Haven's Addiction

Drognaus’s castle was, to date, the most spectacular place I’d seen since arriving to this world. Well, almost. The Courtyard of the Champions was impossible to beat, but this came in at a close second. This castle, however, wasn’t just a castle, but a complete and bustling metropolis. If I arrived here instead of where I did, I could have been around for weeks without ever knowing that I wasn’t really in a city.

The metropolis was up a sloping hill built along the edge of a cliff. Its sheer walls stood over 30 feet high all around it to keep out potential invaders. This wasn’t just a city so much as an all out fortress. Much like a the castles I’m familiar with in history, this place was made to be fully functional. Guards patrolled the tops of the walls at regular intervals with snipers clearly visible in guard towers.

Mazzy and I were searched and scanned at a checkpoint a few hundred yards away from the castle at a solitary guard shack. My awe at the grandeur of the estate was put on hold for a while when I felt like I was getting the shake down from TSA. Guards went through everything in my possession, one item at a time, and even ran a wand-like device over my entire body without a single word about what the scans or checks were for. They frowned at the weapons and illegal items, but didn’t say a word about them. Apparently they were more concerned about other things. It was like being fully interrogated when going through airport security, but without the strip search.

I was relieved to see that they didn’t single me out with racial profiling. Mazzy worked for these people and they searched her just as thoroughly as me. Their paranoia made me wonder if there had been an incident lately much like when airport security got extremely tense after 9/11. We passed through the checkpoint without incident, and I managed to contain any snarky remarks. I’d learned the hard way on a trip through LAX that security checkpoints don’t appreciate sarcasm, and can passive-aggressively retaliate if you irritate them. So I just kept my mouth shut.

The estate was a lot like anything you would expect from a medieval castle in its prime. All of the structures were completely made of stone of the highest quality I’d ever seen. The buildings maintained a cobbled together look to it like an old castle that had been remodeled, restructured, and constantly updated in order to keep it in tip top shape. It reminded me of a client on the east coast who invited me to their massive home one evening. He loved the place, but it was like a full time job to maintain it. An old stone estate that, no matter how much work you did on it, would always look old and worn.

Within the outer walls, the castle bustled with activity. There were buildings everywhere crammed into as much space as possible. They were all lined up along the outer wall to create as much open space as possible. The only open areas were bits of land that were set aside for a modest amount of crops that grew there. When I saw the gardens, I realized this wasn’t just a fortress. The castle grounds were completely self sufficient with its own private army and food supply. All the people bustling around me were not only ready for a long term siege, they were constantly in preparation for it.

The castle itself was enormous, and larger than any structure I had every seen. The width of the castle grounds themselves spanned at least as big as a pro football stadium, including the parking lot. Buildings that held barracks and such were crammed together so tightly that there was no space between them, making the enormity of the place even more awe inspiring.

The tallest spires reached up into the sky so high that I about fell over backward trying to see the top as we neared the entrance. There were seven spires total with one central spire that dwarfed all the others. It was like the Sears Tower amid 6 Empire State Buildings. The towers elevated so high into the air that I didn’t think it was possible to build a structure of stone that high and still be stable. Architecturally speaking, it didn’t seem possible. From a distance, the towers appeared to be made of steel because the surface is so smooth and seamless. Touching the towers up close they even feel like a sheet of metal because there isn’t a single bump or blemish that can be found on them. Out of every structures found around the castle, the towers are crafted to perfection.

Stone gargoyles littered the castle grounds leading up to the castle itself. Each one was unique and with as much attention to detail as the dragon statues in the Courtyard of Champions. They were the most horrific and grisly looking creatures I had ever seen. Their vicious fangs, wicked horns with barbs on the end, and claws that looked like small sabers made me uneasy every time I looked at them. They were only slightly shorter than me, although significantly greater in bulk, but I found them to be absolutely terrifying. I didn’t ask Mazzy about them, but assumed they were life sized depictions like the dragon statues. While their stature was drastically smaller than that of the dragons, I would rather have faced one of the dragons in real life than one of these horrid beasts.

“There are 49 of them,” Mazzy said as she walked beside me. Even though I had a much longer reach to my stride, she never had trouble keeping up with ease. “They are not statues. They are genuine Gargoyles.” I felt a lump in my throat and my stomach got queasy.

“Not to worry. They are defenders of the castle. They lay dormant until the castle is under attack.”

