Fantasy Treasures

Here is another original of mine. This is actually the preface to a book I am working on. I have just started it, so I can’t tell you how it’s going, but I have high hopes.

“Well, that was a good day’s work,” stated a young man in splendid armor.

“Yeah, you would say that,” replied a gruff looking dwarf busy scrubbing at a greave. “You didn’t have to crawl from under the carcass of a dead Giant. I’ll never get the smell out of my Armor.”

“Oh, you’re just upset because I got in the killing blow. If you weren’t so busy hacking at his hamstrings you’d have noticed he was falling right on top of you.”

“Well, if you’d look around to what the rest of us are doing, before you start swinging that big toothpick, then perhaps…..”

“Are you two still at it,” interrupted the third member of their party, as he seated himself at the table. “I’d have thought the two of you would have settled your differences over the long ride back into town. Here, Saienci, I found you a nice elven wine,” he said sliding a glass in front of the young man. “And for our dear, Brak, I’m afraid they don’t carry any dwarven ale, but they do have a very strong dark stout. The proprietor tells me it may not be quite as strong as what your used to, but he has enough of it to fill even your bottomless thirst.” As he said this he indicated to a young serving girl behind him who placed a small cask and an earthenware mug in front of the dwarf.

The dwarf, in his turn, smiled and waved the mug away. He proceeded to pop the bung hole with his dagger and up turned the cask directly into his waiting mouth. A few minutes later he came up for air, a huge grin on his craggy face, “Well, Hrom, I’ll say one thing for you monks, for being human, you do know your drink.”

“Why thank you,” replied Father Hrom, “It comes from being cloistered. You spend all day going over musty tomes, then go back to a eight by eight room for the night. After a few years of this you’d be completely nuts if you didn’t have something else to fill the spaces. Thus we drink, inebriation is the only thing that keeps us sane. ”

“My sentiments exactly,” muttered Brak, as he upturned the cask a second time. “Girl, another,” he roared across the busy barroom a moment later as he brought the now empty cask down hard on the table.

They continued their conversation long into the night. The girl keeping a steady supply of drink going to their table, and every now and then a slice of mutton or beef. The proprietor was somewhat taken aback at the quantity, but then the Mayor had said not to worry about the bill, just send it over to the clerk’s office in the morning. After all, they had saved the town. The giant had been roaming the countryside for months, attacking farms and homesteads. It was only a matter of time before he’d decide to come into the town proper. If it hadn’t been for these three, there might not have been a town in the near future. So, he was more than happy to supply them all the food and drink they’d require.

Somewhere in the early morning hours the three made their way to their rooms upstairs for a much needed respite. It wouldn’t be until nearly noon before the first one would roll out of bed, much refreshed and ready for the next adventure.

It has been a while since I updated anything to the site, and until now nothing that was true prose. The following is a small piece of imagery that has crawled around in my head for many, many years. Hopefully it will paint the same picture for you that it has for me.

The Doorway
by D.E. Overmyer

Snow drops from overburdened tree limbs. A cardinal flutters from limb to limb, basking in the warm sunlight. A group of rabbits forage for food in the tufts of dead grass emerging from melting snow banks. Stillness settles over the glade. When without thought the creatures dive for cover, not realizing what is happening but knowing in some instinctive part of their brain that something is amiss.

A light manifests itself in mid air to one side of the glade. It expands to a horizontal line in the air. It expands upward and downward in equal lengths until reaching an apex of a dozen feet or so. Leaving a doorway to nothingness. Well, perhaps not nothingness, all doorways lead somewhere, and this one is no exception.

Soon the ground begins to shake. The trees in the glade soon shake off their covering of snow, by no choice of their own. Shapes appear in the distance through the doorway. Only seen as an increasing of the darkness. Soon a horseman emerges from the opening. A dark foreboding powerful man, if man is what it could be called. Man fits only as the general shape of the things armor, the instinctive feeling emanating from the creature is definitely an inhuman sense of wrongness. It rides astride a powerfully built destrier, well over 20 hands high, though no horse ever had eyes as dead.

Close on the heels of the first, pour a multitude of others equal in stature and dread. For many long minutes the horde rides forth. Steam rises from each hoof as it sits down on the icy earth. Not a sound is made, an absence of sound emanates forth. As if sound itself is afraid to make an appearance so long as this column of riders issue forth.

As the last horseman disappears in the distance, sound returns to the glade in the form of silence. Trampled earth, drifts of snow, and a lone empty Doorway are left in its wake.