R. Salvatore - Night of the Hunter

Wulfgar held the craft steady with one strong arm, using his other as a railing to help his companions clamber out. As Bruenor moved to the front lip of the raft, the huge man easily lifted him over the remaining splash of water and deposited him on dry ground.

Shaking his hairy head, Bruenor glanced back at him. “As strong as ye was last time,” the dwarf muttered.

“When I saw Pwent, in a cave long ago, he was rational,” Drizzt replied to the dwarf. “Perhaps there remains enough of Thibbledorf Pwent for us to coax him along to a priest that will alleviate his pain.”

“Ain’t so sure o’ that,” said Bruenor. “Pwent was back and forth when I seen him, cheerin’ and snarlin’, sometimes the friend, sometimes the monster. He was keeping control, out o’ respect for me and the throne I’m guessin’, but just barely.”

“I have the scroll,” Catti-brie said as she, too, came onto the beach, guided and lifted by Wulfgar’s strong hand. “And Regis gave me this.” She held up a small sapphire.

“Not much of a prison, compared to the one ye caught the lich in,” said Bruenor.

“Will it work?” Drizzt asked.

“It’s the best I have,” Regis answered, pushing aside Wulfgar’s offered hand and hopping easily from the boat. He brushed the sand and water from his fine clothing, straightening his trousers as he went.

“Then if it needs to do, it needs to do,” Bruenor decided.

The four continued to chatter as they moved along, but Wulfgar, taking up the rear, didn’t join in, and hardly listened. With his great strength, he dragged the giant mushroom cap raft from the water and up onto the beach, then hustled to catch up to his companions as they entered the grand upper hall of Gauntlgrym.

This place was not designed like Mithral Hall, Wulfgar noted immediately, for its first room was huge indeed, unlike the myriad tunnels that led to any significant chambers in Mithral Hall. Conversely, Drizzt had described this first hall as the crowning jewel of Gauntlgrym’s upper levels. Despite those obvious differences in architecture, the barbarian couldn’t escape the sense of déjà vu, a feeling as strong as any memory that he had been an actor in this play before. He remembered vividly that long-ago day when the troupe had first entered Mithral Hall, when Bruenor had gone home.

Wulfgar felt a twinge at the back of his knee, a pain of memory alone, he knew, for the troll’s clawed hand that had dug in there in that previous adventure had done so in an entirely different body.

But this place smelled the same to him, as if the ghosts of dead dwarves left a tangible scent, and his mind danced back across the decades and to that other place and time and body, even.

He shook the memories away, tuning back into the situation around him. Drizzt, Catti-brie, and Regis stood by the wall of the chamber just to the right of the door. Catti-brie had cast a greater magical light, illuminating the area more brightly, and Wulfgar noted an emaciated corpse, a woman’s shriveled body, stripped naked and brutally torn.

Catti-brie blessed it and sprinkled some holy water upon it, and only in witnessing that did Wulfgar remember Bruenor’s tale of his visit here, and the gruesome fate of the dwarf’s companions. Catti-brie was making sure that this one never could rise in undeath, it seemed, though many months had passed since the drow vampires had slain her.

Wulfgar’s gaze went to Bruenor, the dwarf moving slowly, almost as if in a trance, toward the great throne on the raised dais perhaps a score of long strides from the front wall. With a last glance at the other three and a cursory scan of the large chamber, the barbarian hustled to join his adoptive father.

“The Throne o’ the Dwarven Gods,” Bruenor explained when Wulfgar arrived. The dwarf was rubbing the burnished arm of the magnificent seat, stroking it as if it was a living being. “Thrice have I sat on it, twice to my blessing and once to be thrown aside.”

“Thrown aside?”

“Aye,” Bruenor admitted, looking back at him. “When I was thinkin’ of abandoning our quest and puttin’ aside me oath to me girl’s goddess. I wasn’t heading for Icewind Dale, boy, but heading home.”

“Abandoning Drizzt, you mean,” Wulfgar said as the other three walked up.

“Aye,” Bruenor said. “I forgot me word and convinced meself that I was thinkin’ right in turning aside the quest. ‘For Mithral Hall,’ I told meself! Bah, but didn’t that chair there tell me different!”

“The throne rejected you?” Catti-brie asked.

“Throwed me across the room!” Bruenor exclaimed. “Aye. Throwed me and reminded me o’ me place and me heart.”

“Take your place upon it now,” Wulfgar prompted, and Bruenor looked at him curiously.

“You believe your path to be true, to Pwent and then to your home,” Wulfgar explained. “Do you hold doubt?”

“Not a bit,” Bruenor replied without hesitation.

Wulfgar motioned to the throne.

“Are ye asking me to bother me gods so that I’m thinking I’m doing what’s right?” Bruenor asked. “Ain’t that supposed to be me own heart tellin’ me?”

Wulfgar smiled, not disagreeing, but he motioned to the chair once more, for he could tell that Bruenor was more than a little curious.

With a great “harrumph,” the dwarf swung around and hopped up onto the throne. He settled back almost immediately, and closed his gray eyes, and wore an expression of complete serenity.

Regis nudged Catti-brie, and when she turned to him, she saw that he was holding aloft another vial of holy water. “A dead halfling and a dead man, and a few slain drow vampires,” he reminded her. “We’ve work yet to do.”

“And all stripped naked,” the woman agreed. “This place was looted after the fight.”

That brought a large and audible swallow from Bruenor, who hopped down quickly. “Aye, and me grave and Pwent’s grave sit just on th’other side of the throne,” Bruenor told them, already heading that way. He stopped short as he came around the throne to views the cairns, however, and shakily stated, “Bless that old body o’ mine, girl! I beg ye.”

On that, Wulfgar moved around the chair to see the two cairns, both disturbed, obviously. He moved to the nearest, and grandest-Bruenor’s own-and fell to his knees. He began arranging the bones back in order, but he looked back, and couldn’t help but wince.

“What’d’ye know?” a concerned Bruenor asked. He hustled up to stand over the open cairn, then spun away with a snarl and stomped back to the throne.

The skull was missing, as well as the thick femurs.

Wulfgar went back to his work settling the remaining bones, then began replacing the stones. He felt a hand on his shoulder and glanced up to see Drizzt, smiling and nodding.

“Am I burying the past or securing the present?” Wulfgar asked.

“Or neither?” Drizzt asked back.

“Or merely honoring my father,” Wulfgar agreed and went back to his task.

Drizzt moved beside him and similarly dropped to his knees, beginning his work reconstructing the broken cairn of Thibbledorf Pwent, though that grave was, of course, quite empty.

“Feelin’ strange to see it again, even though I’m knowin’ in me head the truth of it all,” Bruenor admitted, walking up between the two of them. “That’s me own body there-don’t know that I’ll ever get past that one bit o’ truth!”

He growled. “What’s left of it, I mean,” he added.

Wulfgar glanced back at his adoptive father, and had never seen the dwarf so clearly flustered before. He thought of his own former body, turned to bone now out on the open tundra, no doubt, and wondered what he might think if he happened upon it. He made a mental note to do just that, to find the evidence of his former life and properly inter it.