Legends of the Dragonrealm: Shade (23 page)

So much concern for another?
said a part of his mind mockingly.
Do you think yourself human?

He forced away the thought as he knelt near her. Up close, Shade could see the faint wisps of breath rising. Passing his hand over her, the sorcerer sensed no injuries. Like him, Valea had merely been struck unconscious by the force of their abrupt departure. The stone’s power.

How he could have forgotten the stone until then, Shade did not know. Satisfied that Valea would be all right, the sorcerer rose and searched for the mysterious dwarf.

There was no sign of him. What Shade did see, however, were two more figures frozen in ice, other foolhardy intruders who had become pieces of the Ice Dragon’s macabre collection. One was an elf, the other too obscured to be made out.

Dismissing the dead, Shade tried to sense the stone. However, even after years, the Ice Dragon’s sanctum was inundated with magical energies and ancient spells, some of which were surprisingly active.

A moan escaped Valea. Shade returned to her.

Her eyes opened as he neared. She looked up at him and her stare reminded the sorcerer again that he would never be quite human.

He stared at his hand, always the telltale sign for him. It was solid, which confused him. If his face had lost focus, his hands should have begun to fade.

“The medallion,” Valea finally said. “It’s working again.”

“That is not possible.” He touched the talisman hidden beneath his shirt. Even through the glove and the garment, Shade could feel the medallion’s energies flowing strong.

The enchantress pushed herself up. “Where’s the dwarf?”

“He was not here when I awoke.”

More crackling arose, this time sounding much nearer and closer to the ground. Shade looked behind him at the wall.

The frozen elf had emerged from the ice.

No . . .
Shade quickly corrected himself. A layer of ice was still wrapped around the gaping, sightless figure. The ice used the elf’s corpse as a skeleton, giving it monstrous mobility.

And the elf was not alone. Other frozen bodies began emerging from
the walls, sentries left behind when their creator perished. Somehow, Shade had stirred them to animation.

He stared at the elf. Flames erupted around the macabre guardian. The ice began to melt and then immediately re-formed.

“I should have expected that,” Shade growled as the ghoulish figures continued closing in. He considered another tactic. “Stay very near me.”

As Valea obeyed, Shade planted one hand on the frosty ground. He concentrated.

The ground crackled where he touched it. Guided by his will, a stream of gleaming ice coursed along the floor until it reached the nearest guardian. From there it shot from one sentinel to the next.

And at each guardian, the ice solidified further. The frozen elf tried to move but could not. Where fire had failed, Shade hoped that the late Dragon King’s own element would hold sway.

For the moment, it seemed he had guessed correctly. The now dozen or so monstrosities struggled to reach them but could not.

“We must leave here quickly!” growled Shade, wondering why they had landed here in the first place. He looked around for the dwarf but still saw nothing. Shade hated to abandon the stone but saw no other choice.

Even as he spoke, the foremost guardian broke free. The Seeker followed suit.

The guardians exploded. Shards of ice—and other fragments the sorcerer did not wish to think about—scattered around the ruined sanctum.

“Forgive the delay,” rumbled the dwarf, emerging from a half-buried side passage. “I should have realized that you would set them off.”

Shade started to lunge for their accursed companion, but Valea held him back. She stepped in front of the sorcerer. “Thank you for helping us.”

The dwarf continued to eye Shade, as if expecting something that Shade himself did not. “The stone has its uses, it seems.”

“The stone did this?” Shade asked doubtfully.

“It—helped.”

The sorcerer frowned. “And what else did it do?” Shade tapped his chest where the medallion hung. “Or should I ask what else did
you
do, drake lord?”

The dwarf continued to grin even as he suddenly stretched taller and wider. The grin took on a carnivorous appearance and the eyes narrowed even as they stretched wider. All semblance of the dwarf fell away . . . and the Crystal Dragon, his form more glittering than the icy cavern, stood before the pair.

