Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. II

by Richard A. Knaak

  A bitter-tasting wind swept through the chamber, so swiftly birthed that it was near tornado proportions before Darkhorse could even acknowledge its existence. If Shade had created it to destroy him, it was a feeble attempt. Formed in a place between chaos and order, such a wind was little more than a breeze to him and, protected by the shadow steed’s power, it did not even touch the helpless Erini.

  What it was doing, however, was tearing the chamber—even the mountain under which the cavern lay—to fragments that flew madly into the air, colliding with one another and flying off into a darkness that was not night. Darkhorse found his footing growing unstable and his bond with Erini being stretched to its utmost. It was too late to stop whatever spell Shade—and it could only be the warlock’s doing—had cast. The eternal could only shield himself and the princess and wait for the storm to pass. If it would.

  As the last of the cavern walls tore free from the earth and vanished, a new land formed around the three. A land that seemed out of sync with reality. Its colors were haphazard, clashing, and the landscape was twisted and dying. The sky was an odd shade of green, much like mold or something dead left too long to decay on its own.

  Throughout all of this, Shade stood where he was, seemingly passive. As the wind died down, to be replaced by a stale, sulfurous stench, the warlock spoke one word ever so softly. In the still of this ugly, decrepit land, he might have been shouting, for Darkhorse heard that word all too clearly.

  “Nimth.”

  A single word that spoke volumes. It told Darkhorse where he was. It told him what sort of power Shade must have had to break a barrier that had remained unbroken since the Vraads’ escape from their tortured world, Nimth. It told him something of Shade that he had failed to see upon his arrival.

  The warlock had moved more quickly than the eternal had guessed. He had already claimed his due from the princess by the time Darkhorse had thrown up the protective shield around her.

  Darkhorse had failed.

  “I restore the balance,” Shade abruptly whispered. Again, his voice carried as if he had shouted with all his might.

  They were once more in the cavernous chamber in which the warlock had performed his experiment. This time, the transfer was immediate. Shade evidently assumed that there was no reason for further theatrics.

  The message behind the sudden return to the Dragonrealm was not lost upon the shadow steed. Shade was telling him through actions that there were deeds within his power that stretched even beyond the laws of nature, beyond the rule of reality.

  In the midst of mulling over those thoughts—a period which the warlock was apparently magnanimously willing to grant to his ancient comrade—one realization raised itself above all else and made the huge stallion laugh mockingly.

  Shade, who would not have been able to appreciate the humor had he understood what it was that Darkhorse laughed at, lost his calm demeanor. Though his expression was lost to all but himself, his change in stance was message enough. Darkhorse quieted, knowing he had touched the greatest weakness of his adversary and knowing that his chances of capitalizing on that weakness were minimal at best. Better to try and create a friendly peace between the Silver Dragon and King Melicard.

  Tiny whips of controlled energy darted from the spellcaster’s arms and struck the stallion like a thousand accurate shafts released by master archers. With each blow, Darkhorse felt a little of his essence fade. He repelled what he could, sending a few back at their creator, but there were too many and they continued to come. There was one certain way he knew that would rid him of the deadly rain, but it would require releasing Erini to her fate and Darkhorse refused to do that. It did not escape him that his death would be followed almost immediately by her own, regardless. Only an ever-increasing output of his own power kept her from being scattered throughout all. Soon, he would have none left to defend and heal himself.

  The last of the wriggling missiles faded before they touched the shadow steed. Shade seemed to regain control of himself. His tone was near apologetic. “I was trying to show you what I am capable of, Darkhorse. I am beyond even you now. It would be pointless to pursue your death—and it would be your death, not mine.”

  “You have only succeeded in revealing to me how much I dare not allow you to escape me.”

  “Your efforts go beyond the point of futility now. I could exile you to a place that would make the Void seem a paradise. I could compact you into a tiny sphere and drop you into the deepest sea.” Shade’s voice was almost pleading, as if he truly did not want to continue this confrontation. “I could do so much more, but there is no point to it, anymore. I’m willing to forget our past differences.”

