Lisa Smedman - The Gilded Rune

“By Moradin’s beard,” Torrin breathed. “He can’t reach it. Something’s preventing him.”

Baelar’s shout of frustration echoed back to Torrin across the cavern. Giving up on teleportation, Baelar hunkered over. Like a man battling his way forward against a hurricane, he began to march. Torrin, watching, clenched his fists and counted Baelar’s steps. One… two… three…

Baelar wavered. Then he sagged to his knees. Blue spellfire raged around his silhouette, feeding like flames on his hair, his clothes.

“No!” Torrin shouted. He plunged a hand into his pocket and yanked out the runestone. Sparks of spellfire immediately leaped from the crystals at his feet, streaking up to the runestone like bright blue fireflies. “By blood and earth, ae-burakrin. Take me to Baelar!” Torrin cried.

Fuelled by spellfire, the runestone activated so quickly that Torrin barely managed to complete Baelar’s name. With a twist that left him dizzy, he landed next to the fallen man. Torrin stumbled sideways, crystals crunching underfoot. The rune was still several paces away, yet Torrin was deep inside the dome of spellfire. Baelar was a barely visible heap at his feet, obscured by zigzagging streaks of crackling blue. The spellfire washed over Torrin like heat from an over-stoked forge as streams of smoke erupting from his smoldering clothes. The hole the duergar had bored in the floor was several paces ahead and to the right, adding its own heat to the air. He bent over and grabbed Baelar with his free hand, but saw that he was already too late. Baelar was dead. His hair and clothes were gone, his skin already turning to blue-tinged ash.

The sight sent a sharp pang of dismay through Torrin. Yet there was no time to grieve. Leaving the body where it lay, he scooped up the magical feather instead. The metal shaft was so hot it glowed and burned his fingers. He hoped it wasn’t about to melt.

Torrin squinted his eyes almost shut, peered into the blazing inferno, and spotted the rune that had been carved into the cavern floor between the growth of crystals. It was enormous, perhaps five or six paces long, and filled with molten gold through which tidal ripples flowed, bulging its surface as they flowed first in one direction, then another, as if seeking an exit.

Torrin felt his strength flagging. His clothing was full of holes now, the fabric falling away in puffs of ash. Sharp crystals poked into his thinning boot soles. Spellfire consumed his beard and eyebrows, turning them to clouds of ash that drifted into his eyes and clogged his nose. The skin on his arms and cheeks was starting to flake away. The pain was almost unbearable. The spellfire that had blossomed around the hand that held the runestone was a bright blaze that engulfed his arm from fingers to shoulder. His fingers felt like dead things.

He quickly transferred the runestone to his left hand, awkwardly gripping both it and the magical feather. “By blood and earth, ae-burakrin,” he gasped, “take me to the rune.”

Nothing happened. The runestone, like the teleportation boots, wasn’t working properly. Wasn’t working at all, in fact. The teleportation boots had at least shifted Baelar around a little when he’d tried to reach the rune, but the runestone was completely failing to activate.

Why?

Torrin’s left hand and arm were also ablaze with spellfire from within. If he survived it, he’d be spellscarred on both sides of his body. He shifted his grip on the runestone, and cried out in dismay as the magical feather slipped from his fingers. He tried to catch it, but then suddenly the runestone activated. Torrin felt a wrench, and an instant later found himself standing several paces away from where he’d just been. The blue glow was so fierce that he could barely see his feet, yet a dim gold-green glint beside his right foot told him where he’d landed-directly beside the gold-filled rune.

The spellfire so close to the rune was even more intense. Torrin felt it sear into his lungs, felt more of his skin burn away. In a few moments more, he’d be nothing but bones cloaked in ash. He realized, in that instant, what had been keeping Baelar from reaching the rune. The duergar must have placed wards that prevented the approach of any magical device capable of dispelling the rune’s magic. The feather was no use. It was impossible to bring it close enough to the rune to activate it. All of their efforts, everything they’d been through so far-Baelar’s death, Torrin’s imminent death-all had been for nothing.

Torrin would have wept, except that his eyes were as dry as sun-hot stone. “Moradin,” he prayed as he sank to his knees. So great was his agony, within and without, that he barely felt the crystals on the floor spike into his flesh. “Forgive me.”

He raised the runestone and squinted, trying to see the wall of the cavern. There was one last thing he might try-to teleport to the spot where Baelar and his squad had entered the cavern. If any of the other squads made it that far, and found the runestone, there was the faintest of chances they could-

Torrin screamed as a fresh agony forced itself upon him. His knees were on fire, flaring with the most intense pain he’d ever felt!

He glanced down and saw a shiny puddle. The gold filling the rune had overflowed the edge closest to him and was touching his knees. Burning them. Still more gold was flowing out of the rune toward him.

No. To the runestone clenched in his left hand. He moved it to the side, and saw the puddle of gold follow it. A hysterical laugh bubbled out of him.

“By Moradin’s beard!” he cried. “That’s it! That’s how it can be undone!”

The agony of his knees and shins reached a point beyond comprehension. The pain was so intense that his mind was no longer capable of registering it. He collapsed, halting his fall by slapping his right hand onto the cavern floor, directly into the flowing gold. The skin was immediately charred-a fragment of white knuckle bubbled to the surface-but Torrin didn’t care. With something between a laugh and a scream, he turned and hurled the runestone toward the hole that had been bored into the floor. Spellfire sped after it as it landed with a splash inside the well, and molten gold from the rune followed, flowing past Torrin in a wave that sealed his doom. He saw the hole in the floor begin to close, to scab over the molten metal that was flowing back into it. Then he fell onto his side, splashing down into the last of the flow leaving the rune. The last sensation he had was the smell of charred flesh and hot metal. He sighed in contentment as he died, knowing his work was done.

The rune was empty, the gold flowing back into Moradin’s vein. The Dwarffather would live.

The stoneplague would end.

The first sensation was a white radiance. Cooling. Soothing. Pure.

He felt it more than saw it. The glow surrounded him. Sustained him.

Slowly, the radiance dissipated. A second sensation replaced it-the sound of metal on metal. Each blow reverberated slightly. A hammer, striking forge-heated steel on an anvil.

How he knew that, he could not say.

He realized he was standing. A massive, calloused palm was the floor on which his feet rested.

No. That wasn’t quite right. He had no feet, no legs, no body. Just… self.

Where am I? he asked.

Then a more pressing question. Who am I?

“You were known, in your last lifetime, by two names,” a voice that boomed like thunder said. “You preferred your dwarf name.”

I am Torrin Ironstar, he realized. But no, that was slightly wrong. I was Torrin Ironstar. A delver, of Eartheart. I am he no more.

“Yes,” said the voice.

The clang of hammer on steel continued, as steady as a heartbeat. Sights joined that sound. The soul that had been Torrin could see around itself. The palm that supported him was joined to an arm, and that arm to the shoulder of a figure seated on a throne-a dwarf, with a gleaming white beard that flowed down onto his chest, across his apron-covered lap, to touch the floor between his boots.