FYI, we’ve met Bruna and the Foxhound before…
© J.B. Norman — Published by Emona Literary Services™
“You fools!” the wizard cries. “You’re no match for my hordes of shambling undead!”
Right on cue, an army of skeletons claw their way of the dirt and start slowly but menacingly approaching Kat, Dunstana, Bruna, and the Foxhound.
Kat frowns. “Hmm. I’d say their more lurching than shambling, really.”
“I’d say trudging,” the Foxhound offers.
The wizard angrily stamps his hood. “They. are. clearly. shambling!” he protests. “They are skeletons. They shamble. Fireworks explode, geckos geck… and skeletons shamble!”
He stamps again, causing the glowing eldritch orb in his hand to roll precariously in his hand and almost slip out of his grip.
“Uh oh…” he mutters.
He steadies his orb, clears his throat and stares back at the four adventuers.
“As I was saying,” he begins before his voice falters. “I don’t actually remember what I was saying. You louts made me lose my place! Do you have any idea how long I spent working on my evil speech?”
“Clearly not longer than you did conjuring these skeletons,” Bruna notes, swinging her huge axe with her typical barbarian glee.
Bruna swings her axe and a skull goes flying what looks like all the way to the horizon.
“Now, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think we’re really getting anywhere,” Kat says, noticing that despite the increasingly large of skeletons strewn across the ground, the shambling horde doesn’t seem to be getting smaller.
“Of course!” the wizard cries. “My magical prowess is without rival, and the wellspring of my power, inexhaustible!”
He waves his hand over his orb and another batch of skeletons claw their way out of the ground.
Although Bruna is completely undaunted and completely happy to just keep hitting things with her axe for the duration, the Foxhound is rather more practical.
He dodges an oncoming skeleton with a flourish of his cape.
“We need to overcome his magic!” he cries to his companions.
“Oh, easy!” Dunstana says, looking from where she’s using a severed skeletal arm to pick the nose-socket of another fallen skeleton. “Just shoot his orb! I’m, like, ninety-seven percent sure that’s the source of his powers.”
“No, it isn’t,” the wizard, hastily hiding the orb behind his back. “The orb is an artifact of terrible, but completely unrelated, power.”
“We saw you use it!” Dunstana cries, pointing accusingly with the skeletal arm.
“No, you didn’t…”
“Oh,” Kat says with a wolfish grin. “That means it’s definitely the source of his powers.”
Bruna leaps forward. “Strike true, friend Katherine! I shall hold him. Hound, girl-child! Keep the skeletons at bay.”
“I have a name!” Dunstana protests.
Soon, the wizard is struggling in the barbarian woman’s grip. He colour drains from his face and his eyes bulge in his head as the orb tumbles out of his hand, bounces across the ground and rolls to a stop by a nearby tree stump.
“Well,” Kat mutters, nocking her next arrow and lining up her shot. “I wasn’t expecting to get such an easy shot.”
If you enjoyed this scene, want to see more, and don’t want to wait for my new scenes every Friday, please consider subscribing to the Emona Literary Services™ Patreon page.
My latest short scenes are available to both my paid and free subscribers.
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
