretive. But anyway he's sending his apprentice to help us. A mage called DarknessDie. Should be here soon, if he can get past the crows..."

'Crows...?' I thought. Instead I asked where Kysin and Adrilor was.

"Kysin has gone to aid Darkness Die; I haven't seen Adrilor since last night." Hawkfeather said.

When Kryarn had left to message Kysin, Adrilor had followed. He knew many useful little spells that mortals didn't know of, such as invisibility. He whispered the incantation and climbed the ladder; stealth of the elves making him soundless, the spell rendering him unseen.

He had seen Kryarn's futile attempts to persuade Morak, he had watched the crows attack. He had recited charms that would calm a normal bird, but none of them worked. Only elves knew how to command crows on such a large scale as this... Only elves could create a spell that his incantations couldn't break... And a powerful elf at that. But which elf, that was a good question.

Through muttering a very powerful spell of summoning and gesturing towards a single crow as he spoke, Adrilor was able to call the bird to himself. He held it tightly, and stared into it's eyes, for behind the eyes lie the most conscious thoughts of all living creatures... So the old elf taught the young ones, in the days when Guthix stopped the war centuries ago.

Almost an hour later, Adrilor was still on the roof, clutching the same crow in his hands. He had explored the bird's simple mind as much as he could. He knew everything now that the crow remembered. The crow had been ordered to come to this tower, and attack all living creatures within it, except those within my favor... Once the tower was devoid of living creatures, the crow was to return home.

Hard as he tried, Adrilor couldn't discover where 'home' was, or who was within whose favor. Whoever it was, the crows would leave them alone. Obviously not Kryarn. Adrilor gave up. A crows mind was too simple, it's memory too small to remember everything. He released the crow, which flew upwards slightly, and hovered over Adrilor. The fact that he was still invisible saved him.

The trapdoor leading to the bunkhouse was shut, and locked. Adrilor whispered a spell of unlocking, and let himself fall downwards. As soon as he hit the floor, he sprang back up and locked the trapdoor against the crows that had been perched in a nearby tree seconds ago, the crows that were now approaching at a fast and noisy pace.

It wasn't long after Kryarn recovered that the crows started coming. They swarmed in through the open trapdoor until Hawkfeather pulled it shut and bolted it locked. It was a small task, but nonetheless difficult to kill off the forty-odd crows in the room. They were fast and small, rendering my whip almost useless. I needed a target that would stay in basically the same place for at least a second, and an open space to swing the whip in. I had neither. So I held the large arrow-shaped tip in my hand and proceeded to gash the little black enemies with that.

Hawkfeather had a dragon scimitar; a well-balanced lightweight weapon that was perfectly suited to the surrounding battle. I think he was the only one who didn't get maimed at all by the sharp beaks and clawed feet, so great was his accurate skill with his weapon.

I would've felt safer, much safer if Parrea had chosen to use her dagger, especially as she had just woken up and wasn't fully alert yet. Instead she used her bow. Crows fell in a lot of places, bronze arrows protruding out of them. She was good with that bow, there was no way I could've hit any crows at the speed they were traveling at. Yet she killed many enemies and missed all friends.

Kryarn as usual, was totally weaponless and improvised by using a pillow to smash the crows away from him. The force of his blows actually stunned a few; he stamped on their motionless bodies. I never found out why he didn't go for one of the battlestaffs standing in the corner... but then, that's Kryarn.

Mostly thanks to Hawkfeather and Parrea, all the crows inside the room were soon motionless, feathered corpses. Like everything else living in Runescape, these crows had the respawning gift. The corpses lay there for only seconds, before disappearing into thin air. The crows would live again at their original site. We all collected the bones, and buried them in a large hole in the room.

A loud, sharp noise made me whirl around to face the trapdoor. Somehow, the bolt locking it had shot off and the trapdoor was standing open. Through the open trapdoor, I heard the raucous crowing of the little black birds outside. Holding his scimitar ready, Hawkfeather strode towards the trapdoor. Parrea drew her bow and notched a rune arrow. Before Hawkfeather even reached the trapdoor, it swung shut again and Adrilor materialized directly below it.

Adrilor quickly explained where he had been, what he had done. I became aware of just how powerful a friend had followed us from Camelot. Why had such a one followed us? I silently wondered.

"Can everyone here teleport to Ardougne?" Hawkfeather posed the question. We all could, except Adrilor who was unfamiliar with our magic spells. Everyone had anticipated a fair amount of teleporting, so had brought plenty of runes.

"Kryarn, message Kysin and tell him to meet us at the Ardougne shipyards. Adrilor, can you make yourself invisible or something, and meet us there?" Hawkfeather ordered. No one questioned. Just obeyed. I hoped Thormac would be ok without us...

Moments later I was in the middle of Ardougne marketplace. It was uncanny, life was here still going on. The stall keepers were yelling their wares into people's faces, thieves were attempting to steal when the shopkeeper's back was turned, and various ranks of the Ardougne militia were bringing their weapons down hard on the thieves' heads. It was as if no one knew of the noobs in the east, or the crows from the west.

Hawkfeather and Parrea were standing nearby, looking at the marketplace in a similar state of disbelief. Kryarn...

"Where's Kryarn?" I asked of the others. He certainly wasn't in the marketplace.

"I saw him teleport, he should be here. It's not like he could've gotten lost while teleporting or anything." Said Parrea.

"What... it... it's actually not impossible..." Hawkfeather's face had whitened. "I mean, it happened once before. A Zamorak mage apprentice made a mistake while teleporting... instead of going to his chosen destination, he remained in a different dimension somewhere in between. It's not really easy to make such a mistake; that Zamorak mage was the first one that did it, and it took them thousands of attempts to do it again."