  Darkhorse met his threats and condescending words with disdain. “I think it might be a bit difficult to forget our past differences, considering how they have affected so many. Exile me and I will find my way back. Seal me up and I will outlive my prison. Destroy me… and you will defeat yourself.” The stallion kicked at the floor. “Destroy me and condemn yourself to your fate, to your selfmade curse.”

  The warlock straightened, the tension within him visibly mounting. After so many failures, there still remained anxieties. Had he seen his visage or lack of it… “I am free of my past errors. I am whole.”

  One of the statues, the one nearest to the faceless spellcaster, collapsed. Darkhorse felt a shrill cry that coursed through his mind as that which had lived within perished. The others quivered in sudden anxiety. The floor of the chamber slowly developed cracks.

  Darkhorse knew what was happening, though he doubted the other did. “Listen to me—”

  Too late. His adversary was beyond listening. Any hope of a peaceful accord between them had been shattered and Darkhorse knew that it was his own fault as well as Shade’s.

  His mind already a sea of confusion and turmoil, Shade saw the destruction around him as an attack and the shadow steed’s words as a ploy to gain time. A hint of sadness touched him. That Darkhorse would act so! That there might be another cause did not occur to him. He, after all, was himself again—and the warlock was not about to give up so quickly what he had sought for so long. Even if it meant killing the one closest to him.

  The air around Darkhorse grew oppressingly thick. So thick, in fact, that it began to squeeze him. Had he been an actual horse, he would have been crushed in the first seconds. Instead, the eternal found himself being compressed smaller and smaller. The warlock was making good his threat. If Darkhorse failed to resist, Shade would reduce him to the size of a pebble and throw him somewhere where no one would be likely to find him. The hooded spellcaster might even choose to keep him as a memento.

  He resisted instantly, of course, but with only a portion of the strength normally available to him. Erini’s life was demanding almost as much of his energy as his own rescue. It took him far too much time to finally free himself. The next assault took him even before the last vestiges of the first had faded away. A tear in reality sought to draw him inside, pulling at his form with such persistence that he almost succumbed before he was able to fashion a defense. Darkhorse sealed the rip and let it vanish. It lasted long enough, however, to give him a glimpse of where Shade had intended on sending him.

  The festering sore that the Vraads had once called home. Nimth.

  He had not wanted to do it this way, but Shade was leaving him no options. Unless Darkhorse struck back with the one weapon he knew would be effective, the warlock would take him with his next attack—and success or not, this ploy would likely drive the final wedge between them.

  The unsavory deed was done even as Darkhorse pictured it. Shade, sensing something materializing before him, struck at its heart. His target shattered into dozens of glittering fragments, which immediately expanded into exact copies of the original. As one, they focused on their attacker, who could not help but look up at them. Darkhorse, watching, could not help but flinch.

  Shade stared, possibly openmouthed, at repetition after repetition of his own blurre
d, featureless visage. They were everywhere and each told him the one thing he could not face. The truth of his condition.

  He screamed denial even as his pent-up power caused each mirror to melt like a single snowflake on a raging campfire. Darkhorse himself was buffeted to the ground by the wild forces unleashed. He barely maintained his bond with Erini. Other than the energy utilized to keep her from dissipating like a wisp of smoke, the shadow steed had little more to call upon. What remained he needed just to survive this latest and most horrid onslaught. It was all he could do just to keep his mind coherent.

  “Nononononononononooooo!” Shade was screaming. Rocking back and forth, he clawed at his own face, trying to remove what could not be removed. Portions of the chamber ceiling collapsed, but none so much as struck within two yards of the warlock. Somehow, his own defenses were still intact.

  He cannot contain the power and the more he releases, the more destruction! It was worse than Darkhorse had feared. Vraad sorcery had destroyed one world already. It tore at the laws of nature rather than worked with them. As with the sorcery of the Dragonrealm, it was oft times an almost unconscious, automatic thing and the more it was used, the more chaos it caused. Shade, trapped in his own horror, was allowing it to run rampant. Darkhorse wondered if there might have been some other way.

