Swords & Heroes Story #17

Oblivion’s Key by Gustavo Bondoni

Jan 21, 2025

S&S One Story at a Time

Gustavo’s part of my OG when it comes to stories and projects from ResAliens and Tule Fog Press. We go back to the SF/F bulletin board days; and his story, “Protein” was in my first round of five Residential Aliens paperback projects (2010/2011). He has since gone on to publish well over 250 stories (I’m spitballing here) in all kinds of genres and in all kinds of great markets. Check out his ISFDB here - it’s extensive! But for S&S fans, I’m excited to present a story that features a female warrior of his named Yella, who is a companion to his northern swordsman named Sangr. This is the third Yella adventure of Gustavo’s that I’ve published in a few different places. Hope you like this character as much as I do! + Ed.

Oblivion’s Key by Gustavo Bondoni

Junglo emerged from the dark forest. For a moment, he stood silhouetted against the sky, a massive mountain of a man, clad in little more than a leather skirt, a scabbard on his back, a pair of sandals and a lot of sweat.

Yella tore her eyes away from the barbarian warrior and stepped into the sunlight beside him. A valley extended below them, just becoming green again as tender shoots poked out from the blasted earth.

“Wait,” Yella said, thinking. “I’ve seen a place just like this one. But it was months’ travel back north.”

Junglo scanned the scene. “You told me about that place. This isn’t it. I know where we are.”

“Is it magic?”

“It was, once. No longer…not for a hundred years. They say the mage that lived in the Spires of Ecstasy managed to forget his anguish and no longer channels it through the dread forces of death magic.”

Yella put her hands on her hips. “What was that? You sound like a pompous old fool,” she said.

“Sorry. It’s from an old book we had back at my village before…you know. I used to use it to teach myself about places. I was saving it for when my daughter grew old enough to enjoy it.”

She looked away. The pained expression on the barbarian’s face hinted that he might need a few moments to compose himself. He was a good man. It was a cruel world. Things happened. There was no need to intrude on someone else’s pain.

“Well, if it’s deserted, let’s head in another direction. There can’t be much to eat in that wasteland,” she said.

He sighed. “We’ll have to cross the barrens anyway.”

“Yeah, but we can cut across. I’m assuming this wizard’s old lair is right smack in the middle of the dead zone.”

“I have no idea if there’s civilization in any direction.”

Yella shrugged. “We’ll find some. We always do.”

In response, Junglo sat. Yella raised an eyebrow; she knew what was coming. Over the past few weeks, she’d learned that sitting down was the barbarian’s way of peaceful dissent. His forms of active dissent tended to leave corpses—and on one particularly memorable occasion, enormous dead monsters—strewn across the landscape.

“What?” she said.

“We need to talk about this.”

“No.” Yella already knew what he wanted to talk about. She didn’t want to talk about it.

“Yes,” Junglo said firmly. “We do. You can’t keep driving yourself this way. You need to let it go.”

The temptation to tell him to mind his own business was strong. The only thing that had kept her alive since she found herself magically transported to a world that wasn’t her own was the drive to get back to her home, to get back to Sangr.

It would have been unfair to say that to a man who’d treated her with respect, kindness and…. And whatever else had happened didn’t mean she had forgotten that she needed to get back to Sangr.

“Look,” Junglo said. “I know you want to get back. And I know why. And I’m not jealous. Do you think I wouldn’t give anything to wipe away the past, to be back with my wife, my daughter? I’ve prayed to the moon and stars to take me back just so I can die at their side.” He looked out into the barren landscape that had been a forest once. His hand flicked to his eye. “But I sincerely think you’re in a worse position than I am. This hope you have is unhealthy, and it is driving you mad. You need to let it go.”

“Did I ever tell you that I like you better when you’re pretending to be a monosyllabic barbarian?” she said.

“Yes. A lot of times. Pretty much every time I disagree with you on something.”

Yella sighed. “I’m just not ready to move on. Not yet. I feel I’m getting closer. I feel that I’m accepting things. And every time I realize that I’m letting go, I feel like I’m betraying him. And myself.”

