Chapter One: The Forgotten
The crack of light pulled me from my slumber. It was not particularly bright, or far-reaching, but that was not the point. It was light! Light, after all this time!
It was only at this point that I realised I had never been asleep at all. The immense, unrelenting - but most importantly, perpetual - glare of the darkness had conveyed an illusion of unconsciousness. Deprived of anything to differentiate, I had been completely unaware all along of whether I was asleep or nay!
But now, I was certainly awake. And there was light.
Slowly, I began to flex my rusted fingers. At first, there was no response. They remained like slabs of stone. But then, the blood began to flow through them again, restoring them to a fleshy, organic state. I did the same for my other hand, and then my feet. As I did so, the tingling sensation in my legs turned suddenly to a sharp jolt of agony. With great dismay, I realised that they were broken in several places, and would likely never move again.
Cursing my luck, I spat, only to be hit by the vile globule as it flew up in the air a pathetic few inches, and came crashing back down. Clearly, I was lying on my back. Hadn't realised that either.
Over the next few minutes, the life slowly returning to my body, I began to inspect my surroundings. The faint light above me did very little to illuminate things, so to speak, but I could make out a dark-green brick wall surrounding me on all sides. Furthermore, I found myself to be lying on a thin, wooden platform. All around me, similar wooden platforms of varying lengths and sizes stuck out. Apparently, I had fallen down a pit of some sort, although I had no memory of doing so. All I knew that I was in intense pain, and wanted to get outside.
However, doing so proved difficult. I certainly couldn't climb up the platforms around me; not in my state. Scaling the wall was similarly out of the question. My only hope lay in the strange, jagged branch of wood that I had somehow come to hold in my hands after finding it beneath my wrecked body. Turning it over between my fingers did very little to enlighten me towards its purpose. I had never seen anything like it.
"What kind of an idiot am I?" I pondered. "To carry a useless stick around with no weapon!"
Because my memory extended no further than my awakening, I could have been a crazed maniac for all I knew. How would I know if I was crazy, with nothing to compare myself to?
On the subject of people, I came across a sudden realisation whilst I lay on my plank. Someone had to have moved the cover off of the pit. It was unlikely that it had simply moved by its own accord; inanimate objects usually did not possess such an ability. So, presuming the rules of the universe had not changed in the absence of my memory, there had to be someone up above.
Someone who could help me.
I attempted to call out, but my words were distorted into a warped gargling noise, which likely served no practical purpose other than to persuade whomever may be above to replace the cover immediately. Coughing up the phlegm that coated my vocal chords, I proceeded to repeat the gesture. Only this time, a deep, crusted voice emerged from my throat.
It called for help. "Hello?"
Evoking no response, I called once more. "Please! Somebody, help!"
A shadow fell across the light, and for a moment, I was terrified that my saviour had decided to imprison me again. Out of frustration, I balled my fists so tightly that the blood in my fingers rushed to the tips, turning them a worryingly-toxic shade of purple.
The figure bending across the light was shouting something. They didn't sound friendly, or welcoming. They certainly didn't sound like they were pleased to discover a living creature at the bottom of such a deep, dark pit. The reasoning for this was yet unclear to me.
Troubled by the voice - that, judging by its ferocious volume, belonged to a male of Northern descent - I quickly cupped my hands across my mouth to reply. "Please! My legs are broken. I can't move!"
The figure cried out again, and this time there was no mistaking the words that he had chosen. "Good! Then you can stay down there to rot in hell, ya filthy hollow!"
Not only was he refusing to help me, but he had saddled me with a rather unsavoury nickname. Hollow. It sounded familiar, but for all the wrong reasons. Just running the word across my tongue filled me to the brim with foreboding. What could it mean?
"I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm not a 'hollow!'" I protested. Upon making this insistence, I was fully aware of the fact that it may not be true. For all I knew at that very difficult moment in time, I could have been a full-blooded hollow - the hollowest imaginable. But I wasn't about to let my one chance of escape from that hole slip between my fingers.
The voice above spoke again, but this time it was much quieter; focused. Then, I heard a different voice altogether, and I realised that the figure was conversing with somebody else. A woman, by the sound of it. When the male voice rose in volume, like the lashing of a whip, I came to a further realisation: They were arguing. Arguing over me? There was - surely - no alternative.
From my position below, I could hear very little from above. Most of my senses were clouded by the pain that was shooting through my broken legs, but my ears were efficiently-attuned enough to pick out several of the more insidious phrases that were being used.
"...filth from the gutter!" - This one was most definitely the property of the male.
"...can't just...an undead!" - The woman. Although she was apparently arguing for me, I wasn't comfortable with her utility of the word 'undead.' Death was one of the few concepts I was aware of. To throw around a word like un-dead - implying some kind of defiance of death, or state of limbo between life and its affirmative end - I couldn't help but feel that she was referring to me in a less-than-positive light.
