Gauntlgrym

Dor’crae grinned, showing his approval.

“A formidable foe,” Dahlia warned. “Even with Szass Tam’s brooch protecting me.”

Dor’crae shook his head. “Once, perhaps, but no more. The drow have taken care of that matter for us.”

A short while and a dozen chambers and corridors later, the pair came into a strange room.

“What is this place?” Dahlia asked, for it seemed more the drawing room of a fancy inn than a subterranean chamber amidst a network of damp caves. Colorful tapestries hung around the chamber, which was set with lavishly-decorated and well-crafted furniture, including a marble-topped vanity with a large, gold-gilded mirror set atop it.

“It is my home,” said a woman seated on a delicate chair in front of that vanity. When she turned in her seat and smiled at the couple, Dahlia tried hard not to wince. She might have been beautiful, with long, lustrous black hair and delicate features, though what color her eyes might once have been was long lost to the red dots of a lich’s unnatural inner fires. Her smile was a ghastly thing, for her gums had rotted back, making her teeth seem far too large, and her pallid skin seemed almost to crack as she smiled.

“Do you not like it?” she asked sweetly—too sweetly, as if she was a young girl at play, perhaps.

“Oh, we do, Valindra! Oh, we do!” Dor’crae said with exaggerated enthusiasm before Dahlia could even begin to reply. The warrior looked to her vampire companion then back at the lich.

“You are Valindra Shadowmantle?” she asked.

“Why, yes, I am,” Valindra replied.

“I have heard stories of your greatness,” Dahlia lied, and Dor’crae squeezed her hand in approval. “But even those flattering tales greatly understated your beauty.”

With that, Dahlia bowed low, while Valindra tittered and laughed.

“Where is your husband, good lady?” Dor’crae asked, and when Valindra spun as if looking for someone, Dor’crae nodded his chin up toward a shelf on a glass-fronted hutch, where sat a most curious, skull-shaped gem the size of Valindra’s fist.

As they all considered that phylactery, the eyes of the skull flared red, brightly for a moment before going soft once more.

“Greeth is in there?” Dahlia quietly asked her companion.

“What’s left of him,” the vampire replied. He directed Dahlia’s gaze the other way, to a second skull-shaped gem, which showed no life within its smoky white crystal.

“Valindra’s phylactery,” Dor’crae explained.

Dahlia felt at the brooch on her vest as she considered the gems. She dared walk over to the hutch, and noting that Valindra still smiled stupidly, she dared to open the door. Dahlia glanced back at Dor’crae, who held up his hands, having no answer.

“A most beautiful gemstone,” Dahlia said to Valindra.

“It’s my husband’s,” the lich replied.

“May I hold it?”

“Oh, please do!” said Valindra.

Dahlia wasn’t sure if that sweetness was from her apparent simple-mindedness, or if it was an enthusiastic prodding for more nefarious reasons. Holding the phylactery of a disembodied lich, after all, was reputedly the easiest way to get oneself possessed.

But Dahlia wore Szass Tam’s brooch, which offered great protection from such necromancy, and so she took the gemstone in her hand.

Almost immediately, she felt the rush of confusion, anger, and terror contained within that gemstone. She knew it was Arklem Greeth, and would have even if Dor’crae hadn’t told her so, for the lich screamed at her to release him, and to kill someone named Robillard.

She saw flashes of the glory that had been Hosttower of the Arcane, for Arklem Greeth had been its final master. So many images assaulted her, so many discordant thoughts flickered in her consciousness. She felt herself being drawn into the inviting depths of the gemstone.

She began to wonder where Dahlia ended and Arklem Greeth began.

In a flicker of recognition, Dahlia dropped the skull gem back onto the shelf and quickly stepped back, gasping for breath and trying hard to hold her composure.

“Your husband has a magnificent gemstone, Valindra,” she said.

“Oh, but he does, and mine is no less wondrous,” the lich answered, and her voice sounded different then, husky, threatening, sober.

Dahlia turned on her.

“Why are you here?” Valindra asked. “Did Kimmuriel send you?”

“Kimmuriel?” Dahlia asked, looking more at Dor’crae than the lich.

“One of the leaders of the dark elves in Luskan,” the vampire explained.

“Where is he?” Dahlia asked.

“He went home,” Valindra unexpectedly answered, her voice full of regret. “Far, far away. I miss him. He helps me.”

The warrior and the vampire exchanged curious glances.

“He helps me remember,” Valindra went on. “He helps my husband.”

“Did he give you the gemstones?” Dahlia asked.

“No, that was Jarlaxle,” Valindra answered, “and the stupid dwarf.”

Dahlia looked to Dor’crae, who shook his head, then back at Valindra.

“Bwahaha!” Valindra erupted, ending with a sour expression and an even more sour sigh. “Stupid dwarf.”

“So, Jarlaxle is a dwarf?”

“No!” said Valindra, seeming quite amused by that notion. “He is drow. Handsome and clever.”

“And he is in Luskan?”

