Don Bassinghtwaite - The Binding Stone

"Stop it!" howled Geth.

Dandra started, the sound of the shifter's anguish ripping through her. Singe started as well and blinked his eyes as if emerging from a daze.

Geth was down on his knees, clutching at his head and staring at her. "What are you trying to do?" he spat.

"I'm sorry," Dandra whispered. "That's Dah'mir. There's something irresistible about him. None of us could withstand him."

"Who is he?" Geth demanded. "Who is 'us?'"

Dandra grimaced in spite of herself. "'Us'? I should say 'them.'"

She pushed more memories into the minds of the shifter and the wizard. Of Tetkashtai, hovering above the small clear space in the middle of a sparsely-furnished bedchamber, the Adaranforged crysteel head of her spear flashing as she glided through the forms of spear practice. Of another kalashtar watching Tetkashtai from the bed, a smile of pleasure on his face and a violet crystal laying against his bare chest. Of a third kalashtar, her middle-length, slightly curly hair shot through with streaks of premature gray, bending over a table littered with books and paper. A blue crystal glittered in the band she wore across her forehead.

"Virikhad," said Dandra, "and Medalashana." She focused her gaze on the white-crested hill in the distance as she spoke, trying to extract herself from the memories. "We…" She winced and corrected herself. "They lived together in Sharn, researching dragonshards and looking for new ways to blend psionics with the magic of the shards."

Singe's eyebrows rose. "Did they succeed?"

"No." Dandra showed him and Geth an image of the papers that had littered Medalashana's table, all drawings of dragonshards, meticulously sketched and colored by Virikhad, right down to the patterns that swirled at their hearts. The rosy red of Eberron shards, broken from stones. The glowing gold of Siberys shards, fallen from the sky. The night-deep blue-black of Khyber shards, drawn up from the depths of the world. "They needed to experiment with raw shards that hadn't been claimed by wizards or attuned to the powers of the dragonmarked houses-and raw shards are rare."

She hesitated, then added. "When I told Adolan I was kidnapped from Zarash'ak in the Shadow Marches, it wasn't entirely true. Medalashana, Tetkashtai, and Virikhad were lured to Zarash'ak from Sharn. There are rich fields of Eberron shards in the Marches. Raw shards are more common there than anywhere else. Tetkashtai and the others received an invitation from a scholar who claimed to have himself moved to Zarash'ak so he could be closer to the source of the raw shards; he had heard of their research and invited them to visit him."

Another image flowed from her memory: that fateful letter, the three kalashtar all clustered around trying to read it at once. Dandra swung from Tetkashtai's neck. The signature at the bottom of the letter swayed underneath her, bold and clear. Dah'mir.

"Lies?" asked Geth.

Dandra's eyes hardened. She resisted the urge to glare at the shifter. "What do you think?" Her lips pressed together. In her mind, she could feel Tetkashtai tremble with dread at what followed. Dandra spoke the memories in words, afraid they might overwhelm her again.

"They went, of course. A servant met them at the docks, and escorted them to a grand house with blue doors. Dah'mir was waiting for them." The vision of acid green eyes swam in her head again. She forced them away and said instead, "He looked just the way I showed you and the moment he spoke, we drowned in the force of his personality. He fascinated us-kalashtar and psicrystals alike. It was like falling in love. We couldn't help ourselves." She drew a breath. "He led us into the marshes and we followed like children, carrying nothing but what we wore on our backs or held in our hands. After that…"

She struggled to find words, then abandoned the effort, letting the nightmare of her memories flow out.

The journey into the depth of the Shadow Marches was a blur of days, of half-remembered images. An escort of savage pierced and tattooed warriors-Bonetree hunters-meeting them. Tetkashtai and the other kalashtar, crouched impassively in the center of crude, flat-bottom boat as the hunters paddled up a shallow, reed-lined river in silence. Black herons flying overhead like gangly vultures, always circling. A new landscape of drier ground and long grasses, where strings of bones seemed to grow out of trees and clack in the shifting wind. An encampment of rough shelters where slack-jawed men and women and drooling children stared at them in awe. The river had been left behind and the kalashtar, surrounded by the hunters, stumbled after Dah'mir. As they passed the encampment, all the folk of the Bonetree fell in behind them, chanting the praises of Dah'mir and the Dragon Below.

A hill rose up out of the flat landscape, unnatural, a mound built by ancient hands. There was a tunnel in its side. Dah'mir led the kalashtar into it, leaving their Bonetree escort outside, still chanting. Inside, however, a new kind of escort took their place-an escort of which each member had four bandy arms and two gibbering mouths. They carried torches that gave off a blue-green flame, like burning copper. By the light of those torches, Dandra glimpsed other figures in the shadows, stalking the darkness with a lethal grace, their faces eyeless, long tentacles twitching from their shoulders.

Dolgrims. Dolgaunts. Terror sharpened and brought Dandra back to awareness, though Tetkashtai stumbled on, unheeding.

In a chamber deep within-or perhaps beneath-the mound, Dah'mir finally released the kalashtar. Medalashana, Virikhad, and Tetkashtai were free for only a moment, barely long enough to gasp at the horrors and the weird devices that surrounded them, before Dah'mir's warm embrace was replaced by a cold domination.

Among the devices of the chamber stood a half dozen nightmare figures with spindly bodies and limbs shrouded in dark, clinging robes. Their hands had only four spidery digits, their flesh was purple-green and rubbery, their heads…

Their heads were broad and round, with veins that pulsed beneath their skin of their hairless scalps. Dead white eyes peered from deep, bony cavities. And in place of a nose and a jaw-in place of any lower face at all-they had four thick, writhing tentacles.

Illithids, whispered Dandra to Geth and Singe. Mind flayers.

The creatures lived up to their name. Dandra's last moment of coherent contact with Tetkashtai dissolved in tearing mental anguish.

She could feel Singe's growing horror and Geth's growing rage. She held onto the memories though, wrenching them up into her mind and watching numbly as Tetkashtai-along with Medalashana and Virikhad-was subjected to the most gruesome of psychic tortures and probed by psionic powers to rival their own. Their bodies were bound to tables, their minds pinned back by bizarre devices of jointed metal and dark crystal clamped over their skulls. There was no way to know how much time passed. The light in the terrible underground laboratory never varied. The mind flayers came and went, but never in any pattern that made sense. Sometimes dolgaunts would come, torturing the kalashtar's bodies. Hruucan was the worst of them. He made certain the captives knew his name so they would fear him even more.

Always there were Dah'mir's eyes. Acid-green eyes. Watching.

Then spidery fingers closed on Dandra, ripping her away from Tetkashtai and placing her atop a tripod of long, crooked needles, suspended on their points. Virikhad's violet crystal and Medalashana's blue crystal were placed on similar tripods to either side of her. Dandra caught a glimpse of some strange device, an array of brass and crystal, wires and tubes-all of them writhing around a dragonshard, a huge blue-black Khyber shard as large as an anvil.

The mind flayers gathered around the device and their white eyes lifted to the shard. Their bodies grew still, but Dandra could sense the psionic energy building among them, growing increasingly more intense and more powerful-until it burst like a silent thunderclap.