James Lowder - The Ring of Winter

"The first edible thing we see is doomed," Byrt said as they came to the side tunnel leading to the surface.

The main path continued on, wide and straight, but they didn't give it a second look as they hurried up the sloping spur. Gray light bled sullenly through the leaves and vines covering the jagged crack that served as entrance to the tunnel. The rain had stopped during the night, but a steady patter of water fell from the leaves and the roof. The tunnel opened onto the side of a low mound. Pushing the foliage aside, Artus found himself with a good vantage of a gently sloping hillside.

Byrt tried to muscle past, but a well-placed leg stopped him dead. "See here," he began. "I only-"

"Quiet," Artus hissed. He let the leaves fall back over the opening. "There are a dozen goblins moving through the underbrush out there, a hunting party of some kind. Back into the tunnel."

After a quick and quiet descent to the main tunnel, Artus looked dazedly at his companions. "They look like Batiri. Have we gone in a circle somehow?"

"No, no," Byrt said, swallowing the mouthful of leaves he had bitten. "There are Batiri all over the jungle, like sand fleas at a beach or civil servants at a cheap pub. It's said among the locals that you can't fall out of a tree without landing on a goblin…"

The weight of exhaustion pushed down on Artus, a feeling compounded by the drain of hunger, "I hate to say this, since I'm almost ready to eat the next beetle that crawls across the floor, but we'd better keep moving. The sun is coming up, so the goblins will be looking for a hiding place. They might stumble across this cave." He shuffled a few steps down the tunnel, using the unstrung bow as a staff. "I'm not strong enough to fight one goblin, let alone a whole hunting party."

Artus thought only about food as he trudged along. At least, that was all that occupied his thoughts until they came upon a stretch of tunnel limned in a strange gold radiance. It sparkled like the purest sunlight, and when Artus stepped into the glow, his hunger-induced thoughts of steak and ale and fresh-baked pics were replaced by other, more jumbled notions.

Confusion began to tug at the corners of Artus's mind, and his thoughts turned to his plight. The explorer pictured himself lost beneath the surface of Chult, in a maze of tunnels that had but two exits-the one at the Batiri camp and the other they bad been forced to pass by. The images grew more vivid. He saw himself shriveled from hunger, dazed from lack of water. And for what? He looked around at the golden tunnel walls.

Suddenly Artus was twenty years old again and here to rescue someone. That's right. The tunnel led under the jail in Surd, where his father was being held before his execution. The Sembians never took pity on highwaymen, especially those who preyed upon merchant caravans. Besides, hanging the notorious Shadowhawk would gain the local lords favor with the country's overmaster.

This was the third time in as many years Artus had found himself breaking his father out of jail. Shadowhawk, indeed. The old man might have been a real threat to travelers in Cormyr and Sembia a decade ago, but not now. He was getting too slow for all this "robbing from the wealthy" stuff.

"It's a good thing no one at the temple of Oghma knows about you, Father," Artus grumbled. He prodded the ceiling with his staff. Yes, he might want to start digging here. "The loremasters just wouldn't understand how I could let you keep on robbing merchants, They aren't too open-minded, not like Nanda…"

Artus stopped digging into the ceiling with the unstrung elven bow and put his hand to his forehead. Nanda hadn't crept into his thoughts for years. He'd been married to her for only a few months, just after he'd turned twenty. It was a whirlwind romance, ending in a union approved by neither his parents nor her guardian. That had made it all the more attractive to both of them. Sadly, those few months had turned out to be the worst of Artus's life, especially after he discovered his new bride's secret devotion to Loviatar, the Goddess of Pain.

No, he wasn't here for his father, and Nanda had left him fifteen years ago. He wasn't even in the Heartlands now. The thoughts swirled in his mind. Chult. He was lost somewhere in Chult.

Dazed, Artus looked around the tunnel again. "What am I doing here?" he hissed.

"Looking for the Ring of Winter," someone said.

Artus looked down, wondering how the wombats knew about the ring; he hadn't told them about it-at least he didn't think so. "How do you know that?"

He found his two companions in complete disarray. Byrt's eyes were closed tightly and he was walking in a circle, whistling a cheerful tune. Lugg had collapsed onto his side. His eyes were open, but he seemed stunned.

"This is a sorry-looking group, though I'm not one to judge, I suppose."

Pontifax cleared his throat, trying to draw Artus's attention. He stood farther up the tunnel, ghostly and pale, just as he had appeared in the Batiri prison. The explorer took a step toward his old friend, and the phantom backed away. "This way," Pontifax said. "Gather up your two furry cohorts, and come this way."

"Wait," Artus said. "Why are you here?"

"There's no time," the ghost wailed.

"Was your death so-"

Holding up a transparent hand, Pontifax replied, "All that matters right now is that you keep moving down the tunnel. You've got to get out of this golden light. It's some sort of enchantment, a wall of confusion."

That would explain my jumbled thoughts, Artus decided, but not the ghostly mage's presence. But before he could question Pontifax further, the phantom mage disappeared. The explorer paused for a moment and stared at the spot where Pontifax had been. He tried to piece some reasonable explanation together, but found it increasingly difficult to concentrate.

He lifted Byrt-who was still walking in a circle, oblivious to the phantom Pontifax and everything else around him-and tucked the wombat under one arm, along with the unstrung bow. Then he leaned down and grabbed Lugg by the ear. The brown wombat followed along docilely, a blank look in his eyes. It was awkward going. The bow slipped twice and clattered to the ground. Even when it stayed under Artus's arm, it constantly whacked Byrt on the head. That didn't stop the gray wombat from whistling, though.

After a time, the golden fight faded and the swirl of confusion subsided from Artus's thoughts. Soon after, Lugg realized with a start that he was being led along by the ear. With a huge frown, he pulled away from the explorer and hurried ahead. Byrt took longer to recover, but Artus found it hard to tell the difference; the little wombat acted strangely all the time. And when Artus asked Byrt and Lugg about the ghostly visitor who had rescued them, both wombats responded with looks that announced their concern for Artus's sanity.

Finally the tunnel ended. The floor here was smooth, the walls more carefully hewn from the surrounding stone. A wide crack split the wall before the tired, hungry trio. That meant release and, hopefully, food.

The low-ceilinged cavern they entered was dark and full of debris. A quick look around told Artus the crumbling stones were the ruins of some ancient structure. Ornate columns lay in pieces near the edges of the room. Heavy, square blocks of granite, used as the bases for long tables, cluttered the center. The wooden tops from those tables, and the shelves that had once filled the iron brackets attached to the walls, had long ago crumbled to dust.

"This might have been a library at one time," Artus ventured. He knelt to study the engravings on a fragment of masonry. The glyphs, which depicted dinosaur-headed men and women, were unlike any he'd seen before.

"Do they serve food in libraries?" Lugg asked, nosing through the rubble.