Silver peak, p.1
Silver Peak, page 1
part #2 of Sky Realms Online Series
Contents
ALSO IN THE SERIES
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Epilogue
ALSO IN THE SERIES
About Troy Osgood
FROM THE PUBLISHER
ALSO IN THE SERIES
GRAYHOLD
YOU’RE READING: SILVER PEAK
UP NEXT: AXESTORM
PROLOGUE
He awoke with a start, immediately checking his status bars.
All were full, even Vitality.
A good and full night’s rest. So why had he awakened so abruptly? A nightmare? There was nothing that he could recall. If there had been, it was fading fast.
Something had awoken him, but what?
Listening carefully, he heard no sounds. As it should be.
The tower was empty.
As it should be.
No one could find it, not without a key map.
He was safe and isolated.
Just how he wanted it.
For now.
It wouldn’t last. He knew it. Eventually, his isolation would end. By his choice, just as he had designed it. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d been alone for so long, nothing but his research, that he was not looking forward to the day it ended.
But it was not today.
He glanced out the glass window and saw the familiar star-filled night sky. Dark shapes blocked out the stars, islands floating in the air. Still a couple hours until the sun would start to rise, he decided to get out of bed. He was awake now, and there was always something that needed to be done.
Walking over to the window, pulling a robe on, he looked out into the night. Dark shadows hung below the window, the tower built right on the edge of the island. Each shadow was another island so far below that even the largest was small from this height.
The shattered and fractured world of Hankarth.
He paused as he passed the library, a room he had not entered in weeks, looking through the open stone archway. Books lined all of the circular walls, from floor to the very high ceiling. Ladders on steel runners gave access to the highest shelves. A gaslamp hung from the high ceiling above, smaller ones attached to the shelves at intervals along the walls, sending light throughout the room. In the middle of the room was a large table with six globes positioned around it.
Something about one of the globes caught his eye. It was showing a myriad of colors, constantly shifting, where the others were all a foggy gray.
Excited, he walked into the room, coming around to the front of the table. Made of pine, incredibly large and worn, cracks ran along its length. Spread out over it and held down in the corners was a large map. Parchment, cracked with age, the lines written upon it were still as crisp and clear as the day they had been drawn.
It was a map, a map of Hankarth and all the scattered islands. Because of the nature of the world, islands floating over other islands, there were no world maps. They were impossible to make, one landmass would always obscure another. Maps were fragments, notations that gave rough directions from one island to another.
But somehow this map showed the world in detail. No island obscured another, they all lay together like a giant puzzle, space separating them. It was like the islands were all at the same elevation, pieced together how they had once been with gaps between them that indicated the land that had fallen into the abyss below. Hundreds of lines, handwritten notes, covered the map, each island having dozens of sentences in a tight and small font.
In the middle of the map, where no island existed, was a large black metal spike. It pierced the map and the table but did not rip the paper. The cracks in the table spiraled out from the spike.
He ignored the map and the spike, instead focusing on the globe. Smooth, a ball made of clear crystal, in its depths there was the image of a lone tower at the top of a flat hill. Laying his hand on top, the image changed and shifted. It zoomed in on the tower, and he saw the bodies of what looked to be Boarin, humanoid boars, picked apart by scavengers. Tilting his hand, the image shifted again and moved, following a path into the tower. Up a couple flights of stairs, the image stopped on a room and rotating around, showing a chest in the middle of the wooden floor.
An open chest.
One of the maps had been found.
He smiled.
It was coming together. The plan he had worked so hard for, the designs he had impossibly worked and somehow created. It was starting.
Quickly he searched the large world map, locating the tower shown in the crystal. Finding it on the island called Cumberland, he looked around the area, searching for signs. He concentrated on the many small villages and ruins that dotted the island.
But there was nothing.
With a sigh, knowing it would be even longer now, he stepped back from the table and its map and the spike. He turned and started to walk away when something on another island caught his attention.
Edin. Just to the northeast of Cumberland, it would have been floating above Cumberland on any other map. There on the southeastern edge was a new marking. A town, small and ruined, the old marking had changed. Before there had been the symbol for ruins, now there was a half-built house.
A Settlement Stone had been claimed.
He tapped his fingers against the aged table. Things were in motion and he had much to do.