“I get that.” Junglo remained silent for some minutes. “But can we try something different? I’m curious about that glorious ancient fortress this mad, sad magician built for himself. When my family died, the thing that kept me going is that I’d always wanted to see the places I read about in that book. And this is one of the ones that I prayed I’d be able to see. Perhaps the reason my other prayers weren’t answered was that this one is.”

“Damn you,” Yella growled. “What business does a barbarian warrior have reading books?”

Junglo grunted and got to his feet. “None. But a village blacksmith needs to know his figures and at least a few letters. And once you know that much, a book is a good way to pass the time when you’re waiting for metal to cool or for a customer to wander by. And besides, I think of myself as a barbarian adventurer, not a warrior. I’ve never actually been in a war, you know. War is for people who don’t understand that soldiers are expendable, as long as you don’t lose too many of them.”

“I’ll go with you,” she whispered. “For now.”

They walked down the slope that led to the blasted forest, her concession turning what could have been a parting into a truce.

How long the truce would last remained to be seen.

~*~

Junglo dove to the side, and the dark, deformed creature flew over him, only to land in two halves as the barbarian’s lightning-quick sword caught it in midair.

They stood over the corpse.

“You think it might have been a man, once?” Yella asked. It appeared to be some kind of hairless ape, with skin of a reddish purple. It was about half the height of a person, but wider at the shoulders, with powerful, albeit short, arms and legs. Definitely not a tree-dweller.

“I don’t know,” Junglo replied. He studied his sword. “But it bleeds red, and the blood isn’t doing anything untoward to my sword, so we can assume it isn’t magical.”

“Nothing natural looks like that,” Yella replied.

Junglo shrugged. “Nothing we’ve seen so far looks like that. But maybe you’re right. The magic might have deformed the animals—or the people nearby—the same way it’s broken the trees. Maybe this will take generations to cure.

The saplings they’d seen from afar looked to be growing strongly, taking advantage of the lack of competing trees. Up close, however, they were twisted, gnarled and much too dark for natural wood. The leaves were thick, folded over themselves and the bright green of pond scum. But they were alive, forcing their way up through the skeletal remains of the forest that had been.

The beast Junglo killed had been the biggest animal they’d seen in the place. It evidently hadn’t grasped the concept that there might be something more dangerous than it in the vicinity.

It had paid the price.

They walked another hour, and then Junglo gasped. “Look.”

Yella just smiled and shook her head. “Remember what we learned in the mountains. Not everyone has eyesight like a barbarian adventurer.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

Ten minutes later, she saw it, too. It was hard to see in the distance because of the color, but the tower was there. “The spires really are made of glass,” Yella said. “I didn’t believe you.”

“I guess that’s natural,” he replied. “I didn’t believe the book when I read it, either.”

“But you can’t make a glass spire that tall,” she said.

“Not without powerful magic,” he replied. “Look around. The dead forest is where the energy came from.”

They advanced, but the palace was further away than it looked, and they spent a cold, fireless night taking turns to keep watch. Nothing bothered them, but Yella couldn’t shake the sense that the tower looked down on the dead forest with a malicious gaze.

The sun woke her the next morning. It was a handspan over the horizon. “You didn’t wake me for my last watch,” she said.

“You need the rest more than I do,” Junglo replied.

“And now he acts like the barbarian every man undoubtedly is.”

Junglo ignored her and concentrated on getting his belongings together. Silently, she admitted that she’d needed the rest. But she was damned if she was going to say that out loud.

As they drew nearer, the sheer size of the palace shocked her. A central spine of glass whose upper reaches were shrouded clouds sprouted spires of all shapes, sizes and configurations. One set of spines formed a kind of star radiating outward. Another corkscrewed to wrap itself around the center of the edifice.

The colors shimmered, pale pinks, translucent yellows, shimmering light blues all swam across the surface of the building like the rainbows in an oily pool.