“They’re terrifying,” I shivered, sensing one of them staring at me, even though the stone eye sockets never moved, although I’m sure it was just paranoia.

“Yes. They are,” I could sense an uneasiness in her voice as well. Even she found the creatures to be unsettling. I noticed as we walked that Mazzy made a point of keeping her distance from the statues whenever we got near one. As I looked around at the other citizens of the castle, they were all doing the same. “But they are loyal to those who wish this place and the people here no harm.”

“Do they need to defend this place often?”

“Increasingly more and more. Especially since Master Draco’s death.”

“Master Draco?” I inquired.

“Master Drognaus’s father,” she said solemnly.

She spoke no more until we reached the doors of the castle. The giant double doors were large enough to allow a pair of tractor trailers to drive through it side by side with plenty of room to spare. The interior expanded past the huge doors. Vaulted ceilings and a massive hallway led to the main chamber of the castle. The architecture was stunning, but nothing in comparison to the size. The main hall of the castle was more like an indoor stadium than any castle I had ever heard of.

Walking around inside the main halls of the castle I remembered what Mazzy said about working for a dragon. Did she mean Drognaus? He certainly didn’t look anything at all like a dragon. He stood barely as tall as me and she said that dragons were bigger than that at birth. Did she possibly work for someone else? Maybe she was a spy that the denizens of the castle should be suspicious of after all. That or Drognaus wasn’t really the one in charge around here.

All of the main areas of the castle were decorated with dragon architecture, paintings, intricate carvings in both stone and wood that were set into the walls, and even the furniture had a dragon feel to it with scales, tails, wings, horns, and fangs adorning everything. The enormity of it all really got me wondering. If there really were such a thing as dragons in the world, which seemed obvious despite that fact that I had yet to see one in person, then this would certainly be a place for them to live. Not only was the interior of the castle spacious enough for a dragon to live, but a group of dragons could congregate for a family reunion without being overly crowded.

Yet, through my entire exploration of the castle, not a single live dragon could be found. There was such a draconic presence about the place with the absence of a real dragon that I began to wonder if it was all part of some elaborate scam to convince me that dragons were indeed real. Or, worse yet, that this castle was the last vestige of a dying dragon empire. After giving me the grand tour, Mazzy showed me to my quarters, a small room deep within the castle, and went off to take care of business of her own.

The main part of the castle with the central spire was the only place that held such gargantuan accommodations. The rest of the castle and the surrounding buildings were normal sized. Well, as normal as can be in a place you could wander around in for days without truly seeing it all. This I found out literally as, over the next few days, they gave me free reign to wander the castle to get a feel for the place. It became readily apparent that I was initially given the five minute tour that just touched base on the points of interest within the castle grounds; where to dine, the library, the training rooms, the quartermasters workshop, the infirmary, the bathrooms, and my own room for the duration of my stay. My quarters were almost identical to the small room I first woke up in at Drognaus’s office in New Haven City. The only difference being that it was within the castle where the windows didn’t let in actual sunlight. The light for the room emanated from an enchanted source somewhere up in the ceiling. The ‘light switch’ was a glowing crystal embedded in the wall by the door that operated much like a dimmer switch when you touched it.

I didn’t have nearly as much trouble as they expected of me in navigating the massive castle with its labyrinth of passageways deep beneath the earth. Luckily, I have an uncanny direction sense. If I’ve been there once, I can get there again flawlessly. It’s been like that since I was a kid and liked to wander out in to the back timber at my grandparents farm. I’ve been told that my direction sense is an innate ability I’ve used all my life without even being aware of it. The more I learned about what I was capable of, the more I felt like I had been sleeping through life and was finally awake, fully aware of what was going on around me.

It surprised me how much they left me on my own to wander unsupervised for the first few days. With the scrutiny of the security checkpoint to gain entry, I would have expected more security than that. Apparently Drognaus himself vouched for me as a reputable character. Odd, considering we only met the one time, and despite everyone talking about him being the lord of the castle, I didn’t see a trace of him around the castle in all my wanderings.

I spent the majority of my time in my quarters. It took more time to adjust to this new environment than I anticipated. I had a lot to think over from what I learned so far. It was all still very overwhelming, but not so much that it put me on another bender. I couldn’t sleep for the life of me in the castle. Not just because I was on edge with a lot on my mind either. Something about this place made me uneasy and restless. I tried reaching out through my Sense with my newly awakened Psionic abilities, and could only detect a dull throbbing of energy that permeated the walls that seemed to make it vibrate ever so slightly.

