#maynia Day 3 – A Tongue of Fire
The friar trembled in the pitch black, even though the temperature had gone from a damp cold to a dry heat as suddenly as the torches had been extinguished. Outside, from far away, the sound of thousands of mallets rolled on. The noise came from his right, seemingly through the wall of his dungeon room, which made no sense, because the dungeon continued in that direction, room after room.
The impossibility of a thousand mallets banging so loudly in one of those other rooms made the sound all the more terrifying. Instinctively, the friar moved to turn away, reaching to place the manuscript on the table before him – but in searching his hand found nothing but air. The table was gone?
Que Dieu m’aide, he prayed under his breath; then he called for his brothers in a loud voice. The only answer was the banging, which he now realized occurred in a call and response pattern between two separate points, both far away on his right side. He ran forward for the door.
Without needing to pass around the table, he should have found the door in five or six strides. Instead he found that the darkness had a tangible presence that pushed back against him in greater measure as he ran. He leaned forward as though against a wind, though it felt more like rushing waters, like he ran in the inky depths of a sea churning against him. A dozen strides forward and no door; the darkness veered him to the right, toward the loud banging, and there, where he should have found the rocky dungeon wall, he crashed on wood.
The wood parted. The darkness which had pressed against him now – still impenetrable to sight – propelled him forward. He braced his legs against the push and slid forward. As he did the force suddenly ceased; the darkness ebbed back from him like a wave that had tossed him ashore, and he could see.
He stood on a broad barn floor. A row of stalls ran along his left to wide open doors at the far end of the barn. Just inside the doors, a man crouched against the wall. In his hand flashed a tongue of fire.
The tongue of fire flashed twice, and it banged with the noise like mallets. From outside, out of view, an answer came – three quick loud cracks. Splinters flew from the beam above the crouching man. The man pointed in the direction of the cracks, but before the tongue flashed again, he pitched forward and sprawled in the doorway, motionless.
Silence fell, though it rang with the recent noise. Through the doorway the friar could see, instead of the soft green vineyards of home, a broad and yellow plain that extended to a horizon of purple mountains. Then galloping hooves approached.
Clutching the manuscript to his chest, the friar ran to hide in the nearest stall. He dove onto a layer of loose straw; then rolled into the far corner. He put his back to the wall and pulled his knees up over the text.
Across from him in the other corner, a large Moorish woman knelt, her hands clasped to her ample chest, as though in prayer.
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Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/