Mary Kirchoff - Flint the King

The hammer fell rhyththmically against the anvil, oven and over, gradually returning the wheelrim to its circular shape. A sheen of perspiration glistened on the dwarven smith's skin when the fire rose, but then he fell into shadows as the blaze sank into the coals. The smithy around him was empty, dark but for the forge fire.

As the hill dwarf's body labored, so did his mind, franti cally. He thought about the secret he had learned, scarce minutes before. Again and again his hammer fell on the rim as he pushed himself past the point of exhaustion. Sparks exploded from each contact, hissing through the air before settling to the earthen floor of the shed.

Indecision tormented him. Should he remain silent?

Should he speak out? The hammer continued pounding.

Immersed in his task, the dwarf did not see the grotesque figure moving through the shadowy doorway. For a mo ment the fire flared, outlining a black, misshapen figure shorter even than the dwarven smith.

This dark one shuffled forward, and again the blaze rose, revealing a hump of flesh that twisted the stunted body half sideways. Still the smith hammered, eyes focused on the wheel, unaware of the one who slowly limped toward him from behind.

The hunchbacked figure raised a hand to his chest and wrapped his blunt fingers around a small object that hung suspended from his neck by a chain.

Blue light glowed between those fingers as the amulet sparked to life. His other hand gestured toward the smith.

Softly, the blue light spread outward, advancing slowly like an oily, penetrating mist. It reached forward in uneven tend rils, closer and closer to the smith.

For the first time, the hammer faltered slightly in its blow.

Reflexively, the dwarf raised it again, ready to strike. Sud denly his face distorted in a grimace of unimaginable agony, and his body convulsed with a violent spasm. For a moment his movement ceased, as if he had been frozen in a grip of ex cruciating pain.

The hammer remained poised above him as his body stiff ened, wracked within the blue glow that outlined him. The gentle, almost beautiful cocoon belied the supernatural grip of its power. Only the dwarf's eyes moved, growing wider and more desperate with the slowly increasing, inevitably fatal pressure of dark sorcery.

Abruptly the light vanished, and the hunchback shuffled backward, melting into the darkness.

The dwarven smith's hammer finally slid from his gloved hand with a loud clang to the anvil. Slowly, the corpse top pled forward, the stocky body splaying across the anvil and the nearly straightened wheel. It slipped silently to the cold ground.

Watching dead leaves swirl into his windowss, Flint Fireforge threw back his mug and swallowed the last of his draught. A satisfied belch ruffled his thick mustache. For cheap ale, it wasn't half bad, he concluded. But it was gone.

He held the empty bottle — his last — up to the light of the fire. The dwarf stroked his salt-and-pepper beard out of habit. After considering his empty larder, Flint decided that it was time to see if his ale order was in at the greengrocer's.

He was going to have to leave the comfort of his home and fire for only the third time in the month since his friends had left the treetop village of Solace.

The dwarf and his companions — Tanis Half-Elven, Tas slehoff Burrfoot, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, Kitiara

Uth-Matar, and Sturm Brightblade — had parted ways to discover what they could of the rumors concerning the true clerics, agreeing to meet again in exactly five years. Flint had spent much of his time in the last few years adventuring with his much younger friends or traveling to fairs to sell his metalsmithing and woodcarvings. Truly he missed them, now that they were gone. But the truth of the matter was, at one hundred forty years, the middle-aged dwarf was just plain tired. So, being reclusive by nature, he had stayed at home and done little more than eat, drink, sleep, stoke the fire, and whittle in the month since their departure.

Flint's stomach rumbled. Patting the noisy complainer, he reluctantly eased his bulk from his overstuffed chair near the fire, brushing wood shavings from his lap as he stood.

He pulled his woolly vest closer and looked about his home for his leather boots.

The house was small by the measure of the human-sized buildings up in the trees. But his home, built in the base of an old, hollowed-out vallenwood, was quite large by dwar ven standards — opulent even, he reflected, with not a little pride. Sure, it didn't have the large nooks and crannies found in the caves-turned-houses of his native foothills near the Kharolis Mountains, nor was there the ever-present homey scent only a white-hot forge could produce. But he had carved every inch of the inside of his tree into shelves or friezes depicting vivid and nostalgic scenes from his home- ' land. These included a forging contest, dwarven miners at work, and the simple skyline of his boyhood village. Such carvings were not easily done on the stone walls of the homes of most hill dwarves.

The stroke of his knife over a firm piece of wood was Flint's greatest joy, though the gruff hill dwarf would never have admitted such a sentiment. Idly, he raised his hand to one of the friezes, touching his fingers to the carved crest of a jagged ridge, following the dips and summits. He dropped his hand to the carvings of the dark pine forests below the crest, admiring the precise bladework that had marked each tree in individual relief on the wall.

With a large, shuddering sigh, Flint took his heavy, well worn leather boots from under a bench by the door and jammed them onto his thick feet. There was nothing to be done about it — he'd put off this errand as long as he could.

The massive vallenwood front door creaked as Flint opened it, causing the shutters on his windows to bang in the chill breeze, their hinges sagging like an old woman's stockings. They ought to be repaired — there were many such tasks to be done before the first snow fell.

Flint's home was one of the few in Solace at ground level, since he was one only of a handful of non-humans living in the town, including dwarves. While the view from up in the trees was quite lovely, Flint had no interest in living in a drafty, swaying house. Wooden walkways suspended by strong cords attached to high branches were the sidewalks of Solace. Probably they had provided a useful means of de fense against the bandit armies that had once ranged across the plains of Abanasinia in the wake of the Cataclysm.

Nowadays the trees served as an aesthetic delight, Solace's trademark. People came from many miles away simply to gaze on the city of vallenwood.

The day was cool but not cold, and warming sunshine cut through the thick trees in slanted white lines. The greengro cer's shop rose above the very center of the eastern edge of the town square, a short distance away. Flint set out for the nearest spiral stair leading to the bridgewalks overhead. By the time his short legs had pumped him to the top of the cir cling thirty-foot wooden ramp, his brow had broken out in beads of sweat. Flint plucked at the furry edges of his vest and wished he hadn't dressed so warmly; he slipped his arms from it and draped the leather and wool garment over one shoulder. He saw the grocer's, at the end of a long straighta way.

For the first time in quite a while, Flint truly noticed his surroundings. The village of Solace was washed in vivid fall colors. But unlike the maples or oaks of other areas, each large vallenwood leaf turned red, green, and gold in perfect, alternating angled stripes of about an inch wide. So instead of seeing blazing clumps of solid color, the landscape was a multicolored jumble. The bright sunlight cast the leaves in a shimmering iridescence that shifted in shade and intensity with each passing breeze.