Introduction
This story provides some background for The Quests of the Lost Jungle. I wrote it with the idea that you would read it after the Gringar’s Tunnels story. You can read it before The Quests of the Lost Jungle and it won’t ruin the story for you.
And now… The Giant’s Castle
“A giant, you say,” Gringar the gnome said, looking down at the little man in front of him. He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “Then I suppose I am taller than I thought, and my friend Culpepper is an absolute monster.”
The man frowned, his deep brown eyebrows bunching together. “I may not be tall, but I am a giant. Give me time. You’ll see.”
His face was smooth and looked quite young, but his hair was short, silver and slicked back. He was wearing a blue robe with gold thread that seemed too fancy and too hot for the jungle.
Gringar shrugged. “Okay, good to know. Listen, I came to help Elder Folk such as yourself. Underice is a beautiful, growing country within a glacier, a very long way away. Culpepper Fangorn, who created Underice, says that we’re all in danger from the humans spreading across the earth. They don’t understand our magic. They fear it and can cause us trouble because of their fear.”
“That is so,” Santos said, nodding. “The humans have been spreading. The Amazon Rainforest is also home to many animals who are a threat, even to giants such as myself.”
“Come, let us walk together.” Santos said and started walking without waiting for a response. Despite his tiny steps, he was able to move much more quickly through the dense plant life than the much larger gnome.
Gringar was not used to the thick, hot air of the jungle and soon sweat started rolling down his forehead and cheeks. He had a magical necklace made of ice that cooled him somewhat, but it wasn’t enough.
“Santos,” he said. “Do you have any water to drink?”
“We are not far from the mighty Amazon River, but I would rather not walk that far out of the way. I want to show you something. You can quench your thirst with that,” he said, pointing to a berry that was beyond his reach.
The berry was unlike anything Gringar had seen before. It was bright red, skinny and a foot long.
“Normally,” Santos said, “I would caution you to not consume anything that is bright red. But I happen to know that fizzyberries won’t hurt you and are rather delightful.”
Gringar reached up and pulled the berry from the branch of the tall bush from which it was hanging. He studied it for a moment, quite uncertain what he was supposed to do with it. He couldn’t just pop it into his mouth. It was much too long for that. So he gripped the ends with his hands and was about to take a bite from the middle.
Santos cringed and yelled, “Stop!”
Gringar stopped, his mouth poised over the fruit.
“Who drinks like that?” Santos asked, his shock clearly visible on his face. “You were about to send fizzyberry juice flying everywhere. Bite one end and then tilt the berry up to drink.”
Gringar blushed, embarrassed about seeming foolish in the eyes of the little man. He bit the end of the fizzyberry and drank a sip of juice from it. It was delicious! It tasted like a mix of strawberry and raspberry and it made his tongue feel all tingly. He quickly drank the rest and felt his thirst go away completely.
Santos was staring at him, his eyes showing a bit of concern, but his mouth twisted in a little grin.
Gringar’s stomach started to gurgle. His throat felt uncomfortable. Then he let out the loudest belch he had ever heard. Birds and small animals nearby scattered, looking for safety from what they assumed was a huge creature.
“Uh, excuse me,” Gringar said. He felt as if he was acting like a little kid around Santos, despite being an eighty-year-old. He realized that he had no idea how old Santos was.
“Quite all right,” Santos replied. “We tend to take small sips of fizzyberry. That holds gaseous emissions to a minimum.”
“Oh, yeah, fewer burps. I just have to ask you something. You speak in such a … refined way. How old are you?”
“Twenty-three. My parents raised me in a refined way, because they insist that I have greatness ahead of me. Let us talk as we walk,” Santos said, wanting to get moving once more.
They continued walking through the jungle, Santos picking up the pace.
“Tell me,” he said, “how did you get here?”
“As I was saying earlier, I’ve come from Underice,” Gringar replied. “There is a tunnel from Underice to this rainforest. The tunnel is just a short distance away.” Gringar hoped he’d be able to find the tunnel again.
Santos seemed to pick up speed even more. He was practically running, and Gringar had to walk quite swiftly to keep up. “That is very interesting. I never would have imagined a tunnel coming from an ice land all the way to here. I’ve never even seen ice before.”
“Being in Underice doesn’t feel like living around ice. It’s a really nice place. Lots of trees, a beautiful river.”
Santos smiled. “We have lots of trees and a beautiful river here as well.” He paused his walking and pointed straight ahead. “Ah, here we are.”
The dense jungle gave way to a round clearing. In the middle of the clearing, there were giants (tall ones, unlike Santos) and various large magical creatures working on a huge building. The building itself was being built with gleaming white blocks. The blocks reached about halfway up the ground level of the building.
“This is the castle in the Amazon Rainforest,” Santos said, pride bursting forth from his voice. “It is of my design and will be the hub for magical creatures here in the jungle. Come, let me show you the parts that have been built so far.”
