With a startled jerk, his body returned to full functionality.
In one swift move, Zendar pulled out the catan behind him and slashed upward with it. The creature whose presence had drawn him out of his sleep cycle only had time to shriek once before its head was separated from its sinewy neck. Bluish blood made a fine mist in the air, covering Zendar’s pale open face in a splash of color. The rest of the lurker’s body fell away, twitching as its killer shook the blood off his blade with a casual flick.
Just two feet away from the disembodied head was the silver pod shape of the emergency preservation shell.
Sheathing away his weapon, Zendar knelt beside the shell. Some of the lurker’s blood had splashed on the device’s outer casing, and he carefully wiped it away with the edge of a sleeve. A small display screen the size of his fist mounted on the casing informed him that the shell could only hold Ayn’s badly damaged body for another seventy-two hours, ten minutes and fifty-three seconds.
Sighing, he stood up to look around. For this night’s stop, he had chosen a spot far from prying eyes. A vertical forest of cables climbed up the walls of the deep pit they had settled down in, with rings of light interspersed every ten feet or so. A ledge, suspended a hundred feet up, reminded him of how he had come down.
Zendar took his breakfast in silence, chewing mechanically at a bland nutrient wafer from the satchel around his waist while he ran another scan of the vicinity. Other than the rapidly decomposing corpse of the lurker nearby, his sensors reported nothing; but he knew from experience that where there was one lurker beast, others were sure to follow.
“You know,” a familiar voice rasped. “I read a long time ago…Humanity had creatures like the lurkers; uncontrollable population and impressive adaptability like theirs. Cockroaches, I think they were called.”
“I know,” Zendar said, resisting the urge to look.
She sighed. “Well we should get out of here, while we can. More of them will be coming soon.”
“Yeah.” Giving in to the temptation, he looked up.
As always, there was no one there.
Two days later, they came to the sword graveyard.
Zendar let go of the shell’s reins as he looked around at the solemn landscape he now found himself in. Blades of different shapes, forms and functions stuck out of the ground like steel flowers for miles in every direction before him. A clear star-speckled stretch of velvet stretched overhead, and a somewhat chilling, slight breeze washed over him. A path through the field of swords lay open before him, wide enough to accommodate four men walking abreast. It lead right up to a tall monument fashioned after some mythical beast of legend, and to a building that rose up in the misty distance like something out of a fairy tale; a castle of stone and glass.
He broke out the map to check, but as the ghostly holographic image projected itself into being from the machina in his gloved hand, he noticed a figure watching him from atop the monument. Thumbing the map off, he slipped the machina into his pocket before picking up the reins of the crude sled he had constructed for the shell. The hooded figure watched in silence as he approached, bare feet dangling off the edge of the monument’s head. Zendar dragged the sled to a stop just several feet away from the monument’s base. He dropped the reins, took only a few steps forward when the stranger barked, “That’s far enough.”
“Do you live here?” He asked, looking up.
The stranger said nothing.
“I need to find a rebirth chamber. My friend, she’s…”
“You’re trespassing.” A female’s voice, barely out of her childhood. She pointed sternly at him. “Father…I mean, the master doesn’t like trespassers.”
“She needs help,” Zendar snapped back.
She flinched as if his anger had physically burned her. “Tch, fine. I’ll go tell him then.” She jumped into the air, the strange lump at the back of her hooded robes flapping open, revealing a set of ten-feet long wings made of blades hanging off a metal frame. “Wait here,” she said, leaving an unspoken threat in her hostile tone.
Zendar nodded.
She took off, gliding gracefully towards the castle.
An hour and seventeen seconds later, she returned in a flurry of chiming metallic wingbeats.
Zendar got off his seat on the ground as the winged woman strode over to the shell, her irritation evident in the short angry steps she took. “What are you doing?”
“This empee needs to be taken care of,” she snapped tersely. “Fa…the master would very much like to meet you in the study.”
She placed a hand on the shell, even as Zendar’s right hand dropped near the hilt of the catan.
“Don’t,” he said.
With a derisive snort, she reached under the shell, hoisting the device up in her arms. Her wings snapped open and in a single powerful stroke, shot her skyward, leaving the golem earthbound.
