Sword of Kings
Chapter 3 – Some Truths Revealed

by Bill W

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Legal Notice:
The following story contains descriptions of graphic sexual acts. 
The story is a work of fiction and has no basis in reality.
Don’t read this story if:
**You’re not 18 or over,    
**If it is illegal to read this type of material where you live,
**Or if you don’t want to read about gay/bi people in love or having sex.

The author retains copyright to this story.  Placing this story on a website or reproducing this story for distribution without the author’s permission is a violation of that copyright.  Legal action will be taken against violators.

I wish to extend my thank you to Emoe57 for his editorial assistance with this chapter.

E-mail responses to the stories, story suggestions, or other ‘constructive’ comments or advice may be sent to: bwstories8@aol.com.

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Kieren awoke some time during the night, and he panicked when he realized he wasn’t in familiar surroundings. He sat up in bed and began to look around, uncertain where he was or how he’d gotten there, and he tried desperately to study the room, seeing if it looked at all familiar. He needed to discover something that might give him a clue as to what this place was. Before he could solve this conundrum, he was startled by something moving next to him. He nearly jumped out of his skin, before lifting the edge of the covers, only to barely make out the familiar face of one of his friends. He turned to face the other side of his bed, lifted the covers, discovered the sleeping form of his other friend, and began to piece together this minor mystery.

Suddenly, it all clicked into place and he remembered having been brought to the king’s home to spend the night. He also remembered having been sent to his own home to say goodbye to his parents, and suddenly a rush of other images came flooding back at him. These scenes ignited a series of questions that now raced through his mind, and he began to realize he would need to get some answers. Carefully, he crawled out of the bed, trying desperately not to wake his two companions as he did so, and grabbed a robe he accidentally happened to discover, as he felt his way to the door and slipped out of the room.

The hallway was equally dark, and once there, he realized the absurdity of what he was attempting to do. How would he find Beraut, seeing he didn’t have the slightest idea where he was or which room the mage might be using? He stumbled along the wall, trying frantically to determine what he’d do next. At that moment he thought he saw something move farther along in the shadows, so he squeezed his body tightly against the wall and held his breath, hoping it wasn’t an intruder. When he saw nothing else that roused his suspicion, he moved on, wondering if he had lost all common sense.

He stumbled around in the dark for quite some time, before noticing a candle flickering somewhere off in the distance. Slowly he crept toward the light, being careful not to trip over anything along the way, so he wouldn’t alert whoever was there to his presence. As he peered around the corner, he saw Beraut reading by candlelight. Now, he boldly made his way into the room, causing the magician to look up.

“Kieren, what are you doing out of bed at this hour?” he asked the boy, trying to determine if something was wrong.

“I woke up and realized there were a lot of questions I need answered, so I came to find you. I need to know a lot more about Madumda,” he announced, quite forcefully. Kieren stared at the aged wizard, waiting to see how he was going to respond.

“You do need your rest, but I know you probably won’t sleep until you get what you want, so let’s try to do this quickly. I knew I would have to explain this to you sooner or later, so we might as well get it over with. Why don’t you sit down and make yourself comfortable.” Kieren pulled up a chair and sat next to the wizard, eagerly anticipating what he might learn.

“So what is it you wish to know?” the mage asked him.

“I want to know everything about Madumda and how he came to power.” Beraut’s lips began to curl, as he wondered if his young friend knew how much that would entail.

“Well, that is a great deal of information, but I will tell you what I think you need to know. Until nearly one hundred and two years ago,” he began, “this land was ruled by the great King Ethelbert and his descendants, the last of this line being King Orthilue. During those many years, including the present, Tarolia has been plagued by the existence of an evil, vindictive foe, the black wizard Madumda. Madumda was not always evil. In fact, he was once a member of the Great Council of Wizards where he and I were brothers. He was a very bright, adept, and ambitious magician, much older than myself. He was the fifth eldest of the council, of which I was the twelfth and youngest.”

“So he wasn’t always bad?” Kieren asked, amazed.

“No, not at first he wasn’t, though he may have had inclinations toward the dark side, but this is how it began. In about the fourth year of the reign of the mighty King Ethelbert, his majesty asked the Council of Wizards for their assistance. Thialfi, chief of the council, agreed and offered to help the king secure the country’s southern border from invasion. Thialfi then chose the next three eldest and most powerful mages to join him in this task, as he knew this would require a great deal of magic to be effective.”

“So you didn’t go, because you were the youngest?”