Santos didn’t wait for a reply and started jogging toward the castle. The stairs leading up to what would become the castle’s entrance would have been a difficult climb for the tiny giant, because each step was several inches taller than he was. A human standing nearby saw Santos approaching the stairs and ran up to him.
“Hey, how about some help up the stairs, buddy?” the man said to Santos. He had short brown hair and blue eyes, and wore the simple brown shirt and pants that were common among humans. His pale skin was out of place for the jungle, but, even more than that, something just seemed off about it. The way it caught the sunlight and reflected it back was wrong somehow.
“Thank you, Ben. That would help,” Santos said.
Ben, the human, reached down and lifted Santos up carefully. He walked up the steps.
“The entrance good, or you need me to carry you somewhere else?” Ben asked.
“I could use your assistance in showing our guest,” Santos said, pointing to Gringar, “what we’ve built so far.”
Something about Santos’s tone made Gringar uncomfortable, but any thought of that was pushed aside when Ben spotted Gringar, still standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Ben’s plastic-like face showed surprise as best it could. The front of his shirt opened up, and a gnome with unkempt, long white hair peeked out. “Another gnome! Here! Unbelievable.”
Gringar had exactly the same thought, made larger by the fact that the gnome he saw was peeking out of a human’s shirt. He had no idea what to say.
Ben saw the look on Gringar’s face. “Oh, this,” he said, his arm reaching out to gesture up and down. “This was my dad’s Creation. I’m Ben Junior. We gnomes don’t get much respect, so I prefer to walk around as Ben the human instead of Ben the gnome.”
“That is quite an interesting Creation, Ben.” Gringar peered at the human face which was about a foot above the gnome’s face. It did resemble a younger Ben, but with fake-looking skin and the longer features of a human. Gringar realized that he should stop staring and introduce himself. “I am Gringar, from the land of Underice.”
“Good ta meet ya, Gringer,” Ben said, causing Gringar to flinch at the other gnome’s inability to say his name. Ben retreated back into the shirt and the human face started moving again. “Let’s get the show on the road!”
The not-quite-human carried the little giant into the castle through the half-built archway that would eventually be the entrance. Gringar followed close behind.
“This is going to be a grand entrance hall,” Santos said, making a wide, sweeping gesture with his hands. “There will be staircases going up on either side, and we’ll have high ceilings in many rooms to accommodate the heights of giants such as myself. It will be truly grand.”
“It sounds marvelous,” Gringar said, trying to picture it. Right now, all he could see was a stone floor, partially built stone walls, and jungle all around.
“Ben,” Santos said, “let us go downstairs and show our guest the construction that we have already completed.”
Ben opened a door to the side of the entrance area and walked down a staircase that was dimly lit by a torch on the wall.
“My apologies, Gringar,” Santos said. “We are still adding torches down here.”
Ben pulled the torch off the wall, and they continued walking down. The staircase continued downward, but they stepped off onto the first floor below ground level.
“I promise this gets more interesting,” Santos said as their footsteps echoed off of the stone walls. “You can set me down, Ben.”
Ben set Santos gently on the floor.
Santos turned to the left and walked through a door. Gringar followed him, but Ben stayed just outside the door, holding the torch into the room.
“These are the first rooms we’ve built,” Santos said. “They are, unfortunately, a bit dark, but we thought there should be some nice places to sleep. The bed is remarkable. We were given some feathers by an amazing bird that lives here in the jungle. The mattress is unlike any I’ve ever seen. See for yourself.” He waved a hand toward a barely visible flat surface in a dark corner of the room.
Gringar walked over to the bed to take a look. He reached out in the dark and discovered that there was indeed a mattress there, and it was perfect. It felt cozy but firm.
He was startled by a loud, metallic clang behind him. The room suddenly became lighter as a torch on the wall sprang to life, and he turned all the way around to find that the one exit was blocked by a solid metal door. He was in a small room, just a few feet in each direction. The walls were bare, except for the torch. There was a basin and a jug of water across the room and the bed right behind him.
An opening near the floor opened and Santos peeked in.
“You are now our guest here at the castle,” Santos said. “The Elder Folk of what will soon be the Lost Jungle have no need of a tunnel to Underice. They will be perfectly fine here.”
“But why? Why do you want to keep me here?” Gringar asked.
“Until the Lost Jungle is ready, Elder Folk might be tempted by your offer. We cannot have that. But don’t worry. It should only be a matter of a few years before the Lost Jungle is sealed off from the world. We just need to finish the castle and figure out how to create the sort of magical border we are looking for.”
“A few years?”
“Yes. But, in the meantime, you are our guest. Let us know if there is anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable.”
“There is something, actually.”
“Yes?”
“You could let me go.”
Santos chuckled. “Nice try.” He stepped back into the hallway, and the opening at the bottom of the door slid shut. Footsteps trailed away down the hallway.
When the last of the sound had died down, Gringar sat on the delightfully comfortable bed. He reached into a pocket on his work pants and pulled out a small pouch.