  The warlock was on his knees and facing the ground, unmindful of what havoc he was unleashing. Darkhorse had wondered what this new spell would do; the answer seemed to be create more destruction. It was as if the intensity of the original curse had been doubled in scope.

  “Shade!” he called out, his voice booming above all else. “You must listen to me! A part of you must know the chaos you have invited into this world! I know from the past few days that there is, within you, a desire to end this madness peacefully! If you would hear me—”

  Surprisingly, the warlock did look up. There was a tenseness in his movements. He had heard Darkhorse’s voice, but not the shadow steed’s warning. A fierce presence rose about the warlock as his tortured mind mixed facts and suppositions until they no longer had any true meaning. From that came one final, insane conclusion.

  “You!” Shade rose, all fury. His mind, the stallion noted, was shifting from one extreme emotion to another—and with this particular emotion, he needed a focal point. “You did this to me!”

  It would have been one of the most absurd things that Darkhorse had ever heard, save that he could have predicted it would be so. Shade could not accept that the grand spell had failed again or that he had not even recovered from the first attempt. He needed a scapegoat in order to preserve what little remained of his sanity—if there was anything left. The warlock needed something to lash out at.

  What he does next could level settled areas, the eternal realized. And being in the Tybers, one of those places might be Talak! How ironic it would be if the Dragon King captured Melicard’s kingdom, only to have it sink beneath the earth or simply cease to be.

  That image in mind, Darkhorse vanished—

  —and reentered the world in the desolate, blistering cold of the Northern Wastes.

  Before him, almost as if he had known where the shadow steed had intended fleeing, was Shade. Despite the wind, his cloak remained still, covering him like a shroud. Darkhorse had wondered what death would look like when it finally claimed him. He now knew. There would be no escaping Shade, then. Whatever it took, the warlock would track him down, laying waste to whatever happened to cross his path in the meantime. Perhaps, letting the axe fall here would at least save the Dragonrealm, thought Darkhorse somewhat fatalistically, though he suspected that the tortured figure before him would not completely spend his madness here.

  “For our friendship,” the spectral figure said, his calm words more chilling than his angered ones, “I would have left you in peace. I would have. Then, you did this to me! Now, I have only—”

  “Shade, if you would just listen to me!”

  “—one question to ask of you before I treat you as you’ve chosen to treat me. Why do it? Tell me that.”

  There was no correct response and Darkhorse knew that. The best he could do was give no answer at all. Shade’s twisted thought had condemned him already.

  “Goodbye, then, my comrade of old.”

  Despite the distance now separating them, Darkhorse still maintained the shell protecting the helpless Erini, although it sapped almost all of what remained of his strength. He prepared himself now for the worst. Death or, at the very least, the absence of life. Having never died, he could not say what awaited him, if anything. Certainly, he did not fall within the realms of human afterlife.

  Scattered thoughts touched him. Curiosity concerning the eventual fate of Talak. Questions as to where the Bedlams had gone. He wondered what their children would grow up to be like. Most of all, Darkhorse wondered what fate awaited the world of the Dragonrealm, with or without the interference and chaos created by its new, blur-visaged demigod.

  He would protect Erini with the last vestiges of his power. When Shade finally took him, the shadow steed would give his essence to her. Perhaps it would buy her time enough for Cabe to find her. Likely not.

  I have erred every step of the way, Darkhorse decided. Most of all, I erred in thinking of this one as still human—when all he truly was, was a Vraad!

  Shade moved, but slowly, as if unwell. Darkhorse saw little of consequence in that at the moment, instead concerned with bracing himself against what would surely be the warlock’s final blow. His own nature would protect him briefly, but hardly long enough to matter. He only hoped, a foolish hope, that the warlock would feel regret afterward. It might stave off some of the coming devastation.