The castle was a dreamlike thing of stone and wood and glass, of spires and turrets and foreboding walls. As he crossed the lowered drawbridge over the mile-wide moat, Zendar allowed his body’s augmentations to run assessments of the structure. Facts and figures splashed along the sides of his field of view, giving him information about its age, structural integrity, number of occupants and the possible location of his companion.
Of the latter, he found no trace.
Before the portcullis stood a brutish-looking hulk, adorned in a set of polished, ornate silver armor that was all angles and sharp edges. The giant silver knight stared down impassively at the little golem that was approaching it, the hilt of a broadsword that was just as large as its frame rising over a shoulder.
Zendar came to a stop, locking eyes with the glowing orbs behind the visor of the knight’s helmet. “The master’s expecting me.”
For a moment, the knight made no move. Then it tilted its head at him. Behind it, the grille gate began to rise in the grinding noise of long-unused analog machinery. “Follow.” The knight’s voice was a low rumble like distant thunder as he turned to walk through the open entrance. Zendar obeyed the command after a second’s hesitation, casting one last look back the way he had come when the wind seemed to die down.
They crossed the stone courtyard in silence, where alabaster statues and bronzed mechanical figures slowly enacted a meaningless play of life and death. Humanoid machina, draped in white livery worked amongst the glacially moving figurines, cleaning, repairing and adjusting the pieces as they battled. A few looked up as the knight lead Zendar through a clear lane toward the central keep of the castle, but then they either resumed their task or dropped optical camouflages in place when the golem returned their inquiring looks. Zendar noticed the peculiar sigil that they all bore; a stylized representation of some unidentifiable avian creature.
The central keep rose before them with vitrified walls and blackened scraps of cloth that Zendar’s internal computer informed him to be remnants of heraldry. Through another portcullis, they climbed up a winding, spiraling flight of stairs that took them a third of the way up the tall keep. The silver knight brought him to a long narrow landing at the height of the stairs, with several rooms on either side of the corridor. Zendar came to a halt as the knight pointed at the room at the far end of the corridor.
“Master,” he said simply. Just as the knight began to leave, Zendar called out, “Wait. Where’s the rebirth chamber? I had someone with me, but she was taken to the chamber. Do you know how I can get there?”
The knight shrugged. His armor clanked with the motion. “Master knows,” he said, then began the long climb back down.
Zendar walked right up to the door at the end of the hallway, keeping a wary eye roving over the vicinity. There was a stillness in the air some part of him found unnerving; an eerie quiet that lacked the subsonic hum and drone of hidden machinery that was everywhere else in the land. He looked around the doorframe for some sign of an identification mechanism, found none, and proceeded to simply push the door open.
He emerged in a well-lit labyrinth of books, most of them ancient dusty volumes composed of that extinct organic material called paper. The book-filled shelves lined the walls of the large half-round room, branching out to form walls themselves, creating twisting, turning corners and pathways. A few feet before him, seated on the ground next to a stack of books, a boy of about six winters old looked up from a gold-and-silver backed tome resting on his lap. He had luminous pale blue eyes.
“Hello,” he said.
“I need to speak with the master,” Zendar said.
“Nee-sama? Why? Do you want something from him too?”
Zendar merely folded his arms, refusing to say anything more.
The boy closed the book, carefully set it atop the nearby stack, then stood up. “I’m Sraosha. What’s your name?”
“Zendar.”
Sraosha smiled. Briefly. “I know where Nee-sama is. Come on!”
He led the golem into the heart of the labyrinth, whistling a slow sad tune as he went. Zendar found the tune strangely familiar, but his attention was elsewhere and failed to recognize it. The deeper they plunged into the labyrinth, the higher the walls of books seemed to rise, until they blocked out all light and sound. The hairs along the back of his neck rose up, and his sensors detected the gradual buildup of background radiation and static charges in the atmosphere. Sraosha seemed not to notice a thing, and kept going at his half-walking, half-running pace. Feeling slightly uneasy, Zendar kept a hand on the hilt of the catan, clutching it in a steely grip.
A rectangle of light appeared in the distance of the dark tunnel they were in, and the boy said over his shoulder, “It’s not far. We’re almost there.”
