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Will do this one in takes, see if people like it.
I couldn't get my brain to make the full story jsut yet~
Fantasy short again, a little darker maybe this time.
Enjoy.
The young man smiled to himself. Once he would have been overjoyed to stand here, after finding the tower. Other times he would probably have avoided this place at all costs. It was ironic how he only now, after losing everything, he could finally face this place with the calm attitude it deserved.
First he had sought it as a young boy, barely twelve, trying to prove his worth. The boy would have rushed in, and would probably have fallen to the first trap he'd meet on the way in. Well, maybe the second, it didn't matter. Undoubtedly, the second trap was still not significantly further in than the first.
Later, when he was around sixteen years old, he would have tried to find it, but only to escape himself. Even scared of his own shadow, he would probably never have entered. Even worse, he would never have accepted his fate as he had now, would he have entered back then.
No, this was how it was supposed to be. A man that had nothing left in the world to find, was the only one who would go looking for this place.
After his sixteenth birthday, he went to war. When he came back, he found that the war had taken from him, what he tried to protect. The friend he trusted to protect his family, had abandoned them, leaving them vulnerable. Apparently they had already been killed two weeks after he went to the front.
Was he bitter about this? No, A man in bitterness would not go searching, bitterness makes blind. He had simply accepted that there was no way back to his old life, and nothing left to build a new one.
The young man leaned on his battered sword, as the thoughts went through his head. In front of him loomed the dark tower. It was a dark tower of the kind that you would expect to have a necromancer overlord, or maybe some crazed fire-mage.
“Big, dark, creepy tower built with black stone, check.”
His eyes wandered a little further. The tower's perimeter seemed safe enough to proceed. He lifted his sword slightly, and stepped through the frame that had once supported a wooden door. It had long since rotten away.
Once inside, the young man noticed two things. The first was that he had a little more trouble with breathing, the second one was the green glow, that added to the eerie feeling he already had.
“Faint, green glowing mushrooms and damp air, check.”
Just like most towers, this tower had a big staircase leading up to the upper levels. Unlike most towers it also had a trapdoor going down.
Sounds coming from above included clanking chains, and... rattling bones? Maybe there used to be a necromancer here after all.
The young man laid himself down on his belly and put his ear against the trapdoor. He couldn't hear anything, and yet his gut was telling him that down there, a lot of things were creeping about.
Then he looked up, and his eyes were caught by an old inscription on the wall next to him. He ahd seen it before, once. Somewhere on the battlefield, probably? He couldn't really remember.
He reached out, and felt the cold stone. The runes inscribed into it felt familiar, they felt a little like the carvings his father would make.
Except, these carvings seemed to be much older and colder. It was as if they even sucked the warmth from his fingertips.
Those who choose not to trust
Leave the world behind and seek
Glory to ashes, riches to dust
Into darkness, into darkness
Those who reach underground
Leave the world and call the void
Dive in the abyss, nothing be found
Into darkness, into darkness
Those who find ever-bane
Leave the world, deny your soul
River of nothing, try to stay sane
Into darkness, into darkness
Dive into darkness, but keep your light.
“Then, down we go”, the young man told himself.
The trapdoor creaked as he opened it, but it opened nonetheless. The man tied a rope to the middle support beam, that didn't seem too rotten, and hung the other end down the trapdoor.
And so, with nothing on him but a battered sword, some black leather armor, and the few necessities he had hidden in the pockets of his cloak. He descended into the cold, shifting shadows of the cellar.
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