R. Salvatore - Archmage

Tears for a life that had not been lived as well as it should have.

The great hall was silent, not a whisper to be heard. Athrogate looked around at the thousands of faces, and one by one, they began to nod. At the back of the hall, near the exit to the tunnels, he noted Drizzt and Catti-brie, the two beaming at him with wide smiles.

“Suidh!” one called, then another, then all of them.

“Suidh! Suidh!” and Athrogate understood that they were telling him to sit. But not to judge him, he realized, but rather to welcome him.

So he sat upon the throne.

He was not thrown free.

And he heard the language and then knew their song, and knew, too, that he was kith’n kin.

To the side of Tiago, not far away and nursing her wounded arm, Doum’wielle did not miss the noble Baenre’s expression of dismay-nor did her sentient sword, which had guided her to strike the stalactite and had warned her to offer a quick retreat after she had.

She watched Tiago’s face go through a range of expressions, anger to trepidation to frustration. She understood that he feared for Drizzt’s life more than he feared that she would be killed by kobolds.

Nothing else seemed to matter to that one.

Drizzt is Tiago’s way of ascendance in the hierarchy of Menzoberranzan, Khazid’hea explained to her. He envisions no other journey to lift him from the lower environs, where drow males reside.

“Even as a noble,” Doum’wielle whispered, shaking her head in disbelief, and Khazid’hea affirmed that.

I will be stealing his dream from him, Doum’wielle imparted to the sword, given their plans.

You will be saving yourself from a life of slavery and brutality, the sword reminded her.

Doum’wielle nodded in agreement, and her eyes narrowed as she stared back at Tiago, silently scolding herself for even thinking of allowing any hint of sympathy toward her brutal rapist.

The trophy of Drizzt would be all the sweeter knowing the gain to her, and indeed, knowing the cost to Tiago.

“Lock!” came the command of General Connerad Brawnanvil, and the ten dwarves leading the square down the wide corridor interlocked their great shields, forming a solid wall of metal.

And not a moment too soon, for even as the shields clanged into place, the first bombs began to rain down upon them from the darkness down the corridor.

“Double-step, boys!” yelled Bruenor, in the middle of the second rank. Beside him, Drizzt popped up tall, above the shield line, and let fly an arrow that lit up the corridor the length of its travels, albeit briefly- long enough to reveal the horde of kobolds lifting these exploding rocks from a pile, though there was one less monster grenadier when the arrow found its mark.

Drizzt was fast down in a crouch beside Catti-brie.

“Too many,” he started to say, but he noted that the woman wasn’t listening to him. She moved with her eyes closed, her hand on the shoulder of Ambergris to her other side. She was whispering, but Drizzt could not make out the words, and could not discern to whom she was speaking.

“Charge!” Connerad ordered, and the front rank ran off as one, only gradually decoupling their cleverly designed shields.

Up tall again, Drizzt paced about the second rank while firing off a line of silvery death.

The corridor lit up then in a light more profound than any Drizzt’s arrows might achieve, as a wall of rock bombs hurtled down upon the dwarves, smashing against shields and exploding, one after another, with tremendous force.

“Bah!” cried Athrogate, to the other side of Ambergris, when the shield dwarf in front of him was knocked flat and the lava splattered back over Athrogate to strike the dwarves behind him.

Before the bending Athrogate could help the shield dwarf back up, another grenade crashed in just in front of the fallen dwarf’s feet, the splash reaching up at his feet and legs-and how he howled.

“Come on, then!” Athrogate yelled, sending his morningstars into a spin and leaping over the shield dwarf to spur the others forward.

But a second barrage had them all backing and ducking beneath nowdented shields-blockers that dripped with molten lava!

Then came the greatest kobold trap of all, as the ceiling above the front lines of the dwarves cracked open, loosing a river of red liquid stone.

Catti-brie wasn’t hearing Bruenor or Athrogate, or even the grunts and cries of the dwarves in the front line. Her focus remained solely on the ring she wore on her right hand, the Ring of Elemental Power that Drizzt had taken from a drow wizard, Brack’thal Xorlarrin, and then given to her.

She knew these lines of lava to be an extension of the primordial, sending its tendrils far and wide, relishing in the momentary freedom from the water elementals trapping it, a little bit at least. She sensed no kinship from the great and godlike being toward the kobolds, just a measure of acceptance that they would allow the lifeblood lava to drip, drip, drip. For that was the purpose and calling of the primordial, to throw its molten heat far and wide, to consume with liquefied stone. To burn, as the Elemental Plane of Fire itself burned.

Catti-brie felt the flow of lava as surely as she could feel the pulse in her own arm. She sensed it and understood it, and felt it keenly as it pooled in the ceiling just above her and the others.

And so when the ceiling cracked open, Catti-brie was ready for it. The spell came to her lips in an instant. Blue mist encircled her arms, and blasts of water burst from her staff and sprayed upward to intercept the lava. Instead of an immolating, fiery death raining upon her and the dwarves, there came a tumble of hot stones that bounced off helmets and upraised shields. Catti-brie blocked one, painfully, with her upraised forearm, and felt herself stumbling. But Drizzt had her, tugging her along, and then Athrogate barreled into her, shoving the whole pile back, back.

“To the throne room!” General Connerad ordered, and the dwarves methodically and efficiently pivoted and rushed back the way they had come.

Not all of them, though. Catti-brie grabbed Bruenor by the arm and held him, then pulled back against Drizzt’s incessant tug.

“Let’s go, girl. Too many!” Bruenor said to her.

“Only because of their trick,” Catti-brie argued.

“Aye, and a stinging one!”

“No more,” the woman insisted.

“What d’ye know, girl?” Bruenor asked, but Catti-brie was already turning away from him and twisting aside from the driving Athrogate, who fell forward on his face, grunted, and hopped back to his feet.

Catti-brie looked at the ceiling breach, the first stones fallen, and now the rest of the lava pouring out upon them.

Primordial lava, living flame.

She could feel its life-force, though it was no longer part of the greater beast, and she beckoned to it, helping it keep its separate life, fanning the flames to consciousness with her call and her own will.

“Well?” Bruenor said, not understanding what his daughter was doing and wanting an answer-and rightly so, for behind that lava pour came a horde of kobolds, all hoisting grenades.

“Tell her, elf!” Bruenor shouted to Drizzt, but the drow, understanding his wife better than Bruenor ever could, merely smiled and turned a confident look back to Bruenor, even offering the dwarf a knowing wink.

“She got ’em, don’t she?” Bruenor asked, and even as he did, the pile of stones and lava in the corridor between them and the kobolds stood up and swung around to face the diminutive monsters, gladly accepting, even being strengthened by, their volley of flaming grenades.

“No, Bruenor,” Drizzt corrected, “ We’ve got them.”