womb, the now abstinent gremlin held the cumbersome receptacle with engrossing veneration. He spoke only to the stillness of his prison.
Marmalock Arabolis's treasure is mine to keep forever," he hissed venomously to the darkness of the cavern. "When the wizard returns, if his urn is in my possession, Marmalock will return me to a mortal being, a wizard like himself, a man with a soul , again able to practice magic. No longer will I suffer as a serpent like creature beneath the ground, doomed to live on roots and worms."
Lardock Trappler ignored the gold and silver stores, riches that had become gathered from all over the country side in Aboregale before its invasion by Trome. They circumscribed his room in neglected disarray: chests filled with fine silk gowns, weapons and armor plated with silver, wine glasses and jewelry made from solid gold. Admonition concerning powers of immemorial irritation and abhorrent petulance threatened selfish encroachers of the ambiance surrounding his treasure. In the jar, he guarded with exorbitant precaution, were all the worries and fears of mankind. Condensed into a book on sorcery, the volume's contents became stored in the memories of only three living men: Marmalock Arabolis, Lardock Lagarias Trappler and Lord Feydor Antonavich Volki. To the owner of the receptacle's contents went varied powers associated with magic.
With the volume on wizardry, in Lardock Trappler's jar, was an exorcist's necklace. To the holder of that necklace were endowed all powers of evil associated with the book on magic. Fury and indignation spelled arrogance in a primeval intuition that kept Lardock poised, in audacious preservation of the castle's hidden remembrances. Once a recreant advisor to the area's governor and the estate's owner, Lardock Lagarias Trappler advocated the surrender of Hel's necklace to Lord Feydor Volki and the army of Trome. He was, like Marmalock Arabolis, a diviner who advised the ruling class. As well as a magician, Lardock was an uncongenial land owner who had become neither venerated nor praised by his subjects.
To Hel's necklace, through the Torymorton's book on occult knowledge, was associated the power of death. Owners of the ornamented intaglio, an elaborate ansate cross, held capabilities of drawing life from animate things and beings over a great distance. Destruction of crops, game and people was a domain empowered by the holder of the magic emblem. All forms of life, persisting animation, fell into a realm of power ruled by knowledgeable controllers of Hel s grim keepsake. Eternal sufferings in her irresistible sphere of non-existence, wherein victims of death resided in eternal torment and anguish, became controlled by the keeper of the dead. Power beyond the understanding of human beings became embodied with the holder of the silver plated medallion.
Two men's magic clashed, in a final duel, before retreat of the castle's forces to the citadel of Emperor Nicholas Torymorton. Foreseeing the inevitable fall of his fortress, Lardock Trappler hid possessions entrusted to him by Marmalock Arabolis in a sealed container. The necklace had become deemed, by all practitioners of magic, to belong to the keeper of the dead: Odin's daughter. A battle between the two necromancers ensued in which the conjurer, Lardock Trappler, became ostracized and defeated by the overwhelming power of Marmalock Arabolis's magic. Proprietorship guided wrathful and troglodytic vanity in the now subservient vassal of, Marmalock, the affecting wizard.
The two men, Lardock Lagarias Trappler and Marmalock Arabolis, had continually been at odds with one another over safety of items used in practicing arts of divination. The adversaries each held unique knowledge involving particular articles of inordinate knowledge imparted by the acrimonious book on sorcery. Lord Feydor Volki, the ruler of Trome, was aware of subterfuge. Like Marmalock and Lardock, he was also proficient in exercising the secret book's transcended definiens, a capability held only by three human beings.
Lardock Trappler became given a choice, after his defeat by Marmalock, between death and a form of lower reincarnation. The wizard of lesser power, Lardock, expected Marmalock's victory; he protected his own sedition by hiding the two highly prized possessions in a jar. Rather than death, through the superior wonder working and spell casting of Marmalock Arabolis, Lardock chose transformation into another form of life where he was no longer able to practice a mesmerizing spellbinding on the rulers of Trome and Aboregale.
Amid confusion of retreating inhabitants in the fortress, along with Hel's necklace, Lardock stole the lamentable book on communicating with spirits of the dead. Both items belonged to Marmalock Arabolis and Emperor Nicholas Torymorton. In a cave below the soldiers' barracks, covering the buried well, Lardock hid the vexatious accumulation stored inside the jar along with the castle's abandoned mountain of treasure left by the inhabitants. As their final gesture, to prevent the useful water source and untransportable wealth from falling into hands of the conquering army, soldiers from Aboregale sealed the convenient tunnel's entrance by toppling a heavy stone wall on top of it, trapping Lardock and the portentous cache of riches beneath the castle's ponderous blockhouse.
Even in an exiguous state, he was able to tunnel, indistinctly, from the condescending profundity of pitch darkness in his tomb, back to the lethargic earth's chilly surface. Like a reptilian mole, burrowing through a condensed consolidation of mud and loose stones, Lardock found a way out of the cave. In subservient form, however, he had become left nearly blind by Marmalock's mastery and beguiling witchcraft. Lardock Trappler was hideous to look at and completely unable to cast his own spells. He could find his way about on the earth's surface only at night. He exited his tunnel, beneath limestone walls of the fortress, only during hours of evening to look about the ground for food.
