Ed Greenwood - The Herald

His steel felt like ice inside her, but he made the mistake of twisting his blade to do her more agony, rather than pulling it out of her to use again, making sure of her death. Instead, he turned the hilt sadistically as he made a sneering speech.

“I am Prince Vattick of Thultanthar, and your doom! So tell me, foolish wench, who are you?”

Dove kept her feet moving, and clawed her way up his blade before he could withdraw it. Which meant she was close enough to use the sharpest and strongest run of her own sword, the length just above the hilt. Her first slash almost took the prince’s free hand off, and while he was busy screaming about that, she chopped at his sword hand.

Prince Vattick of Thultanthar promptly lost his grip on his blade, which meant she could lurch back far enough to swing-and slice his head off.

She turned, as it bounced in the dust, wearing a look of pained disbelief, to see what had become of the other prince, but the agony flaring inside her took her to her knees.

She shuddered, still impaled on the dead prince’s sword, the sword that was now propping her up, its point caught on the backplate of her armor.

Mother Mystra, but it hurt!

The air above her darkened.

Of course.

Dove looked up through the welling pain. The beholder loomed above her, its wide and many-toothed smile gloating. “Dove Falconhand,” it hissed, “do you remember me?”

She did, but still couldn’t recall its name.

And then she did. “Glormorglulla,” she gasped, her blood iron and fire in her mouth.

“The same,” the eye tyrant purred. “And do you recall our last meeting?”

“No,” she told it honestly, looking past it to try to see what had become of the fleeing elf children and elders and the other prince, but finding her vision was blurring, and everything was going dim.

She could hear screams and cries, but they sounded human, not elf.

“No,” she said again, drifting through memories she hadn’t brought to mind for a long time, but finding no scene nor recollection with Glormorglulla in it.

“You helped the accursed Elminster capture me,” the beholder spat. “With your spells, you aided him, when he lacked the might to overcome me alone. You were responsible for my imprisonment. Yet fate and chance are sometimes wondrous-and now, at long last, I shall have my revenge.”

“So be it,” Dove hissed up at it, spitting out blood and feeling more flooding up into her mouth than she could hope to swallow.

She spat hastily, and managed to ask, “I wonder if you’ll escape the curse I worked on you?”

“ What curse?” the beholder asked, swooping down until its great eye towered over her. “What is this you speak of?”

It was a lie, an empty ruse, but Glormorglulla was close enough now for even her dying, agony-sapped mind to reach.

Dove glared up through the blood, and locked gazes and minds with the eye tyrant.

“ Saerevros ,” she murmured, and so sealed the blood lock.

The beholder could easily break free when she was dead, but until then it could win free of where she held it only if its mind could break hers.

“Not a chance,” she mumbled aloud, as the first hint of horror dawned in Glormorglulla’s fell gaze.

Dove held that dark and malevolent mind in thrall.

The eye tyrant struggled, at first furiously and then in growing terror, tugging-but failing. It couldn’t move away, and couldn’t use the powers of its eyes, thanks to her willing otherwise, but it could and did roll over and over in midair, and flail the passing breeze and her face and shoulders alike with its eyestalks.

Thrice it tried to devour her, its great jaws gaping, but she held it back with her strength of will, its fetid fangs clashing right in front of her nose as their minds wrestled.

She was dying, and her mind was weakening, and they both knew it. The frightened and furious Glormorglulla dared to hope, and anticipate, and even to gloat.

Whereupon she let it feel her full rage, and the silver fire that had started to spill from her weakening constraints.

Fire the beholder sought greedily to take from her, for was it not the fabled all-consuming power that humbled all magics? Would not an eye tyrant wielding silver fire be able to conquer all, and rule every last tree and river of Faerûn it desired?

Dove smiled bleakly into its great eye, and gave it what it wanted. Silver fire, unleashed and raging.

Rushing through the mind she was locked to, boiling and melting remorselessly, destroying so swiftly it barely had time to know true terror.

An awful reek rose around her as the malevolent beholder’s brains fried.

Until Glormorglulla could think no more.

One by one, the small orbs at the ends of its writhing eyestalks burst, popping out gooey matter and then weeping a dark ichor. Then the great eye darkened and shriveled, until it looked like the largest raisin Dove had ever seen.

About then, her mind-hold failed. She was going fast.

Dully, she watched the husk of the great eye tyrant drift aimlessly away.

Well, she’d taken down one prince. Those elf elders would have to deal with his surviving brother.

“Florin,” Dove gasped with her last breath, still draped over the sword that had slain her, tongues of silver fire blazing out between her lips. “I’m coming. Coming at last.”

Magnificence and a dream restored in the heart of the forest, the City of Song-but the song was faint and faltering now.

It had all come down to this bitter end, here in this fiery blue cleft amid a last paltry handful of spired buildings. So fair and so doomed.

“Females first,” the coronal ordered the elf knights around her briskly. “Young and old together-pair them if you can, but waste no time trying to do so.”

Blue fire lit her face in flash after flash; the pulsing blue glow of the portal was reflecting back off the knights’ armor, wherever it wasn’t covered with gore.

“Of course,” the eldest knight agreed, and spun away to see it done.

“You, you, and you,” the coronal said, pointing at other knights, “with me!” And she started to run, down along the ragged and lengthening line of children and elders, to take a stand at its end, in case the last line of defenders-pitifully few they were too-was overwhelmed.

She got there just in time. “Mages!” she called over her shoulder, and pointed at the surging besiegers, as they overbore two elves-several spears and glaives thrusting through each-and poured forward.

The coronal strode to meet them, and the knights with her grimaced and rushed to get in front of her, to shield her with their lives.

They were still a few strides apart from the foremost mercenaries when the elf line broke in another place. With a ragged roar of triumph, the Shadovar-hired mercenaries charged, heading around the coronal and her handful so they could fall upon the largely undefended line of children and elders.

The coronal turned and rushed to intercept them. “Old lives for young!” she cried to the loyal elves running with her. “Win a future for our younglings with our own blood!”

As she chose the highest ground, to stop and make her stand, Ilsevele Miritar saw that she’d been shouting to only six Tel’Quess -and the grinning and eager foe closing on them were beyond counting.

Yet the slope between her and the human hireswords was suddenly shrouded in blue-green mist. A spell, obviously, but not one she recognized. Nothing the handful of high mages here could cast, of that she was sure.

The mercenaries boiled up the hill-but out of the ground in front of their boots, up through the coiling mists, rose a line of baelnorn.

Tall and gaunt and terrible, eyes aglow and withered bodies clutching long curved swords and scepters that shone with risen magic.