The Sage, known as Bastian, smiled. Things were going to get very interesting.
CHAPTER ONE
A COUPLE WEEKS AFTER THE EVENTS OF GRAYHOLD…
Hall looked down at the town sitting alone in the wide-open meadow, most of it sunken down and below the ground. Grass covered the roofs, the front walls mostly rotted away, the sunken dirt street overgrown with weeds. It looked ruined, abandoned. No one had lived there for years.
And it was now his.
Only five or so days after claiming the Settlement Stone of Skara Brae and the fight with Vertoyi, the Wood Elven Custodian of the Grove, and then defending the Gnomes of Greenheight Vale against the Spriggan, he still couldn’t believe it. He was the Lord of a town. A small town, it would only support around one hundred if that, but it was still a town.
Or was it a village?
From the top of the ridge, called Breakridge, that separated the meadow from the rest of Edin, Skara Brae looked small and forlorn. Lonely. Its emptiness emphasized. He had a hard time imagining it as thriving at all. Why would anyone choose to live there?
The small village, sunken into the ground, was nestled in the middle of a wide meadow surrounded by mountains on the north and south and the high ridge on the east. The west side was the edge of Edin, nothing beyond but the sky and the long fall to the nothingness below.
A harsh, sometimes cold wind came off the open sky and cut through the meadow. It pushed along, funneled by the mountains. To the north, there were two plateaus cut into the mountainside. The higher had nothing on it, a river coming out of the mountain and falling to the next level below. That plateau contained a Druid’s Grove and a Branch of the World Tree.
He had fought a battle there only days before, coming close to dying.
The river continued through a small pond, the Branch on an island in the middle surrounded by standing stones, and then fell down the side of the mountain again into another small pond before continuing to the ridge and ending in a larger pond at the base.
Small brooks flowed across the meadow, small groups of trees dotted the grassland.
The south mountains extended closer to the village itself, almost curling around a dense forest of pines, oaks, and other trees that rose up from the grade of the meadow, disappearing in the shadows of the mountains. Greenheight Vale, where the Valedale Gnomes lived.
A lot of land but isolated and cut off from civilization.
Auld, the city they had arrived at was in the southern part of Edin, over a week away and no roads connecting the two. It was all overland travel through moors and highlands. Dangerous lands as they knew of a Trow village in the area. A road did come west out of Auld, heading in Skara Brae’s direction for a bit before turning more south. That one led to what would be the nearest city, Silver Peak Keep.
&
It had taken a couple days to start to recover from the fight with Vertoyi, the former and corrupted Custodian of the Druid’s Grove, and then the fight with the Spriggans after. Hall still wasn’t fully recovered. His Vitality below maximum, and it wouldn’t raise any higher. He needed a good night’s sleep, or twenty, and there were no facilities in Skara Brae that would currently give that. They were comfortable in the village but it was not the same as staying at an Inn or in real beds with full meals.
The others in his small party were the same. They all had small bruises and aches that magical healing could not help. Only rest could.
It was an easy decision to make. They needed supplies and Hall needed to figure out what to do with his village. Leigh, the Human Druid who was the new Custodian, needed materials so she could start cleansing the corruption. Roxhard, the Dwarf Warden, and Sabine, the Human Witch, both needed training as they had leveled up after the fight with Vertoyi.
There were supplies to get, healing to be done, gear that needed repairing. The list was long and growing longer as Hall thought about what was needed for Skara Brae. At the minimum, they needed materials to build up enough of the village to make it livable for them. Or at least for him and Leigh.
The Druid was the new Custodian; she would be tending the Grove.
It was his town, and he intended to use it as a base of operation.
He hadn’t had the conversation with Roxhard and Sabine yet if they intended to stay as well or move on. The Skara Brae Settlement Stone interface currently showed the two as part of the village’s population.
Skara Brae Town Stats:
Lord: Hall
Status: Ruins
Morale: N/A
Government: N/A
Appointed Officials: N/A
Population: 4
Production: N/A
Faction: None
Allies: Gnomes of Valedale
Trade Partners: N/A
Enemies: N/A
Hall had a feeling that Roxhard would stay. He was starting to think of the Dwarf, really a fourteen-year-old kid in the body of a hundred-plus-year-old Dwarf, as a younger brother. And there was Roxhard’s crush on Leigh to help motivate him. Sabine was a different story. He wasn’t sure what her overall motivation was. He hoped she would stay. She could be a bit harsh at times, snarky, but she was an excellent Witch, knowing her class well. And overall Hall liked her, the first Player he had met and talked to after the Glitch.