Three items of wizardry were necessary to effect efficacious magic on the advancing forces of Lord Volki. Viking's gods became directed by practitioners of black magic and controlled by the items: a book of spells that explained how to practice magic, Hel's necklace (the world of the living's key to a realm belonging to the keeper of the dead) and Emperor Torymorton's scepter (used to detect enemies and see into the future). The prophetic staff, held by the defeated emperor, was in the hands of Marmalock. His thwarted foe, Lardock, kept Hel's necklace and the book on magic. The belittled disputant concealed these two particulars from Marmalock and Lord Volki with determined admonition. Lardock swore not to return the book or necklace to either antagonist until he became restored, again, into the form of a human being capable of practicing magic.
From their camouflaged cover, Landregal's dissension continued with men who took him prisoner. In the middle of uncertainty, over his own destiny, he could feel an illogical lure of distasteful compulsion: coercion created by presence of the austere castle. The sauntering hunter rolled discontentedly on the ground in his new robe. Forkbeard skeptically eyed the blackened portals leading into the inclement garrison.
"Nothing stirs in the suitable stronghold that I can see," he told Chin Le. The discordant persecutor, Forkbeard, warned further, "Light no fires tonight. We will sleep on the ground and approach the fort at first dawn. I feel as though someone is surveying us from within the defenses. It is an inescapable compulsion. I perceive an antagonist's resentful eyes, they hide somewhere in the vacuous hollows of those darkened windows, staring back at me in mocking derision. It is as though an imperious observer denotes our presence without seeing us."
Chin Le shook from a moderate cold in the evening air as he rested by a tree. Despondently, Utanba Tu dozed in acquiescence to his own fatigue. Experiencing the same irksome perception that bothered Forkbeard, the African tracker and Mongol warrior relaxed in alleviating comfort. The two men let their minds focus momentarily on benign somnolence. Discriminate apprehension, proliferated by their leader, kept all four men from soundly unimpaired sleep.
At night, as Lardock Lagarias Trappler blindly groped his way to the surface outside limestone fortifications to the castle, he listened to still night air. Reptilian apprehension discriminated an isolated spore from people at a great distance. Subdued light enhanced his feeble vision. Crevices in webbed feet meshed in humidified earth as he stood upright on powerful legs to determine direction of the wind. Lardock's bewailing sentiment disclosed his tautological sentience and fright. Alarming susceptibilities, transmitted by traces of the malodorous hominids in outlying woods, sent intrusive panic into an already nervous anxiety in the vanquished sorcerer's watchful awareness. Lardock's timid attention became hesitant at the dangerous circumstance. A deep entrenchment, filled with water, separated ominous castle walls from the sinister black forest. Lardock splashed comfortably into the dank trough and splashed easily to its opposite side; he emerged, wet and distracted, on its outer bank. As he stumbled over wet rocks in search of food, the conquered wizard acknowledged antipathy and loathing toward the presence of an intrusion into his gloomy domain.
Lardock peered, in lurking curiosity, into the coldness of hostile shadows projected by an appendant moon as it hid on the dark horizon. The trivial silver crescent, its convex edges terminating in keen-edged points, raced with light running steps behind profuse autumn clouds. Thin, hazy, cirrostratus vapor of fall, high in the atmosphere, created a visionary halo in the prosaic undercurrent of night.
Clouded dullness covered the shimmering evening as Lardock crept, distrustfully, into the woods to reconnoiter what his credulous senses disclosed in the ungovernable night air. He moved in awkward, agitated, inquiry to the manifestation of a presumptive compulsion that, close at hand, intrusive invaders became concealed in the plant life not far from his retreat. Threat to the Torymortons' irreplaceable belongings, as well as his own, fathered Lardock's instability. As he neared Saoel Forkbeard and the three reposing men, disturbed admonition warned the Viking of Lardock's inauspicious approach. Drowsy, his mind ominously engaged in the transpositional content of laconic dreams, Chin Le heedfully opened his eyes to witness Forkbeard as he struggled with the clumsy interloper. Lardock Trappler lay on the ground screaming in a high pitched yell as Forkbeard flailed him mercilessly with a clenched fist. "Quick, bring a rope for the contemptible ghoul!" Forkbeard yelled to his partners. "Another one of Loki's worthless demons has chanced upon our proximity."
The confident Mongol bounded fearlessly to his feet and hurdled to aid the indignant Norseman as he scuffled with the intruder. "What form of maddening spook has your great god, Odin, sent us tonight archer? Has petulance no end in this disarrayed country of yours?" impugned, Chin Le, the aroused warrior.
"Bring something to bind the mutant's accursed talons," demanded Forkbeard. Lardock Trappler continued to repulse the vigorous Scandinavian by assault with caustic fangs and bestial claws. The spurred hook of Lardock's short nails and sharp teeth lacerated Forkbeard's arms and legs.
Chin Le quickly secured a rope from the bridle of Landregal's frightened horse. Forkbeard tied the binding securely around Lardock's hands and feet. Once bound, the fatuous demon continued to resist his captors. Forkbeard secured Lardock to the trunk of a stout spruce tree with the useful aid of Chin Le. The men rested placidly and waited for dawn, cautiously watching their overpowered prisoner for signs of observable ferociousness. "Do you think he may have had accomplices," questioned Chin Le?
"I think not," Forkbeard replied conformably. "He blundered upon us in such an inordinate manner that I sense it was an accident. In the morning we will question this conspirator as to his intention and get a better look at him in the light."
Lardock Trappler twisted in protracted agony at the base of the spruce tree. The four men observed steadied results of Marmalock's magic as dawn's still twilight crept upon a resonant horizon. Saoel Forkbeard scowled at the disabled and powerless sorcerer, running a callous thumb over the notched edge of his