Sentinelspire - Mark Sehestedt [57]
"Yes?"
"Tonight, it would be wise to lock the door as well."
The door closed, the first heavy drops of rain began to spatter the balcony outside, and Lewan could control his sobbing no longer.
Chapter Nineteen
When the forebears of the Tuigan first wandered into the steppes, Sentinelspire was old. It stood alone and unchallenged, a great sentinel indeed amidst borderless leagues of grassland. The mountain's true origins had been lost to even the wisest of loremasters. Some who lived in the wild and knew well the ways of the earth believed that the forces that shaped the Firepeaks had also formed Sentinelspire, making the mountain a sort of larger relative to its distant, more active cousins to the north. Others-the Tuigan foremost among them-believed that the mountain was no natural creation, that it had been formed from dark magics that rent the very fabric of Faerыn, opening passageways to realms of fire and destruction.
None living knew the truth. But the mountain had been old even when the Imaskari had claimed it as their own and built the hidden fortress on the southeastern face of the mountain. Many of the buildings and tunnels were crafted from the mountain itself. But some of the towers and the hidden chambers beneath the fortress had been built and decorated with purple stone that came from distant lands. Greatest of these structures was the Tower of the Sun-so named because those standing atop it would be the first in the fortress to see the sun each morning. The Tower-and though there were many towers in the fortress, when the inhabitants spoke of "the Tower," there was only one they meant-stood in the very center of the fortress, its topmost galleries looking over the rim of the canyon wall itself. From the top of the Tower of the Sun, one could see for hundreds of miles into the open steppe, and on clear nights every star and constellation looked down upon the tower, their silver light gathering in the purple stone and crystal statues that ringed the rim of the tower.
The broken peak of Sentinelspire itself dominated the western sky and loomed over the canyon. The storm that had spent the late afternoon gathering strength waited until full dark, then poured its full fury on the canyon. Lightning wreathed Sentinelspire's jagged cone, and thunder rolled down the mountainside, strong enough to rattle the stones of the fortress. Early spring storms were not uncommon in this part of the Wastes. They built over the Great Ice Sea to the north and trampled the hundreds of miles of steppe like the Horde itself.
But on this night, the storm that hit the Fortress of the Old Man came with a power that many within the canyon, even those with no training in the mystic arts, found unnatural. Some thought they could hear whispers under the wind, and there was a rhythm to the thunder shaking the mountain. Lights of no natural hue flickered around the Tower of the Sun. Once a great bolt of lightning struck the tower itself, blasting the vines around the stone to cinders, and the flickering aftereffects seemed to linger too long. Rather than fade away, it looked as if the lightning crawled inside the open windows of the tower, where it continued to flash and burn.
As the world turned to midnight, the storm's fury did not abate or pass, but seemed to settle in over the Fortress of the Old Man. The lamps burning in the streets and pathways of the fortress cast only weak pools of light, and the wind blew out many, deepening the darkness in the fortress.
The unnatural lights around the Tower of the Sun dropped into the gardens below, where they lurked amongst the trees or hugged the stone of the tower. The upper regions of the tower were lost in the darkness of night and storm to any not possessing eyes that penetrated the dark-eyes like those of the half-orc and his tiger, crouching under the storm-wracked trees in a garden a few streets away. Most within the fortress had sought refuge in their rooms, behind