I bode my time by rigorously meditating, practicing my new found abilities, and tinkering with my equipment, both magical and mechanical. I continued to practice telekinesis in the solitude of my room whenever I took a break from exploring the castle, and got good enough that I could hold a lightweight object in midair. It wasn’t perfect by any means. It wobbled around like a marionette in the hands of a toddler, and took a lot of mental strain to pull off, but I still moved it with just my mind. That seemed pretty damn amazing considering I just learned it was even possible to do such a thing only a few days ago.

In the privacy of my room I placed every weapon I owned, down to the the slingshot and stun gun, in the magical bracelets I procured from Fenton. Just saying the words ‘magical bracelets’ and meaning it felt surreal to me. Any possibility of sounding fruity was ignored by the sheer awesomeness factor of what the bracelets could do. I practiced with them over and over again, almost obsessively, until I mastered them to the point that I could make any particular weapon I wanted appear in my hands with just the briefest of thought. On command they literally appeared in my hands out of nowhere, ready to fire. When they were dismissed the weapons vanished with a ‘poof’ like they were never there. They were all preloaded and ready to go with the safeties off so that I could shoot them right away. I even had some of the pistols in pairs with one appearing in each hand so I could go into action John Woo style. I could go from unarmed to Rambo and back again in a matter of seconds.

I felt pretty cool being able to draw out powerful weapons in an instant, but was still uncomfortable with them. I never shot a gun before except for a small .22 rifle and a pistol on my in-laws farm. It’s not like there would be a firing range nearby that I could practice with, or an ammo store where I could restock if I used up all the ammunition learning how to shoot. In all honesty, the firearms intimidated me more that they brought me comfort. So much could go wrong in handling them, and its not like I could ask anyone to properly train me on gun safety. The assault rifle even had a grenade launcher mounted under the barrel, and its not like it came with an instruction manual on how to operate it.

The rest of the gear I went through in the bags made up an eclectic combination of equipment. There was a gas mask that I assumed would be be used in combination with the few canisters of teargas, a small digital voice recorder, night vision goggles, binoculars, a few flashlights, a set of long range walkie talkies, a lighter, a hand held blowtorch, and a gun cleaning kit that was pretty much useless to me because I didn’t know how to take the weapons apart to clean them. Some of the items in the bags were completely useless to me, like the cell phone, GPS locator, a laptop that I didn’t have the password to, and a couple other electronic devices that I didn’t even know what they did. The only use I got from them was playing Pac-Man on the phone until the battery died.

I also spent a great deal of time analyzing my other magical equipment, making experiments with them. With the freezing ring I could freeze objects and shatter them. It came in handy for chilling drinks as well, as long as I was careful enough not to overdo it. The attendants in the mess hall didn’t appreciate that I kept breaking their glasses after freezing drinks too solid.

I stored all of the extra ammo in the bottomless bag, and went a tad overboard in playing around with it. I kept stuffing everything I could find that would fit, into the bag. Even though the bag itself only held about a cubic foot of space, I could stuff a long object, like a broom, all the way down into it. Maybe it’s the child in me, but I found infinite joy in reaching into the bag and pulling out whatever object I desired from within, like a magician performing a trick.

The cloak amazed me to no end, and I practiced with it about as much as I did the weapons in the bracelets. With the right amount of concentration, which became easier as I improved in psionics, I could make myself literally look like anything I wanted. I quickly found out the limitations of the cloak by testing every conceivable angle. I could only change into something my size, so using it to appear as a dragon was out of the question, except for a diminutive human sized dragon, which was apparently unrealistic; although I had still yet to confirm that personally. The appearance change was only an illusion that affected others while the cloak remained completely normal to me. Since I couldn’t see what I looked like, I had to keep a constant mental focus on what I was supposed to look like to others in order for it to work. I found this particularly frustrating because I had no way of knowing for certain that the cloak actually worked. If not for the fact that Fenton demonstrated the cloak for me in his store room, I never would have believed in its power, and would have thought he was just trying to sell me magic beans.

Blending in with backgrounds only worked when I remained completely still. The invisibility aspect of the cloak was like in the Predator movies with a mirrored haze in my outline. I was tempted to take the cloak around the castle grounds to play pranks on people, and lighten my burdened mind, but considering the security checkpoints I went through to get in the castle I deduced, probably correctly, that they wouldn’t find it the least bit amusing. Instead I wore the cloak around the castle disguised as various visages of random people I conjured in my mind, just to see if anyone would recognize me.