“No, I was also invited, not to assist, but merely to accompany, observe, and most importantly to learn. You see, at that time I was a novice and didn’t have much training or many skills.” Kieren studied Beraut now, unable to imagine him as an almost powerless young wizard.

“We were gone nearly three months on this errand, helping to push back the enemy, heal the wounded, and most significantly to set wards. These wards would seal off the southern border from any person with evil intent in his heart and make it impossible for him to enter the country.” Beraut could tell Kieren was a bit confused by his choice of words. “A ward is like an invisible barrier that couldn’t be penetrated by those carrying weapons or those who are malicious in nature,” he clarified.

“But they can’t see that barrier?”

“No, it is totally invisible. Anyway…” their conversation was interrupted, as two heads suddenly peeked around the corner. The wizard looked in that direction and spoke.

“You might as well come in and join us,” he said simply, and Garreth and Romaric came bursting in the room. “What are the two of you doing up?”

“I woke up and found Kieren gone,” Romaric began to explain, “so I got Garreth up to see if he knew where he went.” Garreth nodded, to support his friend’s statement.

“So what brought you here?” Beraut asked them.

“Well, we were walking around,” Garreth responded, “to see if we might be able to find him, when we heard his voice. So, what are you two doing?” Beraut cocked his head and gave the elf a dissatisfied look.

“Well, if you must know, Kieren came to find me, because he wanted some more information about Madumda.”

“Can we stay and listen too?” Romaric asked, excitedly.

“If you want, but this is for Kieren’s benefit, so I expect you two to remain quiet and merely listen.” The two elves simply nodded in reply, so the wizard began again. “Now where were we? Oh, yes. While Thialfi, the other elder wizards and I were away from Treblanc, Madumda was placed in temporary charge of the council and its fortress. He was to serve as the leader, in absentia, until the four older wizards returned after their task had been completed.”

“So Thialfi still trusted him?” Kieren wondered.

“Not completely, but until then, he had no reason to totally distrust him. However, during the fifth or sixth week of our departure, Madumda summoned each of the remaining six conjurers to attend a private audience with him. As they arrived at the reception hall, he would offer them a drink, but before they arrived he had put a sleeping potion in the goblet they would use. That way he could take his drink from the same jug, not arouse suspicion, and still overtake them, once the drugs took effect.”

“That’s really sneaky,” Romaric observed, only to receive a scowl in reply from the enchanter. Once he had made his point, Beraut continued.

“One by one he bound them and sealed their mouths, so they couldn’t recite any spells if they came to before he had finished his deed. Once they had been restrained, Madumda used a form of an ancient spell to neutralize them. He had uncovered this obscure incantation some time before, but held it in reserve, until he found the perfect moment to use it.”

“But how did he steal their power?” Kieren wanted to know.

“Madumda would place his staff near the head of his victim, recite the spell he had memorized, and then a thin strand of silvery light would stretch from their head to his staff, literally draining his captive of all of his supernatural powers. Methodically, Madumda siphoned the magical potential from each of them, accumulating and controlling it for his own diabolical use.”

“Did he kill them?” Garreth interrupted, almost in total disbelief. That too earned him a glare from the wizard, before he responded.

“Yes, he did,” Beraut told him, studying his reaction; to make sure he got the unspoken message. “By draining them of their power, he had also consumed their life force and sent them into oblivion. More significantly, he had simultaneously increased his own potency and heightened his status in the council. He had effectively reduced the membership of our body by half, but now he singularly represented that half’s magical potential…and he arrogantly began to think himself a god.”

“Really? He thought himself that powerful?” Kieren asked, astounded.

“Indeed he did.”

“But how could Madumda have learned all of that magic without anyone else knowing?” The expression on Kieren’s face let the wizard know how confused he was.

“We were all encouraged to study on our own in the library at Treblanc, and somehow he discovered volumes of magic the rest of us had either never seen or had forgotten their existence.”

“But how could the council have allowed such evil magic to continue to be around?” Kieren wondered. “Why didn’t they destroy the volumes which contained all of those spells?”

“There is no easy answer to this question,” the conjurer responded. “You see, magic in and of itself is not evil. The nefariousness comes from the user and how he utilizes this knowledge. The council had realized many decades ago they could not destroy various forms of knowledge merely because it might someday be subverted. If they had chosen that policy, then there would be little, if any, knowledge left in the world.”

Kieren was aghast. “Do you mean all magic can be used for evil too?”

“Yes, most of it can. So instead of destroying the knowledge, the Council decided it would be better to try to safeguard this type of information and maintain it in written form. That way they could one day retrieve it, if necessary, to counter its ill advised use. Intentions however, no matter how pure, are not always enough to prevent mistakes, and this was no exception. Eventually, the members of the council neglected to monitor access to these volumes, as they had vowed to do, and over time they even forgot about their existence.”