The problem as Hall saw it: they were short on funds to do all that was needed. Each of them had a tiny bit of gold but it would go quickly. There was the emerald sunstone and some other jewels that could get a lot of gold, but those were for emergencies only. They needed coins to get everything they needed. Staying in Skara Brae would not help that problem.
They needed to go to Silver Peak Keep.
And probably spend a lot of time there.
Which was time away from Skara Brae.
With a sigh, Hall turned away from the village and started down the long switchback trail that led down into Edin’s highlands. He walked under the stone arch, seeing the other three not that far down the trail along with Leigh’s cow companion, Angus. He looked up into the sky and saw Pike, his dragonhawk, circling.
He’d only spent a handful of nights in Skara Brae, but it already felt like home.
They kept close to the mountains, not going too deep into the grassy hills of the highlands. The last time they had come this way, through the hills, they had encountered Trow in the fog. There was always fog in the mornings, most of the time burning off as the sun rose, but sometimes lingering.
The Trow had surprised them, and they had gotten lucky in their response. It had been a quick but brutal fight, and Hall did not want to press their luck. He wanted to avoid another ambush if possible. They were not at full strength, bruised still from the recent fights, gear in bad need of repair, and low on potions. The plan was to avoid combat on the journey to Silver Peak Keep. Once there, repaired and healed, it would be time to head out and start making some gold.
Hall knew all plans were destined to fail.
“We need a name,” Roxhard said on their second day out from Skara Brae.
It was morning, just a couple hours after sunrise and a cold meal. The fire had died out in the middle of the night, and they had all woken chilled and damp. Hall wanted to get moving so they had not taken the time to light a fire. Now, they walked with cloaks pulled tight to ward off the morning’s lingering chill.
“What?” Sabine asked.
Hall could barely hear them as he was twenty feet or so ahead, scouting and trying to avoid ambushes.
“A Guild name,” Roxhard explained.
His voice was deep, rough like gravel. The body of a hundred- or so year-old Dwarf from the Stonefire clan, Roxhard was, in reality, a fourteen-year-old boy. Or used to be. After the Glitch that had trapped the minds of a couple dozen Players in the Sky Realms Online game, Roxhard was now truly a Dwarf. Just with the mind of a teenager.
A fine Warden for his age, Roxhard knew his class and his abilities. But Hall was worried about how the teenager was dealing with his new reality. It had to be tougher than an adult. Not only was Roxhard dealing with being trapped in Sky Realms Online, but he was also dealing with puberty and teenage awkwardness on top of it.
The Dwarf walked at the rear of the line, behind the women and the cow with the dragonhawk riding on its back. Angus mooed at Roxhard’s suggestion.
“Angus agrees,” he said with a chuckle.
Angus mooed again.
“There's four of us,” Sabine said. “Why do we need that?”
“Isn’t that what you do when you find a group of people you want to adventure with?” Roxhard asked, a bit embarrassed.
Sabine, a Witch, didn’t answer. Either she couldn’t think of a reply that defeated Roxhard’s dubious logic or else she just didn’t care. Hall felt it was the latter. Sabine was a hard one to get a read on. She was trustworthy, he knew that, but sometimes she could be arrogant, angry, and a bit mean.
But like Roxhard, she knew her class and abilities.
Both were Players, like Hall himself. They had all been from Earth, the real world, and had been gamers playing the VRMMORPG called Sky Realms Online. The most advanced game ever. During a play session, there had been a glitch, and they all awoke to find themselves now living in the game and back at Level One. Their minds had apparently, according to Electronic Storm, the developers, been downloaded into the game itself. They were now digital consciousnesses that were living in the gameworld.
Each dealt with it in their own ways. Sabine was angry and Hall suspected scared, which was where her meanness came from. Roxhard was scared and worried about his mother and brother. Hall wasn’t sure what he was. Practical. He didn’t really feel anything about not being in the real world and was starting to accept and even enjoy that he was now in Sky Realms and truly living the life. He didn’t miss his old one.
