Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

“Kender, gully dwarves, and gnomes!” the beast roared when it spotted the intruders. It spread its great black wings, trails and tatters of shadow swirling from their edges.

Rulf cast himself on the ground and gnawed the floor, trying desperately to fill his belly before he died. Dr. Palaver held his smelly salts beneath Whort’s nose, while Morg edged closer to have a better look. Never had he seen such a magnificent creature. The red dragons and blue dragons of the world paled beside this being of shadow. Only a death knight could possibly have been more frightening, and though Morg’s mind still wanted to get a closer look, his feet wisely took another course and began to run the opposite direction. He swooped up his nephew as he passed, dragging Dr. Palaver after him.

But not even kender feet could outrun the dragon. It breathed its black despair-inducing breath in a cloud that quickly overtook the fleeing intruders. Rulf, who had remained prostrate on the floor, felt it first. They heard him cry out in his sudden blindness, and then his cry was cut short by a sickening crunch. Before they could begin to feel sorry for the miserable creature, the breath caught up to them as well.

Dr. Palaver, who was behind the two kender, stumbled and fell, struck blind by the darkness of the dragon’s breath. Then it overtook Morg. He dropped his nephew, then fell over him and caught himself against the wall. As he felt the will to live drain from his body like water from a leaky bucket, leaving him in a most uncomfortable black despair, he slid to the floor.

For the first time in his life, Morgrify Pinchpocket didn’t really care about anything. He didn’t look forward to anything. He didn’t anticipate the next moment with all the gusto of his diminutive race. He was blind, but the blindness was more than the physical inability to see. He was blind to the future, blind to all hope of what lay in store for him tomorrow or the next day or the next. With sudden insight, he realized that this was indeed fear, the selfsame fear that had stolen his nephew’s voice and every aspect of his kenderness.

With that realization, he resolved not to lose his own particular kenderness, even if he had but a few more moments to live. Death, as his old Uncle Dropkick used to say, was the grandest adventure of them all, and Morgrify Pinchpocket determined then and there not to miss his own death, no matter how horrible it promised to be. Privately, he had always hoped for a horrible death-the more horrible the better. Dying in his sleep didn’t appeal to him at all, not even now.

Morg roused himself. Since he was blind, he turned his attention to his other senses. He smelled his nephew. The boy seemed near at hand, well within spitting distance, while the gnome, by his groans and moans, was a bit farther down the passage. Also within the range of his hearing was the sound of the dragon as it finished its meal of Bulp gully dwarf. The crunching of the bones and the way the dragon purred as it fed was particularly unnerving, but Morgrify was no longer afraid.

He crawled to his knees and felt around for his nephew, found him, and lifted the boy onto his old shoulder. Staggering away from the sound of the dragon, he paused only to grab a handful of the gnome’s coat and drag him along. He bumped and thumped his way down the passage until he thought they might be beyond the area of the dragon’s black breath. He was still blind, but the air here did not seem so close and smoky. He gently lowered Whort to the floor and tried to rouse him.

Slowly, the young kender came to his senses, then all at once he stood up with a shout. Although he was now able to put together a string of noises that sounded rather like the bellowing of a yearling calf with its foot stuck in the fence, he still had not freed his talk bone from its restriction.

Morg tried his best to calm his nephew, knowing that the boy’s continued noises would only draw the dragon to them. By the tightening feeling in the air, he knew that the beast was not far behind.

“You must drink the gnome’s potion, boy,” he urged his nephew. “Have you still got it? No? Why, I’ve got it in my pouch here. Now how did that get there?”

He pressed the bottle into Whort’s hands. Whort took it and looked at it with his goggle eyes as though he had no idea how it had got there.

Morg had been right. This area of the tunnel was beyond the range of the dragon’s breath. A few torches smoked on the wall, providing a thick, yellow light. Morg lay on the floor, staring around as blindly as a newborn kitten. The gnomish doctor writhed nearby, a stream of incomprehensible babble pouring from his bearded lips as he banged his bald head on the floor in the blinding despair wrought by the dragon’s breath.

However, Whort, who had been unconscious when the dragon breathed its black breath upon them, was not blinded by it, nor did he experience the despair now torturing his uncle and the gnome. His fear and affliction remained. He was almost paralyzed by it, but he was used to it, and the sight of his blind and helpless uncle projected new courage in his vines (as Dr. Palaver might say).

Whort looked again at the bottle and knew what he had to do. He had to drink it before the dragon appeared. Only the potion of mighty heroes, as Dr. Palaver had named it, might give him the courage to rescue his uncle and the good doctor from their predicament.

He uncorked the bottle, loosing a pleasant smell not unlike popcorn popping over a winter blaze. Encouraged, he tilted the bottle to his lips, but at that moment, the shadow dragon loomed around the corner. Whort’s nerve almost abandoned him altogether, but his uncle’s pleading cries to hurry, cries tinged with a fear he had never known in his redoubtable uncle, roused Whort enough to pour the contents of the bottle into his mouth and swallow.

It tasted like licorice, and when he had drunk it all, Whort tossed aside the bottle and tried his voice. To his horror, nothing happened, except that he hiccupped. But from this hiccup there fluttered a black butterfly with yellow bands on its wings. Whort opened his mouth in surprise at this strange occurrence, only to experience something quite beyond the pale.

Sunlight streamed from his open jaws, poured from his nostrils, and waterfalled from his pointed kender ears. It spread like a pool of melting ice cream across the floor in an ever-widening circle. As it flowed over the gnome, he ceased his babbling and sat up, wiping his runny nose with a filthy sleeve and blinking blindly. On the other hand, Morgrify fell immediately into a deep and contented sleep, a heroic snore ripping across the chamber. The dragon paused, unsure of what this portended.

The magical sunlight reached his shadowy scales, searing their fleshless substance like white-hot iron. The scent of a warm spring morning in a rose garden assaulted his nostrils, driving him back into the comfortable gloom of his lair.

Seeing the dragon retreat, Whort’s talk bone was set free, erupting in a storm of expletives worthy of the crustiest sailor to scrape a barnacle from the belly of a ship.

Meanwhile, the sunlight from his mouth continued to swell across the floor. The dragon retreated before it, hissing and thrashing its mighty tail. Whort stepped toward it, assaulting it with such a plethora of kender taunts as few before him had ever strung together in one sunny breath. Wherever he stepped, green grass sprang up in his footsteps. The dragon writhed with anger, but it dared not move into the kender-born sunlight. Finally, it retreated into its lair, belching up what it hoped would prove a protective wall of darkness to block the passage behind it.

Whort returned to his uncle, who smiled up at him, the wrinkles around his blind eyes just a shade more pronounced than Whort remembered them. Taking the elderly kender in one hand and the strangely silent gnome in the other, he led them from the sewers of Palanthas.