“That’s beautiful,” Yella said. “Why do you say it was created in pain?”

Junglo shrugged. “That’s what the book said,” he replied. “A magician so consumed by sorrow that he turned it into rage, and turned the rage into power to build the Spires of Joy. Or something like that. I lost the book a long time ago.”

Yella was sure the words were exactly right. There was something about the way he spoke them, the certainty of the cadence, that spoke to her of true memory.

They reached the ring of class around the base. It looked like it extended three or four hundred paces.

“The heat of construction melted the very rock to glass,” Junglo said.

Yella held up a hand. She scanned the landscape.

“How long ago did you say this was?” she asked.

“A long time ago. More than a hundred years at least.”

“And the magician disappeared?”

“The book said he’d been healed of his pain through the offices of a young mage, perhaps his daughter, perhaps just a village girl. The book is only certain that the tower was abandoned, and the terrors ceased.”

“So where is everybody?”

“I don’t understand,” Junglo said. “Are we waiting for someone?”

“Not us. Where are the looters, the squatters, the people coming here to take the fabulous treasures accumulated during a lifetime of terrorizing the region?”

“That would be us. We’re right here,” Junglo observed.

“No. Others. A prize like this…” She looked around. “Sure, it’s far away, and yes, I suppose some thieves are put off by the possibility of curses and residual magic or whatever. But I grew up with thieves; that kind of thing will only stop the truly weak-willed. The rest either won’t believe the superstition or believe that they are somehow magically immune. This place should show signs of them. Base camps. Litter. Something.”

Junglo mulled it over and shrugged again. “There’s the door,” he finally said.

The entrance was, like the rest of the edifice, made of glass—in this case yellow glass that looked gold until you walked right up to it. Yella put her head against it, shielding her eyes against the sun, to see a large chamber with a wondrously decorated black floor ahead, and a wide spiral staircase that ran along the walls and disappeared into the heights like a vertebral column.

The barbarian adventurer pushed against the pane nearest him and the door opened silently. He pulled his sword out of its scabbard and entered.

Yella came in behind him. It felt good to follow Junglo into danger. The sheer bulk of his musculature made it feel like he was invulnerable, that people could be shooting at you with siege engines on the other side of him, and that he would advance regardless.

“I guess we go up,” he said.

Yella’s trained eyes scanned the room. It was the bottom of a hollow stem that reached up into the edifice. The walls didn’t look strong enough to support the colossal weight above them.

But it was the floor that sang to her. This wasn’t made of glass, but rather of embedded and polished stones. Her eye immediately spotted the texture and lustrousness of opal and jade, and she thought there were other stones in there that one could profit by enormously.

“This is wrong,” she whispered. “That floor at least should be torn up.”

“Will you stop?” Junglo said. “We have a lot of climbing ahead of us. If there’s anything really valuable in here, it’s going to be at the top. I think it’s in the rules that it’s always that way.”

They began to climb. Around and around, and Yella watched the world drop away below them through the transparent walls. Her legs began to ache, she rested and drank and felt irritation that the lump of muscle leading the way, despite weighing twice what she did, didn’t appear to feel the strain.

They reached a platform where a fountain—unconnected to the rest of the transparent building by any kind of pipes—shot water into the air, where it was illuminated by rose-colored light to fall back to the basin.

Junglo put his hand into it. He smelled it. “Water,” he declared.

“Don’t drink it!” Yella hissed.

He raised his eyebrow. “I’m big. Not stupid,” he replied.

Yella was about to answer when the enormous sword swiped across the air and something fell to the ground: a red, batlike creature with only one wing—the other having been removed by Junglo’s swing.

“Duck!” the barbarian shouted.

Yella obeyed and felt a rush of cold air along her back. And then the battle was joined.

Red balls dove at them from the gap in the center of the staircase. Her rapier flew into her hand and she swung at one of the creatures. She missed as it suddenly zagged to her left.

“They’re incredibly fast!” she exclaimed.