“So nobody could have prevented this?” the young man wanted to know.

“There were those of us who once knew about this magic, but it had been so long since any of us had dealt with it that we had forgotten about the ways it could be perverted. Madumda’s accidental finding of those volumes was unbeknownst to the rest of us, and even though his research started innocently enough, that soon changed.”

“So what happened next?”

“That’s when Madumda challenged Thialfi as leader. We had just returned to Treblanc, when we discovered Madumda’s treachery and he openly declared himself Chief of the Council. When he demanded that we follow and obey him, Thialfi and the others became incensed and stormed out of Treblanc. There was no way they would follow him, especially after all he had done, but now they had to discover a way to neutralize or, if need be, eliminate him instead.”

“Do you mean you planned to kill him?” Romaric gasped aloud, but this time he didn’t seem to draw Beraut’s ire.

“Exactly, but at that point in time we dared not challenge him directly, for we did not know the true extent of his power. In turn, Madumda had no idea if the others knew how to combine their powers to stand against him, so a very uneasy stalemate was created, with each side hesitant to make a move.”

“So neither side wanted to fight it out then, because they didn’t know if they could win?” Kieren asked the mage, to clarify his understanding of the situation.

“Precisely! Therefore, we followed Thialfi to Leander, where we were housed and cared for by King Ethelbert and his court, and it was there that we began to plan our reprisal against our misguided brother. Thialfi sent a message to Madumda stating that he was willing to negotiate with him at Leander, under the sponsorship of King Ethelbert. This, of course, was merely a ruse to draw the Dark Lord away from Treblanc, so we could carry out our plan. Believing he was going to get his way, Madumda eagerly accepted the offer. While he was journeying to Leander to parley with his peers, one of our brothers was making his way to Treblanc to see if he could discover an antidote, of sorts, for Madumda’s madness.”

“You mean it was like a sickness and you thought you could cure him of it?” Garreth asked.

“We knew there was no way to cure him, but we needed to find a way to either drain him of those powers or get rid of him altogether.”

“So there was no other way to solve this problem?” Kieren wondered.

“None that we could think of,” the wizard explained, “but we were willing to try to find another option. To do this, we would have to search through those long forgotten books of magic, which were still at Treblanc. That’s why one of us had to go there, while Madumda was at Leander.”

“So you were being sneaky again,” Romaric observed.

“Yes, I guess you could say we were, but we felt it was absolutely necessary. We also knew Madumda might have left magical forms of protection to safeguard his newly acquired possessions, so this became a possible suicide mission. Bravely, one of the older wizards volunteered for this duty and he set off for his former home.”

“Was it really that dangerous?” Kieren questioned.

“It didn’t turn out that way, but it might have been. So, after a lengthy journey, he was able to search the fortress until he located the answer to his prayers. He found a spell that would allow him to transport things great distances, so he used that magic to move the contents of the library of Treblanc to the Woods of Wildoness. There it would be housed under the protective cloak and watchful eyes of the elves, at least until the elders could study the various tomes at length and find a way to neutralize Madumda. The wizard who had accomplished this deed now made the library at Treblanc to appear as though the volumes had been destroyed, in case Madumda discover our theft.”

“And no one saw him do this?” Garreth asked, amazed.

“If they did, no one told Madumda about it. Remember, he was very cruel to his slaves and servants and was therefore despised by them, so if anyone noticed what had happened, they didn’t tell their master.”

“Serves him right,” Romaric offered, reflectively.

“Precisely,” the mage acknowledged. “After making sure his handiwork was concealed, the old wizard left Treblanc and made his way to the kingdom of the elves. He wanted to make sure his task had been successful and the multiple volumes were now securely held. From there, he made his way back to Leander, where he found the negotiations strained and Madumda’s patience wearing thin. Thialfi and the others had rotated into these meetings in groups of three, so the missing wizard’s absence wouldn’t be so easily noticed. When that wizard returned, Thialfi immediately called a halt to the sham, which had long been disguised as a negotiation. This sent Madumda flying back to Treblanc in uncontrollable rage. He spewed a progression of threats and curses in his wake.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t start a fight right then,” Kieren observed.