"cut his tongue out!" - This one I utterly detested.
Eventually, their voices fell to a much duller pitch. I wasn't exactly reassured by the fact that the woman had seemed to have won. If the manner by which she referred to me as 'undead' was anything to go by, she could have simply been arguing for a more thorough method by which to dispose of me. Boiling lava, perhaps?
But then, the woman raised her voice. It echoed in the pit, and I caught every single word.
"Hang tight! We're coming to get ya!"
And at that moment, no words in all of my world could have made me happier.
There was something that felt almost spiritual about my rugged ascent into the world of light. With the man shouldering most of my body weight, and the woman acting as some kind of enforcer of enthusiasm, the climb to the surface took little more than five minutes. The man was extremely strong; I feel the bulges of his biceps through his grasp and they were almost as hard as the platform that I had lain upon. It didn't bode well for me to think what he might do to me with those mountainous heights when we reached the surface world.
Of course, when we did, the first thing I did was cower from the intense light as it scoured my eyes. The beams tore through my pupils like a rock through a pane of glass, and I became unbearably nauseous. I dropped to the ground, clutching my eyes, fearing that I may go blind.
Turns out, that was the least of my worries, after the man suddenly started to shout at me.
"This is no man! Look at that, and tell me that I just rescued a man!"
I did not hear the woman protest. Perhaps she had been struck into silence.
The next thing I knew though, she had cried out, and a large, bulking weight was pressing down upon my shoulders. I had no idea what to expect, except that this was no friendly gesture. The object, apparently a weapon judging by the sharpness of its vertices, was digging into my flesh at just the right level to cause me discomfort. My eyes, still burning in the light, focussed upon a large, hulking man with sturdy steel armour, and a head obscured almost entirely by a furious-red beard. I only noticed the gigantic greatsword that he was holding atop my shoulders just before he barked "Keep your head DOWN!" into my face, and my eyes were retreated onto the ground.
"Who are you?" he pressed. "Where did you come from?"
My teeth clattering like shutters in a storm, I tried to answer. "I know not either of the answers you seek... Please... I remember nothing from before the pit!"
The woman, now referring to the man as Aldane, came hurriedly to my defence aftr a brief lapse. "Does he look like one of the halflings? Look at him! He can speak for one thing!"
'Aldane' snorted. He did not deny the name that the woman had given him, so I began to assume that it was indeed his name. "The hollows of all things can speak now! We should not expect less of he halflings. They may be one step further on the ladder of sophistication, but they are no less revolting, or deserving of a swift death!"
Now this word 'halfling.' Over the past fifteen minutes or so I had been labelled with many unpleasant-sounding titles. From this strange word - perhaps meaning a fusion of two parts, or a division (with equal probability) - I salvaged ideas about loneliness and belonging. I'd certainly never been so insulted, or confused, in my extremely-short memory. But perhaps that was my purpose.
Whilst lost in my thoughts I had missed the progression of the conversation to an apparent impasse. Aldane, still panting from his angered outbursts, had taken the sword from my shoulders and had - with some very evident reluctance - sheathed it. The woman, whose name still escaped me, was asking me something. But I wasn't listening, because now I had gotten my first glimpse of the world around me.
And it was gorgeous. I was in some kind of village built into the mountainside. The pit I had fallen down appeared to be a sewer pipe of some kind. But all around me, there was something far more appealing.
Water. Water everywhere. Words betrayed me. It was stunning. Golden rays of sunlight hit the waves and bounced off, giving the water a transparent tinge that made it all feel so mysterious. Like every inch of it could be explored.
I watched through a clump of lush green grass as a particularly-violent wave tackled with one of the enormous pylons of rock, playfully parting around the structure so as to meet upon the other side. The way that nature seemed to actually live and thrive here; I was transfixed.
I had come from the dark. Now, I was a pilgrim of the light.
A hand fell upon my shoulder, jolting me out of my gaze. It was the woman who had argued for me. I offered her a grateful smile - the only gesture I could think to give in my disorientated state. She returned it, much to my relief, dispelling any tension of hostility in the situation.
Suddenly, I was taken aback. I caught my first real sight of her - and she was like nothing I had yet seen. All the hills and vales around could not light a candle to her. Her hair, a hazelnut brown, hung loose around her shoulders at even partings, but fell short of her nose and mouth, such a stunningly-perfect alignment - it hardly seemed like a coincidence of nature. Her chin, short and rounded, curled as she smiled, and a warm aura emanated from her very flesh, soothing me down to my bones. Nevertheless, it was her eyes that encapsulated me the most. Shining beacons of the most deepest green you could ever imagine, they practically fixed me in place, searching the furthest corners of my own for anything which may allude to my true self. It was in this way that her eyes were both simultaneously alarmingly beautiful, and intensely inquisitive.
