“Bah, Heft-a-stone, will ye be quick about it, then?” Nordwinnil Fellhammer moaned, rising from his cross-legged position beside the campfire. “Suren that me lips are par—”
Nordwinnil’s words caught in his throat as he turned to regard the pond and Ringo—or the two partial legs, knee-to-foot, standing in Ringo’s boots where Ringo had just been. Nordwinnil’s eyes widened and his jaw hung open as one of those legs tipped over, falling outward to plop into the mud.
“Yeah, me own throat as—” said another of the dwarves, and he, too, abruptly cut off his sentence as he turned toward the pond and saw the gigantic black dragon crouching in the water near the shore.
The beast chomped down, and one of Ringo’s arms fell free to splash into the pond.
“D-d-d-d-dragon!” Nordwinnil screamed.
He tried to sprint out to the side but turned so furiously that he twisted his legs together and wound up tumbling headlong into the tent behind him. He thrashed and scrambled as all the dwarves began to shout. He heard a thump and knew it to be an axe slapping defiantly against a wooden shield.
The ground trembled as the beast came forth from the pond, and Nordwinnil scrambled all the more—and of course that only entangled him in the canvas all the more.
More cries assailed him, screams of fright and a growl of defiance. He heard a crossbow crank back, followed by the sharp click of the bolt’s release, the hiss of the wyrm, the abbreviated shriek of the dwarf archer, and the sloppy, crackling impact of the dragon’s fangs biting the dwarf in half.
Nordwinnil tucked his legs and drove forward as a rain of dwarf blood sprinkled over him and the tent. He finally came out on the far side and kept on scrambling, crawling on all fours.
He couldn’t shout past the lump in his throat when he heard his companions crying out, horribly shrieking, behind him. He didn’t dare look back and nearly fainted with terror when he felt a slap on his back.
But it was a dwarf, good old Pergiss MacRingle, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him along.
Good old Pergiss! Pergiss wouldn’t leave him behind.
With his friend steadying him as they went, Nordwinnil managed to get his legs under him and climb to his feet. On they ran, or tried to, for the ground shook as if an earthquake had struck. The dragon stomped down on another dwarf, crushing the poor fellow into the soft ground. Pergiss and Nordwinnil tangled up and crashed down, and both fought to regain their footing.
Nordwinnil looked back as the dragon turned their way, and those horrible eyes found him and held him.
“Come on then, ye dolt!” Pergiss cried, but Nordwinnil couldn’t move.
Pergiss looked back, and the dragon snapped its great leathery wings out wide, stealing the meager remnants of daylight with its magnificent blackness.
“By the gods,” Pergiss managed to say.
The dragon’s head shot forward just a few feet, its jaws opened wide, and it blew forth a spray of green-black acidic spittle.
Nordwinnil and Pergiss lifted their arms before them to fend off the deadly rain, but the sticky, burning substance engulfed them.
They screamed. They burned. They melted together so completely that anyone who happened upon the scene would never know where Nordwinnil ended and Pergiss began.
There was silence again by the still pond near Palishchuk. The buzzards watched with interest, but they dared not take wing and caw.
He was Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian. He was Urshula, the black wyrm of Vaasa, the Beast of the Bog, the bane of all who thought to civilize this untamable land. He had razed entire villages in his youth. He had decimated towns so completely that those who subsequently returned to the scene could not know that structures had once stood there. Tribes of goblins had paid homage to him, sacrificed to him, and carried his likeness on totems.
In his youth, those centuries before, Urshula had dominated the region from the Galena Mountains in the south and running up the eastern border to the base of the Great Glacier that described Vaasa’s northern edge.
But he had grown quieter. Age had brought contentment and piles of treasure whose smell and taste—and magical energy—provided an irresistible bed for Urshula. Rarely did the dragon come forth from the soft peat and cool stones of his subterranean lair.
Every now and then, though, the smell of fresh meat, of dwarf, human, orc, or even the occasional elf, drifted down to him, and when it was accompanied by the hum of magic and the metallic taste of coins, Urshula roused.
He sat before his conquest, the dwarves all slaughtered and devoured. His forelegs, so deadly and delicate all at once, picked through the treasures as he mused whether he liked the taste of dwarf raw, as with the first kill by the lake, or acid-bathed, as with the pair to the side. A great forked tongue slipped through his fangs as he considered his options, seeking remnants of one or the other morsel to better help with his internal debate.
He soon had all of the treasure worth pilfering in a single sack. He clutched it in one claw and turned his senses to the south, from whence drifted the pungent smell of orc. Urshula wasn’t really hungry any more, and the thought of sleep was inviting, but he spread his great leathery wings and lifted up high on his hind legs, his serpentine neck craning to afford him a view far to the south.
The dragon’s eyes narrowed as he considered the plumes of smoke rising from the distant city. He had known of the settlement, of course, for he had heard the ruckus of its initial construction, but he had never given it much heed. The smell of orc was strong, but they were not known to be rich in either magic or coin.
The dragon looked back to the pond and considered the tunnels beneath the dark waters that would take him home. He looked back to the south and flexed his wings yet again.