“At least I have this,” he said quietly to himself.
He jumped down from the bed and turned the pouch over directly on the floor. He lifted the pouch up, and the Digger was suddenly taking up a good portion of the open space in the room.
The digging took a very long time. Gringar wanted to get far away from the jungle, so he pictured a desert in his mind. It wasn’t any specific desert, but it was definitely not a jungle.
During his previous digs, Gringar had been in a trance. This tunnel was different, because he never knew when someone would be coming to check up on him. He was constantly on edge and listening for the sound of footsteps or jingling keys.
Whenever he heard something, he would leave the Digger where it was and climb back up to his room. Then he would have to slide his bed back into place, quickly and quietly, because his tunnel was hiding below the bed.
After a while, he got used to the comings and goings of Ben, Santos and the random guards. Their timings became more predictable, and Gringar found that he had several hours of privacy after each visit. He began to relax as he continued digging.
Time passed, and Gringar’s tunnel had straightened out so that he only had to climb the first bit of it and then he could walk the rest of the way. Even though he knew he had hours between visits, he was starting to worry that the tunnel was so long he wouldn’t hear anyone coming.
“Oh, well, there’s no help for that,” he said to himself.
One day, quite unexpectedly, the Digger opened a hole that let bright sunlight into the tunnel. Gringar knew that it had been a few hours since breakfast had been delivered to his cell, but the dry, hot air streaming through the hole was too enticing after years in the damp basement room in the jungle.
He kept digging, and a short while later he pulled out his little pouch, which slurped his Digger back inside. He stepped out into the blazing sun, emerging from a rock wall into a flat desert.
He expected to see nothing but cacti and tumbleweed, but an elf was standing just twenty feet away. An elf! The rarest of the Elder Folk, they tended to live in small groups in places where few others lived. Looking around, Gringar couldn’t see signs of any other life, not even another elf.
“Hello, small one,” called the elf, walking closer. Her skin was tanned, as if she had been in the desert for some time. She wore a long, pale blue dress, and her hair was in one long braid with gold thread that hung over her left shoulder. Her face was young and delicate-looking, but Gringar thought her hands looked full of power.
“I heard some noise from the rock,” she said, her pointed ears bending slightly as she remembered the noise, “but I sense that this tunnel is not going through the rock. Most interesting.”
Gringar walked toward her, not wanting to stay near the tunnel, which led back to the place where he had been trapped for so long.
“This tunnel goes through the space between here and a jungle that I believe is far away,” Gringar said. “My name is Gringar, and I was held captive in that jungle. Can you tell me where I have ended up?”
“Greetings, Gringar. I am Mindashti. I am sorry to hear that you were trapped, but you are free now. You have come at the best possible time, for the place where you are will soon be a place unlike any other. When you arrived, I was just about to cast the final spell among thousands that I have been casting over decades on this land.”
Around her neck, she wore a chain from which hung a gold disk with a giant ruby in the center. She grabbed the disk with her right hand and raised her left in the air. She spoke in a language that was sometimes breezy and soft and other times like rocks scraping together.
A sandstorm started swirling in from the east, but kept its distance from Gringar and Mindashti. It swirled over an open area of desert in front of them, obscuring the view of anything within. Mindashti’s voice quieted and the sandstorm disappeared instantly. A wall, miles around and built of tan bricks now sat where before there had only been flat land.
The skin of the elf’s hand grew pale as it clutched the amulet tighter. She started speaking again, quietly at first but growing in volume. Then her voice started trailing off.… and she finally whispered one word: “Break.”
There was a giant boom of thunder, and Gringar cringed and flung himself to the ground in terror at the sound of it. The boom was followed by silence and then by a soft chuckle.
“It is okay, Gringar. You have nothing to fear here,” Mindashti said.
Gringar stood up, looking down out of embarrassment. He dusted off his clothes and finally looked up. His mouth fell open.
The land immediately surrounding the new brick wall had separated from the rest of the ground and floated several feet into the air.
Mindashti let go of the amulet and gracefully held her hand in the direction of the floating land. “I welcome you, friend, to Grandakar.”
She then held her right hand out to Gringar, who took it in his left, and the pair walked together to the newly formed city. From that moment forward, Gringar would always remember the creation of the floating city as the most amazing magical occurrence he had ever seen, and he saw some doozies.
Santos stood in the still-open hole in the rock. He, too, was stunned by the awesome power he had witnessed. He knew that elves could do amazing things, but he thought even elves would not be capable of what he had just seen. “The gold disk with the ruby must be the key,” he thought.
“The gold disk with the ruby will be mine,” he said quietly to himself. Then he turned around and walked back through the tunnel to the cell in the basement of the Castle in the Amazon.
The story continues?
I hope you liked this story and if you haven’t read the 11 Quests books, I hope you will!
I expect to write another Gringar story once The Quests of Grandakar is done.