Zendar grunted his assent and kept on walking. He noted that the boy had stopped the whistling, and had taken out a gold-plated analog stopwatch from the pocket of his waistcoat. Sraosha muttered something under his breath as he put the watch away, with Zendar noticing the same strange sigil engraved on the cover of the artifact. The light ahead grew stronger and brighter until suddenly they found themselves in a place that was not the study.
Sraosha stopped, turning to his guest with a grin. “Well…we’re here. That’s Nee-sama.” Zendar followed the line of sight pointed out by the boy’s arm, and found a man sitting on a rock close to the edge of the cliff face. “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind. In case Nee-sama wants to send you back.” A grim look that looked out of place on his youthful face flashed briefly. “He does that sometimes.”
Zendar nodded his thanks, then approached the master. His sensors told him that he was still in the library, albeit in an area where the atmospherics had increased by about twenty percent. His eyes told him that he stood on a cliff overlooking a vast ocean, with the orange-gold light of the dying sun painting the horizon in the colors of sunset. Chancing a look back, he found the boy with his pocket watch out again, standing before the mouth of a cave.
“So you’re Zendar, I see.”
He appeared to be an elderly gentleman in a period outfit like his brother, with long brown hair that was turning grey in places. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses perched on his hawkish beak of a nose, covering his sharp grey eyes that were at odds with his world-weary weathered frame. Despite the murmuring crash of pounding waves far below them, his voice carried far as if they stood in an empty room.
“Who are you?” Zendar asked.
“Only what you see before you.” He smiled, eyes twinkling as if he had just told a joke. “But please, call me Mithra.”
“You’re the master of the castle?”
“A shadow-lord in truth, but yes, for now you can say that.” Mithra sighed. “Care to sit, my friend?”
Zendar said nothing.
“A silent one, eh? I haven’t had one of those come by since…” His voice trailed off, a scowl creating more lines on his already lined face. “…since that man. A lifetime ago.” Mithra shook his head. “Have it your way then.”
He looked out to sea, falling silent for a minute. Zendar broke the silence first. “There was a woman, with wings of blades. She said she was taking my friend here.”
Mithra sighed again. “Ah, yes. That was Sylph you met. And yes, she brought Ms. Kaki to the rebirth chamber hours ago. She is healing up quite nicely now.”
“I need to see her.”
“In good time, Shindo. In good time.” Mithra fixed a steely gaze on him. “For a very long time, I have refused entry to most of those who approach this castle. Humanity may have faded away in this realm, but their greed and ambition still live on in their misbegotten children. For those granted permission, there is a rule; that you offer something in return for our aid. There is no avoiding this rule; it is the will of the castle itself. So tell me, Zendar Shindo, what do you offer me for your friend’s life?”
Zendar blinked. “I…” He stopped himself short, scowling at his indecision. Then he reached back and drew out his blade, planting it in the ground. Mithra eyed the weapon with something that was not quite curiosity. “Really? Do you offer this of your own volition?”
The golem nodded.
“As you wish.” Mithra gestured for him to pick up the blade, which he promptly sheathed away. For a long time, the master said nothing, and gazed into the blue watery horizon. “In the dungeons, there is a…creature,” he began slowly. “A burnt out hollow of a man, residing in the darkness and his own madness. He was a great sorcerer and king once, who possessed mastery over the very essence of flame. When his love betrayed him, the flame devoured him from the inside out, turning him into the monster that exists now.”
“I see,” Zendar said.
“This castle…belonged to him. Every now and then he sends out his abominations to test us.” Mithra fell silent, closing his eyes. “As payment for our aid, I require you to purge this place of him.”
Zendar grunted his understanding. “How do I get to the dungeons?”
The master gestured with one hand. Two rings of light appeared around the golem’s waist, with each ring moving in opposite directions from each other. In the space that gradually grew between them, nothing remained. “Good luck, Shindo. May your sword arm be true this day.”
In a final flash of radiant energy, Zendar was gone.
Sighing wearily, the master turned to look out over the ocean.
The dragonslayer seeks the Burnt King! What will happen next…?
Gryphon's Nest 2.0 
I like how this is going.
(I think you should add links after each chapter to previous – and next, when available – chapters, plus to a table of contents page.)