Still clutching the sack, Urshula leaped into the air. Great wings rolled parallel to the ground, bent slightly, and caught the air beneath them, driving the wyrm higher. From fifty feet up he saw the city and was surprised at the size of it. Thousands of people lived there, or so it seemed, for its walls ran wide and far to the south. Scores of structures dotted the interior, some of them extensive and multi-storied.
A wave of hatred rankled the beast, and Urshula almost gave in to it and dived headlong for that intrusion. How dare they build such a place upon his land!
But then he heard the horns blowing and saw the black specks—the guards of the distant city—scrambling along the walls.
Urshula had gone against a city—not a town, but an organized and defended city—only once before. One wing, his rear right leg, and his lower torso still ached with the memory of stinging pain.
Still, these intruders could not go unpunished.
Urshula climbed higher into the darkening sky. He let forth a roar, for he wanted terror to precede his attack.
He leveled off once he passed above the clouds, and he could imagine the poor fools along the city’s wall scanning the skies in desperation.
He drifted south for a short while, then he dived, a power swoop that shot him out from the cloud cover at full speed, the wind shrieking over his extended wings. He heard the screams. He saw the scrambling. He smelled the tiny arrows reaching up to him.
He crossed over and strafed with his acidic breath, drawing a line of devastation down the center of the city. A few of the arrows nipped at him. One spear lifted up high enough for Urshula to bite it out of the sky.
And he was gone, out over the city’s southern wall. A slight tilt of his wings angled the dragon to climb into the air once again.
The dragon knew they’d be better prepared for his second run, but there would be no second run. Urshula rose up even higher. He banked back to the north and flew over the city from on high, well out of reach of the puny arrows.
He glided down, swooping past the remains of the dwarf camp, then dipped and plowed into the lake, lifting a wall of water high into the air.
Wings tucked back as he descended, the dragon’s great body swayed to push him through the cold current of the underground river that brought water from the spring melt at the Great Glacier. Urshula would never run out of breath, though, for black dragons were perfectly adapted to such an environment. Some minutes later, the dragon turned into a side passage, a lava tube from an ancient volcano that gradually climbed so that, after a long while, he came free of the water.
He followed his subterranean network of trails unerringly, traversing corridors so wide that he could occasionally flex his wings, and so narrow that his scales scraped the worms and roots as he snaked his way through. In one of those narrow corridors, Urshula paused and sniffed. He nodded, knowing that he was parallel to his lair.
He turned his head into the soft ground and brought forth his acidic breath but sprayed it gradually, melting and loosening the dirt before him as he bored through.
He broke into the southern rim of the side room of his lair, crawled forth, and shook the peat and dirt from his interlocking scales. He stopped and snapped his long, thick tail against the wall of dirt, collapsing the tunnel behind him, and issued a growl that sounded almost like a cat’s purr. His lamplight gaze fell over his bed of coins and gems, suits of armor and weapons. He flung his newest sack of treasure atop the pile and slithered forth.
He collapsed in pleasant thoughts of devastation and considered again the taste of dwarf, raw and cooked. His tongue snaked between his great fangs, seeking morsels and sweet memories.
Then the dragon’s lamplight eyes closed, the lair fell into pitch blackness, and Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian, the Beast of the Bog, slept.
“Minor damage from a meager wyrm,” said Byphast the Frozen Death. She appeared in all ways an elf, except that her hair shone silver rather than the usual golden or black, and her skin was a bit too white. Her eyes, too, did not fit the overall image, for they showed a cool shade of yellow, with a line of black centering them, like the eyes of a hunting serpent. “Palishchuk shows the scars you predicted, several years old, but they are of little consequence.”
In the room was one other, seated at a small table before a trio of large bookcases, who slowly swiveled his head Byphast’s way. The fabric of his gray cloak was torn in strips to reveal the velvety blackness of the robe beneath. His voluminous sleeves hung below the edge of the table, but when the man turned, his fingers showed.
Fingers of bone. A living skeleton.
Beneath the great hood of the robe, there was only blackness, and Byphast was glad for that.
Her relief did not hold, though, as Zhengyi lifted one of his skeletal hands and drew the hood back. The gray and white skull came into view. The pieces of rotting flesh and the inhuman, unearthly eyes—points of red and yellow fire—forced Byphast to glance away. And the smell, the essence of death itself, nearly backed her out of the room.
Zhengyi pulled the hood back all the way to reveal the splotches of his white hair, clumped at all angles across his bony pate. If most people coifed themselves to appear more attractive, it seemed quite apparent that Zhengyi did the opposite.
For as most people, as most creatures, reveled in life, so did Zhengyi revel in death. He had passed beyond his human form into a state of undeath. Of the many variants among the walking dead on Toril, none was more abhorrent and revolting than a lich. A vampire might charm, might even be beautiful, but a lich was not a creature of subtlety. A lich didn’t enter a bargain with Death, as did a vampire. A lich wasn’t an unwilling participant in the state of undeath, as were the minor skeletons, zombies, and ghouls. A lich was a purposeful creature, a wizard who by powerful enchantments and sheer force of will had defeated Death itself, had refused to surrender consciousness and self-awareness or to give in to some otherworldly, godly being.