“The dwarves were cunning and very protective of this last bit, this tiny piece of refuse,” the Dragon King commented in perfect Common. “It escaped the notice of even their masters, the founding race, who had sought all of this substance for their grandest creation.”

“The tower . . . ,” breathed Shade, for the moment so caught up in this revelation that he forgot his anger. “The Tower of the Phoenix . . .”

Palm open before him, the Crystal Dragon approached. Even before the two could see what he held, an array of fantastic, ever-shifting colors radiated from the gauntleted hand. “The dwarves, they call it Var’Gwalimoridor’Dura in the old tongue. A bastardization, I believe, of the founders’ own word for it. Transsslated, it means ‘the Shining Egg.’”

The stone was barely large enough to even be called a pebble. Had it been grey or any normal color, it would have been easily lost in nearly any landscape. But the utter iridescence of the stone, iridescence that made the finest pearl a piece of rock by comparison, made even Shade gape in wonder.

“It’s—so—beautiful,” Valea managed to say. She reached out to touch it, but even though the Crystal Dragon did not prevent her, the enchantress held back at the end. Shade could understand her reaction; he, too, wanted to grab hold of the stone, but his awe was so great that he could do no more than look at it for a moment at a time.

“You came ssso very clossse,” said the drake lord, his excitement finally growing so great that he could not control his speech. “You were
ssso good a friend to the dwarvesss when Iron sssought their realm that their king nearly granted you a brief ussse of thisss.”

The memories flowed through Shade. He and the king
had
been close friends. Shade had defended the dwarves and because of that had learned about the stone. The dwarves, created to serve the founders, had uncovered the unique vein while digging for other precious elements their master utilized for their magical arts. Even the founders had never known anything so astounding. They had driven the dwarves hard, seeking every bit of the vein and then making their servants dig deeper and deeper in the hopes of finding more.

The dwarves never knew what their lords wanted with the substance, only that the founders’ civilization had already begun to fade and that there were great efforts to try to avert its extinction.

By the time of the last dwarven king, there remained no true memory, no written record, of those who had formed them through the magical arts. Like all other races, the dwarves had some tiny bit of the founders’ essence in them, but, unlike the Seekers, the Vraad, or the Quel, they had never been seen as the intended heirs.

Having seen the dwarves’ resilience, Shade wondered if the supposedly infallible founders had been blind.

The shimmering continued to astonish the pair. Only when the Dragon King shut his palm did both Shade and Valea stir.

“It took many centuriesss to discover what you had already forgotten,” the Crystal Dragon commented to Shade. “This. The only piece not taken by the founders. The only tie we have to the tower.”

“They made the tower from this,” Shade recalled finally. “For what they hoped to achieve, it was the perfect conduit.”

“We can use this to ssseek out the tower.”

“For what purpose?” Valea asked.

The other two looked at her. The Crystal Dragon let out a hiss. “She isss not a part of this.”

“You
made
her a part of this,” snapped the sorcerer. He returned his attention to Valea. “I hope to deal with my . . . situation.”

“I understand that. What do
you
plan to do with this tower?” she asked the drake lord.

At first, the Dragon King did not answer, then he said, “Do you recall the well-timed tremor that nearly sssent what remained of the cavern down upon all of usss?”

“I thought that was your doing.”

“And why would I do ssso foolish a thing? The
land
is to blame for that catastrophe! The land itssself sought to crush us beneath tons of rock and forever bury the one object that can lead us to our goal!”

Valea looked to Shade, who nodded. Either she would believe them or think them both mad.

Two not entirely divergent paths,
the sorcerer thought ruefully. This quest
had
driven him beyond sanity during more than one lifetime, even if all the drake lord said was true.

“The land is trying to kill us,” the enchantress finally said, seeking further confirmation of the amazing suggestion.

The Crystal Dragon went on with some exasperation. “Thisss world is under threat . . . from thisss world. The land seeks to change usss asss it ssseesss fit! If we ssstill do not pleassse it, it pushesss usss aside! We mussst put an end to that or the cycle of one failed race after another will continue . . .”

