The Bloodstone Prophecy - Book 2 (complete)

Chapter 24 - Mystery Skeleton

The Shadow Queen could feel the giant's presence through the thick, stone walls. It was restless tonight, shuffling back and forth across the small quarters she kept it in. It let out a deafening bellow that interrupted her work and startled the guard at the door. The guard instinctively pulled out his whip and held it ready.

The queen rolled her eyes and resumed her task of grinding the dried kiro blossoms to powder. The guard knew that she had personally placed a holding spell on the dungeon that would be impossible for the giant to break. The guard, noticing her reaction, quickly tucked his whip back in his belt.

She poured the powder into a small glass test tube and wedged a cork into it. She looked around the laboratory with satisfaction. It was perfectly suited to her needs. A long stone table stretched across the length of the room, allowing her plenty of space to work. Along one wall, several small beasties slunk, or slept, or hissed behind bars. She didn't like to cage her darlings up, but she couldn't let them run rampant in her lab. Controlling their minds was easy enough, but unlike the simple-minded humans, they were still wild enough they did occasionally break free. While deeply engrossed in her work, the creatures could wreak quite a bit of havoc to the lab before she would even notice.

The queen wrinkled her nose. The lab may be convenient, but she didn't appreciate the less than pleasant odor. Who could? Unless one enjoyed a mixture of damp wood and rotting flesh. The advances she was making in her experiments was worth the temporary discomfort.

The giant yelled again, startling the queen and causing her to drop her test tube. It hit the cave floor and shattered. The queen cursed. It had taken her minotaur five whole months to track down the kiro blossom in a remote mountain in the Japanese Alps. There had been only four precious plants in bloom. She had ground them to powder, all of them. It would be a whole year before the plant blossomed again now that the powder had been contaminated with shards of glass. It was a shame. It was a necessary ingredient to create a Asian giant hornet with a stinger the size of her arm.

The giant rattled the bars of its prison and bashed his fists into the wall. It was like being responsible for a spoiled oversized child, one that happened to be more than twice her size. This was completely unacceptable.

"Go away!" she ordered the guard. He seemed relieved to leave, likely planning to join the other guards in a heated game of Basra. She had to admit that thought seemed infinitely preferable to dealing with the giant. Nevertheless, she had created the giant; now it was up to her to teach it how to obey its master. The giant was proving far more difficult to train than her other beasties, but then again, it had been the first time she had created a beast in quite this way.

She strode over to another table that was cluttered with glass jars of various sizes and shapes. Her spoils were held inside them. Her eyes paused on one jar that held an object that at one time had belonged to the angry giant in the other room. It was the bones of a hand. The ulna and radius bones were severed a couple inches below the wrist where she had sawed the hand off the skeleton. Attached to them were the carpals and metacarpals, but a few of the phalange bones were missing from the thumb and index finger. None of this was remarkable, of course, except the size of the fingers (twelve inches across the palm and up the middle finger) and an extra set of phalanges that proved the giant had been a six-fingered man.

The queen lifted the glass off the larger container next to the hand. Stretched out, the giant had been twelve feet tall. This was the only other thing she had kept of the giant's impressive skeleton. It was a shame she had to destroy them, considering how magnificent the bones had been, but the potion had required her to grind the rest of the bones to powder.

She couldn't resist keeping the biggest prize. She touched the abnormally large elongated skull of the giant, running her fingers over it. This was one of the more curious aspects to the giant—only one parietal plate instead of the two in a typical human skull. Running her hand over the skull and down to the back of the cranium, she again marveled at the sheer size of it. It was approximately twice the size of a normal man's skull. Tufts of red hair were still attached to the skull.