“Sometimes.”

“Now?”

“I … I …” The lich’s eyes darted around, seeming at a loss.

Dahlia looked to Dor’crae, who had no answers. “What do you know of the Hosttower?” she asked the lich.

“I lived there once, for a long time.”

“Yes, then it was destroyed.…”

The lich turned away, throwing her arm up across her eyes. “It fell! Oh, it fell!”

“And its magic was broken?” Dahlia pressed, moving near to the distraught woman. She asked again, and when Valindra looked at her blankly, she rephrased the question several different ways.

But it was soon obvious that the lich had no idea what she might be talking about, so Dahlia wisely shifted the conversation to other, more mundane things, then to the topic of Valindra’s beauty once more, something that seemed to calm the undead woman.

After some time, she asked, “May I visit you again, Valindra?”

“I do so enjoy company,” the lich replied. “But tell me before, that I might prepare …” She paused and looked around, and appeared increasingly distressed.

“I … where is my food?” Valindra asked, and she looked at Dahlia curiously. Then she threw her hands up over her face and fell back with a great wail.

Dahlia moved toward her, but the lich thrust one hand forward to keep the elf warrior away. “My food!” she said, then she began to laugh.

“I will bring you some food,” Dahlia promised, and Valindra laughed all the louder.

“I need no such sustenance,” the lich replied. “Not for so many years now. Not since the Hosttower fell.” She looked at Dahlia with a sad grin. “Not since I died.”

She seemed to calm then and Dahlia retreated to stand by Dor’crae.

“I forget sometimes,” Valindra explained, her voice sober once more. “It is so lonely.” She cast her longing gaze at the skull gem phylactery of her husband.

“Then you would welcome us back?” Dahlia asked.

Valindra nodded.

Dahlia motioned for Dor’crae to follow and started out of the room.

“But no food,” Valindra called after her.

“There are still answers to be found down here,” Dor’crae said when they were away. “In the roots of the Hosttower, if not in Valindra’s home.”

“There are answers to be found in there, as well.”

“I doubt she knows much of the Hosttower’s origins, or wards.”

“But Arklem Greeth may well know,” Dahlia assured him. “I would speak with him again.”

“You spoke with him? When you held the gem? It is not wise—”

“Short conversations,” Dahlia promised with a grin. “It’s near dawn now. I’m going back to the city—I have an audience with Borlann the Crow, one of the High Captains. Perhaps he will tell me more of these drow, this Kimmuriel and Jarlaxle.”

“And I?”

“Follow the inland root of the Hosttower,” Dahlia ordered. “I would know where it goes.”

Dor’crae nodded.

“I will return to Valindra tomorrow night, and every night thereafter. Join us as soon as you can.”

“Should I escort you up?” asked the vampire.

Dahlia just looked at him.

“Ghouls, ghasts, and other beasts …” Dor’crae started to explain.

He stopped when Dahlia stared at him as though he’d lost his mind at long last, and she took up her fighting staff.

Before the next dawn, Dahlia hung by one arm from the bottom lip of the uppermost well, peering into the chamber below. She slowly turned, scanning the room for the undead she knew were there, but knew she wouldn’t see.

They could see her, hanging up high, her walking stick sparking with blue light, but it didn’t matter. Even if she’d come down in complete darkness and as silent as a shadow, they would know. They would smell her. The aroma of her sweet, living flesh would almost overwhelm them.

Dahlia dropped to the floor below, springing open her staff as she descended. She landed in a crouch and hopped in circles.

There were too many.

Out they came in a swarm, from every exit and every shadow: ravenous ghouls, hunched low, running on all fours, their long nails scratching against the stone. They appeared as emaciated human corpses, gray skin stretched over skull and bones, but there was more to them than that: claws and teeth and a hatred for all things living, and a hunger for all flesh, alive or dead. There was a score of them at least, and Dahlia had nowhere to run to gain a more defensible position.

But neither did they.

She sprang straight up, inverting with her hands set firmly at the top of her planted staff. She straightened upside down, thrusting her legs back inside the well. She snapped her legs out wide to the sides, locking them against the sides of the well, and bent up, hand-walking her staff before her until she turned upright back in the well, with the swarm of ghouls below her.

“Enjoy this,” she whispered to the ghouls and she tugged a ruby gemstone free from her necklace and dropped it. It exploded the moment it hit the floor, flames rolling out in every direction, nearly reaching back up into the well with Dahlia.

With her legs still locking her firmly in place, the warrior clapped her hands over her ears to diminish the awful keening below.

The fireball lasted only a heartbeat, a single, devastating gout of flames, but the sting remained, fires clinging to the ghouls’ skin, eating hungrily. They shrieked and screamed in high-pitched, otherworldly voices, hellish calls befitting the Abyss itself. They ran about madly, arms flailing to chase the biting flames away, claws slashing to keep their insane companions at bay, for indeed some jumped upon others and began chewing and tearing at undead flesh, at any flesh, at anything that might make the pain stop.