Junglo pirouetted and killed another. “They dip the opposite wing before they turn. You can predict their path. Look out!”

She lunged at another, but the creature, again, evaded her sword and brushed along the back of her left arm, leaving a line of fire.

“Ouch,” Yella shouted.

Pain-driven fury gave her focus, and she spotted one of the bats bearing toward her. Ignoring the others in the flurry above, she focused on that one, and watched it like a hawk, it dipped left. She aimed right.

And with a jarring impact, the tip of her rapier caught the thing right in the leading edge.

“Yes!” Yella shouted. “Take that, you bastard!”

Emboldened by the first success, she moved closer to Junglo, where the density of creatures appeared higher. She caught another on the wing, although that was a lucky strike, and managed to slice one through the body, although that one kept flying. On the way, she suffered a half-dozen more lacerations.

Then, suddenly, there were no more assailants left.

Yella felt the back of her arm. “I think I’m cut,” she said.

“There’s no cut,” Junglo said, peering at the arm.

“Sure feels that way.”

Junglo took her arms in his hands. “There’s a gray line here…. Can you move the arm?”

“Yeah,” Yella said. “It feels fine except for that place, where it feels like it got cut.”

“Did they hit you anywhere else?”

“Back of the leg.”

“Yeah. There’s another gray bit there.”

Junglo stopped peering at her leg and knelt beside the nearest of the dead monsters. The bodies, excluding their wings, were a little bigger than his fist.

Before Yella could stop him, Junglo did the most typically barbarian thing she could think of. The idiot took a finger and touched the dead red monster.

“Ow.” He pulled it away quickly, but before she could say anything, he held up a hand for silence and began to feel the floor around the corpse. Then he looked up at her. “This thing is freezing the floor. It’s not magic or poison that hurt you. You got instant frostbite. It’s a good thing they didn’t hit us in the face or something.” He looked over at her and grinned. “Of course, it would have been much more tragic in your case than in mine. I’m not sure anyone even looks at my face.”

She ignored his attempt at flattery. “And what kind of a creature freezes everything it touches?”

“A very cold one?”

Yella resisted the urge to scream. “Well, there don’t seem to be any more of them. Maybe we should keep climbing?”

They climbed. Eventually, the stairwell ended, and they arrived at what, had this been a royal palace, would have been the great hall. It was an enormous reception room complete with an ornate throne.

“That throne looks like it’s made of gold,” she said.

“Yeah, but if we try to carry it back with us, we’ll strain something.”

“No need to carry it. Just lift it over the railing and let it fall. It should break into a number of pieces. We just pick up what we can carry and buy ourselves a town and an army somewhere. We can terrorize the countryside.”

Junglo grunted. “I thought you were hell bent on going back. Come on, let’s see what else is in here. There’s got to be some magical goodies we can get even more for than we can for the throne.”

Sumptuous corridors, lushly carpeted halls and enormous bedchambers were stacked one above the other, and every way they turned, they could see the countryside stretching out to infinity, with the mountains to the north, a purple haze on the horizon.

“I think we’re getting close,” Junglo said as one hallway ended at an ornate staircase likely worth more than all the plunder that every thief Yella knew had managed to steal their entire lives. The door at the top opened before a determined push by Junglo.

At first, Yella thought the room must be open to the elements. It was freezing in there, and she could see the dark azure of the sky above.

Then she realized that the glass was there, barely visible, cutting out any temperature changes caused by the climate outside. The cold originated inside the room.

“Welcome.” The voice sounded like it was the wind that brought the chill. A hollow, empty tone that seemed to scratch and claw over mountain rocks. A man clad completely in black appeared from what Yella had originally thought was a dark mirror or some kind of strange decorative painting that stood on one side of the room. “The woman was right to ask where everyone was. She was right to wonder how this palace remains undisturbed. The valley belongs to—”

The man made a gurgling sound and fell to the floor, a long, golden ceremonial dagger suddenly protruding from his chest.

Yella turned to see Junglo with his hand still in the air where he’d released the dagger.

