The Eight Walls of Rogar: An Epic Fantasy Adventure Series! (The Lost Kingdoms of Laotswend Trilogy--Book One) Read Online Free PDF

to him.  At times, he wondered if he wasn’t actually asleep, at home in bed...and this was all just a bad dream.  How long have I been in here? he wondered .   It felt like days, though how could he know?  With the stars and sun hidden from him, he had no way to gauge the passage of time, no way to measure its movement beyond counting the seconds.
    After many more hours of empty wandering, Andaris’ eyelids grew too heavy to hold open, so he curled into a tight ball on the ground and fell asleep.  When he woke, his hands were clutched so close to his chest that they had gone numb.  He was cold and weak, but it did not occur to him to eat.  Then, once again, he was shuffling along, only vaguely aware of where he was and what he was doing.  It would be so easy to give in to the darkness, to just lie down, close his eyes, and never open them again.
    In the end, it was neither courage nor strength of will that prevented him from doing so.  Long after both had abandoned him, what kept him going was an unlikely mixture of boredom and habit.  You see, lying in the dark, waiting to die, turned out to be terribly dull.  He simply became used to putting one foot in front of the other.  There was nothing to do except walk, so he walked.
    Shortly following his seventy-fourth right turn, Andaris stopped, rubbed his eyes, and gazed in wonder down the length of the corridor, his sluggish mind straining to believe what he was seeing.  “Is it real?” he whispered.
    The corridor opened thirty or forty feet from where he stood into a cave with a low ceiling.  The floor of the cave glowed with a soft yellow light.  A draft of sweet-smelling air blew through the tunnel, awaking his senses like a slap across the face.
    The way out! He had found it at last.  Next thing he knew he was running.  He’d barely been able to stand, and now he was running.
    Relief flooded through him as he approached the hole, as he came smiling and blinking into the glorious sunlight.  It occurred to him, as he emerged into the brilliance of a clear, sunny day, that the opening was different.  No matter, he thought, filling his lungs with fresh air.  At least I’m out.
    Moments later, though, while shading his watering eyes with his hand and squinting up at the mountains, Andaris frowned.  There, in the distance, set dramatically against the pale blue of the sky, were four snow-capped peaks.
    Snow?   But just yesterday they were bare.  Could the storm have dropped so much ?  No, he decided.  They even look different…steeper and more jagged.  But how’s that possible?
    Turning back to the hole from which he had just emerged, he pursed his lips, trying to reason it out.  Set into the side of a grassy mound, the hole appeared to be nothing more than an oversized animal burrow.  If he had traveled underground from the cliff to here, then why couldn’t he see it?  As far as cliffs went, it was quite large.  It should have been visible for miles.  He’d reached the foothills before even entering the cave, and yet save for the distant peaks, could see only flat forest in every direction.  He couldn’t have gone that far.  Could he?
    And what about the trees? he wondered, really noticing them for the first time.  Fingar was a roughly equal mix of oak and pine, and now there wasn’t an oak in sight, and the pines were bigger around and had a bluish tint to their needles.  What’s going on here? he thought.
    Determined to find some answers, Andaris spent what remained of the afternoon and most of the evening scouting through the forest around the opening.  By the time night settled across the land, he had given the entire area a thorough once over, but still hadn’t a clue as to where he was or what had happened.  He didn’t see how he could have traveled so far beneath the earth, though supposed he must have.  What other explanation was there?
    Weary and dismayed, he arranged his blankets within the mouth of the cave and lay