  If only there was some way to take from the warlock the powers he had usurped…

  There was. There WAS.

  The answer came to him too late. Something darted around Darkhorse like a mad horsefly, something that grew as it circled him. He tried fending it off, but his power was too weak. It expanded as it moved, rapidly wrapping him within a shell whose very presence chilled his form, froze lifelessly his very essence. Given time, it would make of him a monument to his own futility. Given time, there would be nothing more than a shell shaped like a huge, writhing steed.

  Given a little more time, there would not even be that.

  Darkhorse struggled to maintain his senses. The key was his. He had controlled it all this time, but his own foolish sense of “noble sacrifice” had left him blind to the potential before him. Now, it might be too late.

  Entangled in the warlock’s death trap, Darkhorse tumbled into the snow and ice. The link with Erini, the one that still kept her alive, was his only chance. Summoning up his will and foregoing his own defense, he called out to her in his mind. Erini!

  If he was wrong, it hardly mattered. Neither he nor she had more than a few minutes left either way.

  A dim shadow fell over him. Through partially obscured vision, he saw a spectral Shade loom over him, likely come to gloat over his throes. To the eternal’s confusion, the hooded figure sighed and reached out to touch his foe on the head. Briefly, Darkhorse entertained the thought of absorbing his adversary and trapping him within the emptiness that was his inner self, but he knew that the power of Shade was more than capable of withstanding even that. True enough, the Vraad’s hand pulsated with energy.

  The fiendish thing—did it live?—had sealed his mouth and Darkhorse found himself unable to form another. He lay there, silent and nearly mummified, as the warlock continued to move his hand along the shadow steed’s neck and to his head.

  For the first time, he felt the probe of Shade’s mind. It was the final defeat. Darkhorse no longer even had the will with which to combat his longtime nemesis and companion.

  “Soooo, that’s why you fell so easily,” the shadow lurking above him whispered. He had discovered the stallion’s refusal to abandon Erini. Darkhorse shook, but was no longer able to do anything else… unless…

  The shadow steed op
ened his mind completely and let his captor see everything, but, most especially, what he knew about Shade’s condition.

  The warlock shook and pulled his hand away as if touching something unclean. He remained stooped over his defeated adversary for some time, muttering things that Darkhorse could not make out save that Shade seemed to be arguing with himself adamantly. Finally, however, he came to some fateful decision and wrapped himself in his cloak, staring at the point somewhere beyond Darkhorse’s limited range of vision.

  “I’ll need the girl again,” he whispered to himself as he rose to a standing position. With an almost careless dismissal of the muffled figure at his feet, Shade stepped over Darkhorse and vanished into the tundra.

  The eternal cursed himself. Of course Shade’s first thought would be to recapture Erini! Darkhorse had let him see what was happening: instead of becoming a near-perfect demigod, the warlock was threatened with an existence even less real than in his prior incarnations. As powerful as he had become, Shade was still at the mercy of his self-made curse. The shadow steed had hoped that, knowing this, Shade might come to his senses.

  Forgive me, Erini! Oddly, Darkhorse’s error gave him the glimmer of hope. He had been abandoned and the deadly spell that had almost ended his existence had stopped, apparently dormant without its master’s guidance. Given time, he would be able to free himself.

  At that moment, he felt the link between himself and the princess break. Shade had reclaimed her for his dire purposes.

  A dangerous error on your part, my dear, deadly friend!

  No longer forced to divide his strength between his own defense and the protection of the fading Erini, the eternal’s might returned much more rapidly. He had still nearly burned himself out, but now he had at least the ghost of an opportunity. Shade would be vulnerable now, mentally if not magically, and Darkhorse was already devising a way to increase that vulnerability. He no longer felt much remorse about what he plotted to do; Shade’s apparent denial of his own condition had made it clear that the spellcaster was beyond aid. It was either defeat Shade or watch as the Dragonrealm and the rest of this world suffered the same fate as long-forgotten Nimth.