“What? You could feel the magic, right?”

“What magic?” Yella asked. “He was just talking.”

“The room got colder with every word. Couldn’t you feel it?”

Yella shook her head. She no longer cared about the dead man. Junglo was probably right, the man must have had a certain amount of magic. At least enough to scare away—or deal with—the kind of desperate rogues who might chance to travel here. He evidently hadn’t been smart enough to realize that barbarians don’t often wait for magicians to stop talking and start throwing magic around.

Besides, there was something much more interesting than the magician here. Much more. The mirror, she realized, was nothing of the sort. It was some kind of black hole that opened onto…

…Another reality! And she’d just seen the wizard emerge from there.

“Yella, wait!”

She ignored him. This was the chance she’d been searching for for months: a portal out of this world. Even if it didn’t lead her straight back into Sangr’s arms, it would take her somewhere else. This reality’s magicians couldn’t build a portal to save their lives. Maybe the next universe over would be better.

Yella dove through the portal.

Her throat snapped shut like a trap. She fell to her hands and knees, which immediately exploded with pain. She tried to scream, but there didn’t seem to be enough air to scream with. She couldn’t breathe.

She tried to stand, but the floor was so cold she didn’t want to push against it. The pain was incredible. Her eyes felt like they were hardening, like the very water in them was freezing.

Suddenly, something wrapped itself around her waist and Yella found herself flying through the air. She landed face-first on the on the floor of the chamber, right next to the dead magician.

A moment later, she began to sob. Not because of the pain from her bruised face, she barely felt the pain, but because her dream was dead. Not postponed. Not something she could resort to another wizard for help with.

Dead.

She would never get back. She knew it in her bones.

The knowledge ripped at her inside; it was like Sangr was dead. Like realizing she’d lost him all over again.

“You should have let me die,” she screamed at Junglo as he stepped back through the portal. The big man shivered. He studied his arms and began to pick pieces of frozen sweat from his body. They fell to the floor with a soft clicking sound.

“No,” Junglo replied. “I shouldn’t have. And yes, I know how you feel. But you’ll get over it. I’ve seen you getting better. Every single day for you is better than the one before. Maybe now it will go faster.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.” He knelt beside her. “Really, I do.” He took her hand. She didn’t resist. He studied her palm. “I bet this hurts like hell,” he said. “It’s like a burn, but from the cold.” He prodded her and she whimpered. “You were lucky I got there so fast. It didn’t freeze your hand all the way through. Only the outer layer of the skin. You’ll probably be fine in a few days.”

“I don’t want to be fine,” she said. She curled up into a ball. “I just want it to end.”

Junglo put his arms underneath her and effortlessly brought her to her feet. He walked her over to a seat and placed her there.

“I promise you it will get better.”

“How can you know?”

Junglo didn’t say anything, and she looked up at him. He was looking away, the muscles of his jaw working.

“I’m sorry,” Yella said.

“He nodded.”

“You’re a good man,” she said.

“And you’re a good woman,” he replied. “Allowing yourself to continue to live won’t take that away.”

He hugged her, and she nestled closer, thinking how lucky she was to have fallen into the arms of a man like this one.

A pang of guilt accompanied the thought.

But it was smaller this time.

Oblivion’s Key © 2025 by Gustavo Bondoni (3840 words) All rights reserved. You may restack this story via Substack but please do not republish elsewhere. Banner and clipart by Gilead, used by permission.

Support the Author: Want to read more about Yella and Sangr? Then don’t miss Gustavo’s episodic novel, The Song of Sangr (2022 from Three Ravens Publishing). Two more original Sangr and Yella tales appear in Swords & Heroes anthology and the special sword and sorcery edition of ResAliens Zine (Double Issue 8 & 9).

You can also pick up Gustavo’s collection of dark fantasy, Pale Reflection, published by Tule Fog Press, which includes the story, “Protein,” mentioned above.

Finally, jump in and tell us what you thought of “Oblivian’s Key.” Did you enjoy this story? Drop a comment!

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