Samantha Henderson - Dawnbringer

She sat on the bed, suddenly looking very young. “Magaster sees little use for locks and keys save to secure a room, and little use for me. He tolerates me against those times he needs me to steal something. He can’t understand the beauty of a well-constructed trip latch or a spell that works, bit by bit, on opening a door starting from the very grain of the wood. He certainly can’t appreciate this.” She picked up the bracelet gingerly between two fingers and placed it in her palm. “I can’t begin to imagine the skill of the people who constructed this.”

There was a pause.

“What’s your name?” Ivor asked her.

“And what do you want from us?” said Gareth.

She grinned up at them, looking even more catlike. “Jandi, Jandi M’baren. I thought if you had something like this, you might want to use it. And if you wanted to use it, that I might be able to help you.”

“Why would we need your help, Jandi?” asked Gareth. He felt Ivor stir by his side. Fool, he thought indulgently, to be charmed by a pair of pretty cat eyes.

She pursed her lips. “Do you know anything about locks? Do you know how a key can be made that will unfasten a man from the liver outward, and unlock his flesh with a word? Do you know how to ward a house so that each lock will whisper the name of the last being that opened it?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Well, I do,” she said. “And while I admit that the secrets of your pretty trinket here are beyond my knowledge, they won’t be for long. Just give me a little time.”

Gareth was intrigued. “What can you do with a key-or a lock-like that?”

She turned it over in her fingers. “There’s a great Power that runs through it. It keeps something shut and enclosed, and it is able to tap into it and magnify its own strength, and its ability to keep it imprisoned.” Jandi tilted her head and considered. “That’s very clever, you know. If it imprisons a living being, the entity’s struggles will only strengthen the lock. It would trap itself further, like a bird caught in a wire.”

Gareth felt a flare of excitement. He stepped closer to her. “Could you use it to secure something against all comers? A ship, maybe?” He thought of a ship of his own, a merchantman proofed against all of Ping’s ilk.

Why stop there? “Or a house. A big house. A …” Dream big . “A fortress.”

“Using the Power of whatever it imprisons?” She lifted it and looked through it like a keyhole. “I bet I could do it,” she said reflectively. “I bet I could.”

“I bet you could, too,” said Ivor, staring at her.

“Then Jandi M’baren and Ivor Beguine,” said Gareth. “By the Nine Hells, I think it’s time all of us got out of Mulmaster.”

Again he experienced awareness, like a flaming whip. This time Fandour seized it, ignoring the pain, and the burn faded away along with his connection to the Rhythanko. But before it did, he had a clear image graven on his mind-a creature of the strange plane held the Rhythanko and knew its nature-he knew it as few ever could. He clutched at the image, but it slipped away, leaving him bereft. For a long time Fandour floated static in the iron egg of his prison .

Then he turned his consciousness back to the Nexus, the place in the strange plane where over the centuries he’d been able to make contact, to touch those alien minds, and to begin to understand them. With understanding camecontrol. From one mind, if he was sufficiently rooted, he could reach out and touch another, both gathering information and influencing behavior .

In Faerun, his mind grew. He had infinite patience. It had taken an eon to realize he was imprisoned and to remember how that came to be, another to learn to send his consciousness to the plane where his avatar had wandered, another to begin to manipulate, one by one, the inhabitants there .

Eventually the net would be cast wide enough. Eventually he would find the Rhythanko and make it remember. Eventually he would be free .

THE GIANT’S FIST, LATER JADAREN HOLD

1461 DR-THE YEAR OF THREE GODDESSES BLESSING

During the birthing of the land that mortal and fey would eventually call Faerun, the earth twisted and buckled, and the rocks that composed Toril melted and re-formed, only to melt again. Volcanoes erupted from the plains, and rivers of lava flowed like water would millennia later. The very elements of the planet were in constant, shifting flux. The crust cracked open, revealing the scarlet and orange chasms of plasma bleeding beneath, and healed itself, only to be torn asunder again and again.

At the end of this cataclysmic time, the rock and fire at the heart of the planet folded in on themselves and were pushed to the surface, breaking through the crust. Mountain ranges hatched like a clutch of dragons out of one monstrous egg. Active volcanoes sprang up wherever the skin of Toril was thin, studding the ribs of the mountains like enormous, fiery gemstones.

One range pushed to the surface, high and jagged. It then became worn down over time by the elements and the restlessness of the earth, and rose again, newly forged in the liquid heat of the mantle. The second time, a volcano rose with it. Made of black rock, it spewed a constant river of bright lava to flood the slopes of the valley below.

A thousand years passed, and another, and the flow of liquid rock from the black mountain slowed, diminished, and finally stopped, leaving miles of rippled stone like a river frozen in time. Now and then a plume of smoke would belch forth, along with a rain of pumice and ash, but with less and less frequency until the volcano became a cinder cone, extinct, an enormous knob of basalt squatting on the weathered side of the mountain range, and the folklore passed on by the tribes that began to settle the area was the only testament to its original primal savagery.

At the base of the cone, years of weather and erosion had hollowed out caves, some shallow, some so deep as to extend halfway under the mountain. There were tunnels where lava had flowed, some with ceilings so low that a halfling child would have to duck its head to go inside. Some were enormous, tall enough to hold houses, roomy enough for any goliath that might choose to dwell there. Particle by particle, rainfall wore away the softer minerals throughout the monolith, leaving it honeycombed with more passages, some smooth as glass, some lined throughout with crystals. Erosion had also carved the softer material of the mountain away from the cone, so it was a discrete structure in itself.

At some forgotten place in history, a race of beings-dwarves, perhaps, or one of their relations-had come and constructed a stair, carved out of the living rock, that circled behind the cone, between the basalt knob and the mountain, and emerged at the top of the monolith. From the flat summit, an adventurous soul could see a dizzying view of the valley and rolling green meadows below, with tributary streams branching and tumbling through them to a distant river, and only traces in the landscape of the solid black lava beneath it all.

The ancient, mysterious delvers had refined the voids and tunnels of the cone, making wide passageways and series of rooms, stairways from base to summit, and hallways big enough to house an entire village.

Some said they disturbed a primordial evil that slept in the passageways and were devoured, while others said they tunneled too deep and broke through to the Underdark, and were killed or enslaved by gray dwarves.

Who they were, no one knew, or would admit to knowing. They left only their stonework, the marks of their tools on the surface of the basalt, a few ancient runes on some of the walls, and legends of their passing.