Valea shook her head, but her face indicated her acceptance at last. “The more I think about it, the more I realize I’ve heard that said before. From my father.” Valea hesitated. “But where does the tower fit into that?”

“When the founders devised their grand plan to create a series of potential successors, they set about designing two points of control,” Shade said.

“
Two
points?” hissed the Dragon King, suddenly distrusting. “We have not talked of a sssecond point.”

“I only discovered it when I entered the Gryphon’s mind in search of other knowledge.”

“The Gryphon!” the enchantress exclaimed. “I’d forgotten what you
were doing when I found you! How could you? We don’t know if he’s even recovered!”

The odd feeling of shame Shade had previously felt when he disappointed her returned. “He will.”

“Never mind such trivialities,” snapped the Crystal Dragon. “Tell me of this other point.”

“The Gryphon recalls it as existing in a place called the Dream Lands. The point itself is called Sirvak Dragoth. There were images of various rooms and the reflections of the last of the founders as they prepared themselves for their part in the grand transformation.”

“So the tower isss across the sea? Thisss goes againssst all—”

“I never said that,” Shade replied with some satisfaction at the drake lord’s momentary consternation. “Yes, that was an integral point, but for the entire spell to work, for the founders to imbue the land—the
world,
I should say—with their essence, they had to have another major point in this land. In fact, they could not have succeeded without this one. Sirvak Dragoth by itself would have failed utterly.”

“Why, sssorcerer?”

“Because of what you hold in your hand . . . and if you have calculated the levels of power in the lines of force that crisscross
everything,
as I have through a thousand lifetimes and more, you will see that the nexus of any spell also involving this Sirvak Dragoth must be somewhere on this continent.”

He waited, knowing the question that at least one of them would ask. Shade found himself pleased that it was Cabe Bedlam’s daughter who did so first.

“Do you know where?”

The sorcerer answered with another question, this directed at his ally. “Why are we here in the Wastes?”

“The Ice Dragon, too, sought out the tower, but for the purpose of the Dragonrealm’s destruction. He did not find it, but he did discover something else. Come.”

The Dragon King led them into the passage from which he had
come. A short distance later, they entered a smaller chamber that had managed to survive more intact. Inside and frozen in ice were an array of artifacts of various size and design, many of them clearly from previous races that had ruled the land. Shade recognized Seeker and Quel work, among others.

There were also creatures of various sorts, fantastical creatures, many of which even the sorcerer could not identify. Shade wondered if the Ice Dragon had dealt with an outside source, perhaps even the wolf raiders, to procure some of his collection.

And then, the sorcerer saw the body.

Valea raised a hand toward the figure, but Shade brought it down. This was not some new guardian but rather simply a gruesome addition to the rest of what they saw here.

Yet, for Shade, the sight of it brought forth nightmares he had long forgotten, nightmares that multiplied a hundred times over. Shaking his head, he stepped back from the terrifying sight.

“Faceless . . . ,” the sorcerer whispered in disbelief, caught up in the far, far past. “Faceless . . . a perfect . . . empty vessel, they said . . .”

Indeed, not only was the face missing, but the head itself lacked
any
features whatsoever. There were not even ear holes or a mouth. The body itself was devoid of anything marking it as either male or female. To any onlooker, it was as if someone had carved the basic structure of a human, then given up on creating details.

But Shade knew well from where those details would have come. He had only just spoken of these . . . 
things
to Valea a short time ago in the dwarven chamber they had occupied while waiting.

“Do you know what it isss?” asked the Crystal Dragon in a tone that indicated
he
knew what lay sealed in the ice.

Shade did.
Your grand plan still haunts us to this day, Father!
he thought mockingly.

It was one of the living shells created by the Vraad to house their souls—their ka—after their journey from their ruined home of Nimth to what would someday be called the Dragonrealm.

The same living shells—created from dragon flesh—that had consumed the souls of those Vraad, especially the great Tezerenee, and in the process made of them the first Dragon Kings . . .