Douglas Niles - Feathered Dragon

Man and monsters tumbled over the side of the cliff, a whirling vortex of pluma that plunged in eerie silence toward the jagged rocks far below. The crash of their bodies against the stone was a sickening, final sound.

At the last moment, the dark powers within Darien held her back. She felt a compelling urge to leap; in fact, she stumbled forward and lost her footing at the lip of the precipice. But she slid a few feet and then grasped some curling roots of brush that grew along the face of the bluff.

Gasping for breath, she scrambled for footholds. She found purchase for enough of her legs to support her, then collapsed, suddenly exhausted. Shivering in a sudden chill she wondered at the nearness of her escape. The rest of the driders, together with the blind human, had perished on the rocks far below.

She clutched the cliffside, unseen by those above. For a time, she needed to rest. Her anger and hatred seethed

anew, directed at these humans who had so nearly defeated her. But she still lived, and her strength slowly returned. Soon she would return.

The final ten regiments of Hoxitl’s army doomed the defense of Actas, the second village on Cordell’s defensive line. The ores rushed forward in force with untamed fury, sweeping around both sides of the village.

Grimes led charge after charge of the slowly shrinking company of horsemen, but he may as well have tried to hold back the ocean tide. Finally the riders fell back to regroup, realizing the futility of further attacks.

Bather than expend his army in Actas in a hopeless holding action or allow it to be annihilated, as had happened to the defenders of Nayap, Cordell ordered his trumpeters to sound the withdrawal.

The defenders broke away from the savage onslaught, struggling to hold their formation as they fell back toward Helmsport. The cavalry operated as four small companies, driving back the foremost spearheads of the pursuit.

Sharp volleys of harquebus and deadly showers of arrows dissuaded the attackers from vigorous pursuit. Didn’t they have their foes in full withdrawal, in any event? Now that the battle was won, why press? No fighter, whether human, dwarf, or ore, wants to be the last to die in a victorious campaign.

The slow, pale light of dawn began to wash across the field, revealing that many a brave warrior lay behind on the once-grassy savannah that was now a sea of mud. Dwarves of the desert, the Little People of the jungle, warriors of Payit and Tulom-Itzi, mercenaries of the Sword Coast-all mingled their blood in the earth, no longer caring of the differences that had separated them or the alliance that had brought them together.

But many more of these fighters, the defenders of that alliance, remained alive. These were the ones who reached Helmsport’s high, earthen ramparts. They fell back in good

order, and were met at the walls by Cordell or Daggrande. These officers quickly directed the retreating companies into useful positions on the fortress ramparts.

As the last ranks of Hoxitl’s regiments reached the battle, there was no fight to be found, for all the defenders had gone. Thus they swept on in victorious glee, a surging wave of chaos roaring toward the breakwater of the solid fortress.

That rampart served its function as the ores and ogres and trolls roared up the steeply sloping outer wall. At the top, they met an array of defenders, tightly packed together and holding the high ground. The horde was too big to bring all of its strength to bear against this limited front, and Cordell took advantage of the fact. Now his men fought shoulder to shoulder, spurred on by the knowledge that there could be no further retreat.

In Helmsport, they would hold or they would die.

The massive monolith that was Zaltec had neared the clearing at Twin Visages early that terribly dark night. The god of war had sensed the powers there, powers of both pluma and hishna. Also, it had sensed that its moment of confrontation with Qotal had not yet arrived.

So the mountainous figure of the war god had waited standing impassively as Halloran fought for his life, as the driders threatened the woman, and as the pluma whirlwind carried the creatures of Lolth to their deaths.

Zaltec sensed the nearness of the childbirth, and this tiny spark of life, insignificant in scope when viewed by one who had overlooked armies, gleamed like a tempting morsel be-fore the blood-hungry god.

And so Zaltec stood silently, watching and waiting. Soon the moment would come, and he would gain his greatest victory.

Colon raised his hand from Halloran’s forehead as the swordsman sat up with a groan. The cleric immediately went back to Erixitl, who gasped for breath in the throes of another volley of pain. Hal climbed to his feet, his head throbbing, and quickly went to kneel beside his wife. He noticed, with vague detachment, that the driders and Lotil were gone.

The woman moaned again and threw back her head. Her legs spread limply on the ground, and she clenched her teeth, striving to push her baby into the world.

The priest held a hand before her and gently shook his head. Grimly, as the pain slowly lessened, she nodded in understanding.

“1 know,” she whispered. “Up there.”

Painfully, awkwardly, she rose to her feet. Halloran supported her, while Coton went to pick up the blanket of pluma that Lotil had dropped over Jhatli. The youth lay still and cold below it, and his blood had soaked into a portion of the feathered surface.

Slowly and agonizingly they made their way up the steps of the pyramid, stopping each time Erixitl was seized by another pain. It took them countless minutes of ever-increasing daylight to reach the top, and by the time they did, the sky was light blue and the moments between Erix’s contractions had shortened dramatically.

Coton spread the cloak on the platform on top of the pyramid some distance away from the grim altar. Immediately Halloran lowered Erixitl, and once again she gasped.

Then she screamed and wept. She threw back her head and cried out loud. She hissed through her teeth and pushed with all of her strength. Again and again she strained.

Pain became her constant emotion, a way of life that seemed as if it could bring only death. But she fought against that pain with all of her strength, striving and pushing to overwhelm and defeat it. With a groaning curse, at last she felt herself collapse. The pain was still there, but now it was a fading sensation, unimportant any longer.

Halloran, in one stunning second, found himself looking

at, and then gathering up, his son. The baby squirmed; kicked on the blanket of pluma, wrinkling his face and then uttering a sharp, demanding cry.

“A boy,” he said reverently. He handed the child to his wife and she clutched it to herself.

Colon surprised them by tugging insistently at the blanket of pluma. He pulled it free and Erix gasped in surprise. “The Cloak-of-One-Plume!”

Indeed, the cloak woven from countless tiny feathers by her father Lotil now looked exactly like the one she had worn, the one that had marked her as the chosen daughter of Qotal.

Slowly, devoutly, Coton rose to his feet in the pale blue of the dawn. He carried the billowing cloak in his arms, and then he gently spread it across the altar.

At that moment, the sun crested the eastern horizon, and the first rays of the day fell upon the altar. The cloak fleeted these, sending up a dazzling rainbow of light.

The twisted violently, plummeting into a steep dive. For the first time, Poshtli felt the tug of gravity below him, and then he saw the ocean, pale blue in the dawn and spreading to the far limits of his vision to each side.

But not before him. There, a thin green line of land emerged from the distance, quickly growing into the bluff at Twin Visages. Now he saw the two faces he had seen before, still staring out to sea, waiting… waiting for him!