“That’s only because he wasn’t sure if he could win such a battle, so he somehow managed to resist the urge. The fortunate thing was, our misguided brother had been so completely absorbed in his attempts to gain domination over the council that he failed to discover our true agenda. This allowed us to peruse those materials at our own pace, so we could discover how to counter his treachery. Madumda compounded his error by failing to uncover our thievery, even after he returned to Treblanc. It was this oversight that allowed us the time necessary to formulate our strategy to neutralize him and then set that plan into motion.”

“So by getting him to focus on his anger at being rejected as leader, he didn’t notice what you were really up to,” Kieren noted.

“Exactly. It was the result of a simple case of misdirection that helped keep our secret. Anyway, after the elder wizards completed a very exhaustive research into those innumerable volumes of spells, the council held a meeting. By putting the welfare of the kingdom ahead of their own concerns, my brothers reached a consensus on a specific strategy and then set about to put that plan in motion. The first step was to seek and procure the assistance of the most proficient blacksmiths known to exist, the master dwarf smiths of the Amber Mountains.”

“What did you need their help for?” Kieren asked.

“We needed to know what ore existed that would allow us to create a nearly indestructible metal, from which we would create our talisman. The dwarfs, and only the dwarfs, knew of such an ore. They had accidentally stumbled upon it while mining for diamonds near the planet’s core. It was an ore they had named ‘rigilliad’. We immediately commissioned them to forge a talisman for us, which someday might be used to control or destroy our wayward brother.”

“But it didn’t work, did it?” Romaric noted.

“Oh, we got what we asked for, except the opportunity to use it never arose. Within a double fortnight the dwarf smiths had presented us with what we desired. Now, what remained of our council was left to discharge its most important duty since the inception of our order. Thialfi gathered his three aged brothers to perform this exceptionally potent task. In much the same way that Madumda had drained the power of the younger members of the council into his staff, the elder council members willingly relinquished their powers into the Sword of Kings. Thus ended the lives of the older Council members.”

“They all committed suicide?” Garreth gasped. The enchanter looked at the young man, trying to find an answer, which would be both accurate and satisfy the elf’s curiosity.

“Of a sort,” Beraut conceded, not knowing how else to explain this to the young elf. “What they did is voluntarily relinquish their essence into the talisman, so it could be used at a future time to deal with this new threat. My power was not included in this feat for several reasons. In the first place, as a novice my skills were negligible and not worthy of the sacrifice. Secondly, Thialfi and the others felt that as I matured and my potential grew, I could be a deciding factor in the balance of power. I was the key in the uneasy truce between the forces that protected Tarolia and the Dark Lord. My brothers also wanted to leave a representative wizard to relate this story about the rise of Madumda, the creation of the Sword, and the history of our group. They also charged me with reviving the council, should we finally put this chapter of our history to an end. They believed that if they left me as a cornerstone on which to rebuild, some day a new order might be created to once again preside with power, wisdom, and integrity. Finally, as the youngest member of the council, and the one with the greatest potential for longevity, my fellow wizards determined that I would have the greatest chance of surviving long enough to see Madumda neutralized or destroyed.”

“So that time it was good to be the youngest, wasn’t it?” Romaric asked him.

“If you are referring to the fact that I survived because of my age, then that is true, but it was a great burden that was placed upon me in return. I’m not so sure that was an advantage, but I would carry out my new obligation. From that day on I was left to my own resources to face this challenge. I was enjoined to endure all of this alone. I was devoid of leadership and guidance, I was totally separated from my instructors and confidants, and I was torn from the essential security the council had provided. I was now orphaned, homeless, and facing the greatest challenge that anyone, up to this time, had ever known.”

As the gentle enchanter paused in his story, Kieren thought he caught a glimpse of the shimmering of a tear in the corner of his aged eye. A wave of sympathy and despair swept over the young man and he longed to do something to ease his pain. Empathetically, he reached his arm across the small gap between them and touched the seer’s wrinkled hand. Beraut turned and smiled.

“Your concern is duly noted and appreciated,” he whispered to the lad. “But now,” he announced in a louder voice, “it is time for you boys to get back to bed and get some rest. No arguments now, so scoot.”

The boys jumped up and started back the way they came, with Beraut following them with a candle to make sure they did as they were told. After his task was completed, the wizard went to his own room, to get a few hours of shuteye for himself.

As soon as they were inside, the boys jumped back into bed and slowly settled in to sleep. For the two elves, that seemed to happen quite rapidly, but for Kieren it was a whole other story. Since sleep seemed to be evading him, he spent a considerable amount of time just glancing between his two friends, realizing how lucky he was to have them and how much their devotion meant to him. Could they really have been friends for so long already? It seemed like only yesterday when they first came together, but now Kieren realized several years had somehow slipped them by.