I avoided socializing in those first several days, which wasn’t like me at all. I may be a smartass pain in the butt sometimes, but I’m still very approachable and will bend over backwards to help you out if I can. People love those who are helpful. As harsh as it may sound, I’ve learned in life that your relationships to others is determined by how valuable you are to them, and generally make a point of being a shining gem in peoples lives. You never know when you will need a favor from someone that will get you out of a jam.

However, during this time at the castle I was completely out of my element. I was, quite literally, a stranger in a strange land. The castle rested in a strange part of the world full of people I never met before, but that’s something that I’m familiar with. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to visiting strange cities, and always made acquaintances there. My career at that point in life revolved around meeting new people and introducing them to a new and unusual product. I needed to be approachable and friendly in order to make a living. But this place didn’t have people. While many of the citizens of Haven looked like regular people, they were all essentially aliens to me. I could go for a walk around the castle grounds for thirty minutes and encounter at least a dozen different species of intelligent alien life who clearly weren’t human. I’m not racist, by any means. I just had difficulty adjusting, and ended up spending the majority of the time in my room because I couldn’t fully cope. Since I couldn’t sleep at night either, I spent an unhealthy amount of time meditating and going over my equipment.

In my insomnia I wandered down to the training arena in the lower level of the castle. I passed by it before in my wanderings around the castle, but it was usually full of people sparring or sword fighting, so I stepped out quickly. I couldn’t wait to try out my new weapons, but didn’t want to do it around anyone else if at all possible. Having only a vague familiarity with them, even though I spent the last several days studying them in the privacy of my room, I still thought it potentially dangerous to let the power of such weapons be known to others.

The training arena was bare and dimly lit when I entered with just a few candles in the center. Earlier when I looked in on it I couldn’t see what they were all touting about. Everyone claimed that the training arena was the most revolutionary marvel in all the world. In daylight it looked like a large empty room. Although in retrospect it couldn’t have been daylight that illuminated it since the room dwelled deep within the bowels of the castle. Granted, the room was enormous on a scale of the grand hall in the main castle, which is especially amazing considering that the castle was some two hundred feet of rock above my head.

As I entered there was a loud rumble and what sounded like stones scraping together almost as a primal sort of growl somewhere far off in the darkness of the cavernous room. I should have been more scared than I was. For all I knew it could have been some giant slathering beast ready to devour me, but set that thought aside. The security in this place was tight enough to make the president jealous, and I couldn’t conceive of any way that any monsters would be able to make it into this place, I hoped.

I could have sworn I heard heavy breathing elsewhere in the room. Not like the heavy breathing of someone making a stalker phone call, but of wind blowing in and out of some ancient cave in a slow steady rhythm like the tides. Maybe there a big and nasty creature lurked in here after all. I looked around and realized that I was in the center of an open floor space with very limited lighting. Aside from the ground I stood on, there was nothing as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far considering the blackness.

The breathing continued, and now I knew it wasn’t my own because I was holding my breath, being as still as possible. It didn’t sound like a normal breath, but a giant set of bellows. I could almost detect a hint of a growl so low it barely registered, like our dog Tucker used to do when he crouched getting ready to bark at strangers who would walk in our yard. I did a quick double clap with my hands, hoping it would turn up the lights, but the dim lighting remained

I reached out with my Sense to see if I could read the energy signatures of whatever was out there, and was immediately blinded. Not in my eyes because they were seeing the same pitch blackness engulfing the outer edges of the room, but within my mind. A glowing mass of golden energy filled my entire field of senses in front of me so bright it was blinding and made my head hurt. I quickly shut off my Sense to avoid getting sunburned on the inside of my brain. Whatever stood there was huge. So huge that I could scarcely sense the edges of. It overflowed with power like a nuclear reactor, and so brightly that I couldn’t make out any sort of shape or form.

It amazed me how quickly I made the shotgun appear in my hands from the bracelet. I readied the weapon as best I could, considering I’d never fired one like it before, and turned on the flashlight attached to the underside of the barrel, pointing it in the direction of the noise. As soon as the light clicked on there was a whoosh of rushing air and a distinct crackling noise. A faint odor that reminded me of cooked fish wafted over me. I turned the light into the direction of the noise and was surprised to see; Drognaus.