"Hey," she said; her search-beams swiped across me but her smile never came close to diminishing. "Are you alright?"
I nodded; I was too breathless to coerce my lungs into pumping out the correct words to match my feeling.
She laughed, probably thinking me odd. "Good. Do you know your name?"
I knew nothing beyond the dark, and this new world of light confused me greatly. I said nothing, and this simply seemed to confirm her suspicions.
"He's an undead. Probably sent here by the hags; but how he ended up inside that hole is a mystery to me... As is... That."
I had no idea what had caught her gaze, but as I followed it around to my back, all became suddenly, and unnervingly, clear.
What was it doing there? How? Why?
My questions were irrelevant however. The answers would probably only confuse me further.
All I knew was that I had a tail.
It just kind of hung there. A long, scaly white distraction, with seemingly no purpose other than to be awkward, and make me feel even more so.
The woman had been staring quite intensely at me. If I hadn't been so startled by my strange anatomical development, I would probably have burned red with embarrassment. When I was able to draw my gaze from my tail, my eyes met with hers again and she offered me a kind smile.
"My name is Carlai," she said, reaching out a slender, but beautifully-shaped hand. I took it, my fingers crashing against a softness deeper than anything I had ever known. Her skin emanated a hearth-like warmth, and immediately, I felt safer, as though I were wrapped up in a bedroll warmed by a hot spring.
Carlai started to giggle, and I realised that I had been staring at her hand as if it was a wild, alien creation. Stunned, I withdrew from the shake, my eyes dodging from hers. "Sorry."
"So you can speak?" she grinned. "I was starting to think that all of that shouting down the pit might have been a fake out!"
Aldane grumbled and spat harshly upon the floor. Carlai glared sharply at him, and the ferocity took me aback momentarily. I had never imagined something so beautiful could have such a sting. Clearly, I was knew to this world, and had yet no concept of roses or fire.
"Don't worry about him," Carlai whispered, her eyes fixed upon the hulking northerner. "He's a wolf on the outside, but has the heart of a pup."
Aldane made a strangled sound, and I turned to get my first proper look at him. As I had expected, the owner of the muscles that had carried me was a very large, tall man. He possessed a dark black beard that hung off his chin like a poisonous ivy, and a face rounded like a boulder. Whilst Carlai wore little more than a white robe, Aldane was geared up in enormous metal armour. A rather-sharp silver suit, it displayed deep, mysterious grooves that met around the middle and a collection of belts and buckles, each holding an array of assorted knives and other projectile weapons. The greatsword that he had placed upon my shoulders now stood at his side; an enormous, plated chunk of metal masquerading as a tool of man. I shudder now to think what it would have felt like to be ripped open by such a sword.
"Go on," the warrior jeered. "Take a nice long look at it, son. Might as well get acquainted with it in advance, should you try anything funny."
His warning tones should have warded me off for good, but there was something very endearing about Aldane. Not that I could yet put my finger on it.
"Where am I?" I stumbled, addressing Carlai, the only one present who did not look as though they wanted to murder me.
Carlai's gaze deepened, her eyebrows lifting with expression. "Majula, a refuge for the lost, and the withered. And that hole where you just came out of is called The Gutter."
"The Gutter?" The words did not provoke recollection. Nonetheless, the reproachful manner in which Carlai spoke of it did not exactly fill my heart with glad.
"It's a place where all of the unwanted things are thrown into. Which is why I don't understand why anyone would throw a handsome thing like you down there!"
Handsome? Thing? Now, I was receiving mixed opinions, and was more confused than ever.
I wanted so badly to ask her questions. The problem was, I didn't know what they were, how to phrase them, or even if the answers were within reach. And as it turned out, there were bigger fish to fry.
Aldane had heaved his sword from his shoulders, and swung it into a position of combat readiness. But he wasn't looking at me. His eyes were fixed on a path to the right of where we were standing. An avenue now tarnished by the shuddering shadows of approaching figures, and the relentless pounding of hooves.
"Can you fight?" Aldane asked gruffly.
"I'm not sure," I admit. "I don't even have a weapon!"
The northerner laughed for the first time since I had met him, and he looked at me with his eyes blazing, a pre-slaughter sweat coating his forehead and shaggy black hairs.
"Well, I guess you're about to find out!"
To Be Continued...
Hello DkS FanFiction community! It's been a long time, hasn't it? But now, following on from my Epic Tale, The Army of Four, and my... uh, that other story, Dark Lols, I now bring you a new story set in the new and beautiful world of Drangleic. The Magician's Tail will feature mostly OC's, as I wanted to tell a unique story this time around, but you can look forward to some familiar faces returning in Dark Lols II: The Second One, which is coming soon...
Thanks for reading, and please leave your reviews below! I'm dying (again and again) to know what you think of this new tail (hehe).
See ya'll later ;)
ASunbroToServeTwo