R. Salvatore - Night of the Hunter

“Or in connection with them,” Drizzt added with a smirk.

Catti-brie squeezed his hand tightly. “There is something strange with Regis,” she said.

“Something that should concern us?”

“No, nothing like that. He had told me that he is as comfortable in the water as in the air, almost. Watch. He will keep his head in the water in the pail for a very long time-longer than the rest of us could hold our breaths if we followed one after the other into a second pail beside him.”

Drizzt did watch. Regis kept his head submerged, but kept snapping his fingers, as if to keep time, perhaps, or just to let the others know that he was all right. Drizzt looked at Bruenor, standing over the halfling with hands on hips. The dwarf glanced back at Drizzt and shook his head in disbelief.

Many more heartbeats passed and still Regis remained underwater, snapping his fingers, seemingly without a care. “Ain’t right,” Bruenor said. “Was his father a fish?” Wulfgar asked. “His mother, so he said.”

“A fish?”

“Not a fish, but some ancestor … a gensee or somethin’ like that.”

After what seemed an eternity, Regis finally surfaced, and came up with a smile, hardly gasping or distressed.

“Genasi,” Catti-brie said quietly to Drizzt as they turned back to the open night sky and the rolling terrain of the Crags before them. “He has genasi blood, so he believes.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Planetouched,” Catti-brie explained. “Genasi are genies of varying elements, and rumored to reproduce with humans. I have never heard of a genasi-halfling offspring, but it is possible.”

“Of the five of us, Regis seems the most profoundly changed, and not just physically,” Drizzt said.

“Perhaps. Not as many years have passed for us as for you, but we have all been touched, profoundly, do not doubt. But doubt neither that he is Regis, the same halfling you once knew and loved.”

“I speak of changes in outlook, and perhaps purpose, but not in character. Not so much.”

“Is that your confidence or your hope?”

“Both!” Drizzt exclaimed and they both laughed.

“We’ve passed through death itself,” said Catti-brie, as if that would explain everything.

Drizzt leaned back and put on a more serious expression. “I would think that such an experience would make you more averse to the possibility.”

“Possibility?”

“Of death again. But yet you, all four, walk willingly into danger. We are chasing a vampire, and in a very dark place.”

“And then to war, it would seem, and yes, willingly.”

“Happily? Happily to your death?”

“No, of course not. Happily to adventure, and to whatever awaits us.”

A cold chill came over them then, as if the wind had shifted to blow down from the snow-capped mountains in the north, and Catti-brie pulled Drizzt closer, and shivered just a bit.

A fog came up before them, and Drizzt looked at it curiously. The weather shift seemed abrupt indeed-how much warmth had simply fled the air? — but there was no snow, and no water that he knew of, so what had brought forth the fog?

The cold fog, he realized as it drifted closer.

The cold, dead fog.

“Always got a tale, don’t ye, Rumblebelly?” Bruenor said with a laugh when the halfling finally resurfaced from the water bucket. “Can’t ever be nothing regular about ye, eh?”

“I live to entertain,” the halfling said with a polite and exaggerated bow, and as he rose, he shook his head vigorously, drying himself as a dog might, and splashing Bruenor in the process.

“Brr,” he said as he did, feeling a bit chilly and attributing it to the bucket of water.

But Wulfgar, too, stood up and rubbed his bare arms and took a deep breath-a breath that showed in the air.

“Getting cold,” Bruenor agreed.

Regis started to answer, but when he looked at the dwarf, or rather, looked past the dwarf, the words caught in his throat.

He saw the fog.

He knew this particular fog.

“What other tales ye got to entertain us then, Rumblebelly?” Bruenor asked with a wide smile. “Part fish, part bird? Can ye fly, too?”

Oh, Regis did indeed have a tale for him, but the halfling wasn’t confident that Bruenor would find it entertaining. And Regis wished he was a bird, truly, that he could fly far, far away!

“Run,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “Oh, run.”

“Eh?” Bruenor asked, not catching on.

Regis continued to look past the dwarf, and he shook his head slowly in denial as the fog behind the dwarf began to coalesce and take the distinctive form of a tall, emaciated man.

“Oh, run!” Regis cried out, falling back a step. “Bruenor! Behind you!”

Wulfgar rushed past the halfling, between Regis and Bruenor, roaring to his god. “Tempus!” he cried and he pulled Aegis-fang over his shoulder and let fly the warhammer in one motion. The missile spun right over the dwarf’s head, for the barbarian had used the horn on one side of Bruenor’s helmet and the horn stub on the other side to line up his throw.

“Hey, now!” Bruenor shouted in surprise, diving down. He came up and looked back just in time to see the hammer slam into the leering humanoid figure moving toward him through a ghostly fog. That fog intensified, as if flying out of the creature itself, when the warhammer hit.

If the creature had felt that hit at all, it didn’t show it. It was as if it had become something less than substantial to accept the blow, the warhammer powering right through it, hardly slowly. The fog coalesced once more, the creature reforming as soon as the threat had passed.

“Rumblebelly, what do ye know?” Bruenor asked, backstepping toward the other two and veering to the side, where his axe rested against a stone.

“Ebonsoul,” Regis stammered. “The lich.”

The horrid creature drifted in, eyes shining with inner, demonic fire. Its emaciated, rotting face twisted and turned, shapeshifting, it seemed.

Wulfgar’s hammer returned to his grasp. Bruenor grabbed up his axe and ran beside the man. Regis inched forward on the other side of Wulfgar, and all three stared, gawking, at Ebonsoul, all three unable to break the trance.

All three horrified and transfixed.

This was the power of the mighty lich. It went beyond the normal, gruesome realm one might expect from an undead monstrosity. Ebonsoul’s terror transcended garishness, and focused to the deepest fears of any mortal creature, to the most primal fear of death. In the lich’s rotting face, an onlooker saw himself. Undeniably so. To gaze upon Ebonsoul was to peer into your own grave, to see your own inevitably rotting corpse, to see the worms burrowing into your eyes, wriggled into your brain.

That was the horror.

Regis could only think of poor Pericolo Topolino, sitting in his chair, scared, quite literally, to death. He recalled how the Grandfather’s hair had turned white from terror. The aging halfling had looked beyond the grave, and like any mortal creature, had not relished the image and the implications.

Regis could truly understand now the formidable weapon of Ebonsoul.

He could understand the power of it, but understood, too, that he was not nearly as susceptible to it as Pericolo had been. Nor were his companions, for like him, Bruenor and Wulfgar had already passed through death. Bruenor had even looked upon his own rotted corpse in a cairn in Gauntlgrym, as Regis knew that his former body lay rotting under rocks in Mithral Hall, and Wulfgar’s bones lay windblown on the tundra of Icewind Dale.

“Come on, then, ye rotten beastie,” Bruenor taunted, and Wulfgar slapped the returned Aegis-fang across his open palm.

Ebonsoul stopped and stood up straight and tall, his thin arms lifting out to his sides, sleeves drooping wide to the ground, and crackles of lightning showing around his skeletal fingers.