Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

“What do you want?” snarled the monarch.

Ragat, surprisingly enough, stood boldly in the face of his ruler’s fury. “You command the troops to fight the monster,” he declared. “But you offer them no hope! Our weapons are useless against the fire dragon. Our defenses crumble in its presence. We are brave, O king, but we are not fools. How are we to fight that which cannot be fought?”

“Faith!” cried the king, his voice a howl. “Fight with our faith, with the courage of our righteous god!”

His eye flashed again, and his mouth curled into a wicked grin. “The eye of Reorx!” he crowed. “The red stone will give us the means to defeat the monster!”

Ragat could only watch impotently as the monarch hastened back into his quarters on the high palace level. Moments later Stonespringer returned, clutching the wedge of red rock that he called the eye of Reorx. The general watched skeptically as the king strode to the edge of the rampart and held the stone up for all of the teeming, panicked dwarves to see.

“Behold!” the king cried, his voice shrill and cracking. He held up the Redstone. “Behold the eye of Reorx. The Master of the Forge is watching us! He will protect us!

“Witness the power of our god!” he continued shouting. “Here is the talisman of his own self! Here is the means to defeat the fire dragon! Have faith, my people-”

He did not finish, for at that moment the fire dragon returned, dropping right through the ceiling of the vast cavern of Norbardin. Ragat felt the searing heat of the monster’s approach and saw blisters rising on the skin of his hands as he held them up in a futile attempt to defend himself.

Then those crushing wings came down, and the fire enveloped him. The high rampart of the palace collapsed, sending the king, the general, and the vaunted Redstone tumbling into the smoldering ruins of the palace’s courtyard.

Gorathian flew on, a being of pure Chaos. The fire dragon had no goal, no objective, no destination. It exulted in its flight, relished the sweep of destruction, reveled in killing, inflicting pain, and causing terror among the pathetic dwarves.

But it also understood that it had a very powerful enemy. For long years it had languished in the chasm below the wizard’s laboratory, imprisoned and taunted by Willim the Black. The mage had exerted powerful controls through his sorcery, occasionally rewarding the fire dragon with morsels of flesh or promises of imminent freedom. Yet always, when Gorathian strained to rise, the wizard’s magic had forced it back. A powerful barrier of sorcery had pressed the serpent down, and the bedrock of the cavern-a strata of ore heavily infused with iron-had prevented the creature of Chaos from burrowing to either side, effectively blocking it from any potential path of escape.

Gorathian had been trapped since the Chaos War, when, as one of the great legion of destructive beings, it had roared through Thorbardin, laying waste to cities and lives and everything else in its path. It had dived into the chasm, deep within the mountain, and found itself confined by the heavily metallic rock. By the time Gorathian had twisted around to seek an escape, its fellows, the whole army of Chaos, had been borne away from Krynn by the intervention of the gods.

Only Gorathian remained, sealed away in the depths of the mountain’s footings.

But the dwarves, ever industrious, had excavated great blocks of stone away from the fire dragon’s prison, carving out the chamber that was to be the new council hall for the ruling thanes. Fortunately, just before Gorathian would have been freed, the dwarves had realized it was the prison of the lethal and destructive beast. They had hastily resealed the chamber and withdrawn, leaving the monster to languish for the rest of eternity.

Then the wizard had come.

Willim the Black had been drawn to the lair in part because of the deadly monster, and he had used spells of powerful sorcery to tantalize the fire dragon, allowing it to sense freedom even as he tamped it down and kept it imprisoned in the deep crevasse.

For that the dragon feared and hated the black wizard, even as it sensed that Willim was the reason the creature had been, at long last, released from its entrapping chasm. As Gorathian felt the containing magic ease, the beast understood that the wizard was relaxing his control and aiming the fire dragon at the dwarf’s enemies. Since it had gained flight, it would never, ever, return to that stone-walled prison. Gorathian embraced the release but remained vigilant against the wizard’s control.

The dragon flew on, wings spread as it soared higher. The great dwarf nation of Thorbardin beckoned: thousands of lives, all quailing in terror at Gorathian’s approach. The fire dragon roared in exultation, fiery breath engulfing a whole block of small houses. The monster sliced through the rock, causing an entire section of Anvil’s Echo to collapse, crushing a hundred dwarves under many tons of rubble.

The fire dragon flew and it slew. It roared in the pure joy of destruction. And it knew that, for the first time in countless ages, it was free.

Shrieking in terror, Gus ran from the eyeless wizard who was flying so swiftly through the air, seemingly straight toward him. The magic-user’s black robe flapped around his skinny legs, and he swooped like a bird toward the palace wall, very near to where the three gully dwarves had been cowering. Too many terrifying memories surged through the little gully dwarf’s brain, and he was desperate to get away.

Gus well remembered that horrible, eyeless face from his first encounter, a long time-two months, or two years, at least-ago. Gus had been a quivering, terrified captive in a small cage in the laboratory deep underneath Thorbardin. He could still hear the wicked laughter as the black-robed Theiwar had ordered him to drink an obviously lethal potion. The wizard had used a magic spell to compel Gus to drink the potion. It was only good luck that had given the gully dwarf a life-saving option: the magic-user had failed to notice that he had left a second bottle on the table, near the poison, and he failed to tell Gus which potion he was supposed to drink.

So the gully dwarf prisoner had drunk the wrong potion and-much to his surprise-had magically teleported himself out of Thorbardin instead of dying a prolonged and agonizing death as the wizard had intended. His lucky escape had gotten even luckier when he had met-and fallen madly in love with-the priestess of Reorx Gretchan Pax. He had shared fascinating adventures with her, strolling along beside her and her mighty dog, Kondike. He saw wonders he had never imagined, went to places he didn’t even know existed. In a way, that was why and how he became a highbulp.

As he recalled all of those dizzying events, Gus couldn’t really remember why he’d been so eager to get back to Thorbardin. Sure, it was maybe a little more interesting than Pax Tharkas, but it was also a lot more dangerous! It seemed like every time he turned around, the place was finding a new way to try to kill him.

He ducked again as he heard a large crash and spotted the fiery dragon smashing through the high wall of the king’s fortress. The wizard, he was relieved to see, flew after the dragon; he had not been pursuing the gully dwarf after all. Still, that was little consolation for Gus as another avalanche of rubble plunged down from the heights, stones smashing and bouncing all around him in a pounding, destructive barrage.

Gus heard shouts of terror and saw two dwarves tumble down with the breaking wall. One was dressed in silver armor; the other wore a robe, and when his face momentarily turned toward the gully dwarf, Gus saw that the other dwarf had a bright golden eye in one of his sockets. The two plunged to the ground and vanished into the cloud of dust, still shouting and cursing.