Ed Greenwood - Death of the Dragon

Probably, Vangerdahast should not have worried about failing to notice it earlier. At the time, he had been fighting for his life, trying to capture Xanthon Cormaeril and force him to reveal the exit to the goblin city. There had been flashing spells and gruesome melees and hordes of droning insects, and it would have been normal for even the most observant of combatants to miss the mosaic.

But Vangerdahast was no mere combatant. He was the High Castellan of the War Wizards, the Royal Magician of Cormyr, the First Councilor to the King, and he did not overlook such things. He could not afford to. Everyday the life of the king and the strength of Cormyr depended on his powers of observation, and he kept his senses honed keener than the blade of any dragon-slaying knight. He perceived all that passed before him, heard every whisper behind his back, smelled any kind of trouble the moment it formed, and still he had not noticed the mosaic until-well, until sometime earlier. Days had no meaning in this place. The only way to mark time was by the steady shrinkage of his ample belly, and he had already taken in his belt two notches before he began to notice the mosaic. Either he was hallucinating or the thing had begun to form before his eyes. He would not have liked to wager which.

A pair of yellow membranes slid across the pool, coating the surface with a fresh layer of black sheen, and slowly retracted again. Vangerdahast had seen the pool blink before, long before the dragon appeared, so perhaps the blinking had nothing to do with the mosaic. Everyone knew mosaics could not blink.

Vangerdahast slipped his ring on, then descended the stairs, moving slowly to keep himself from blacking out. The goblin city contained nothing but stone and water, and he could not eat stone. He had long since passed the stage of hunger pangs and a growling stomach, but his dizziness was almost constant.

Near the bottom, his strength failed. He dropped to a stair, where it was all he could do to brace his hands against the cold granite and prevent himself from sliding the rest of the way down.

“A meal you need.” The words were deep and sibilant, and they rumbled through the lonely city like an earthquake. “A nice roast rothe, and a big flagon to wash it down.”

Vangerdahast leaped to his feet, his strength returning in a rush. He peered into the murk beyond the plaza, searching for a pair of glinting eyes, or a skulking black silhouette, or some other hint of the speaker. Seeing nothing but murk, he considered hurling a few light spells into the darkness but quickly realized he would find nothing. His hunger had finally gotten the best of him, and now he was hearing things as well as seeing them. There was no sense wasting his magic on hallucinations. Magic was too precious in this place, where even spells of permanent light seemed to burn out like common torches.

The pool continued to stare, and it seemed to Vangerdahast that the darkness in its heart had swung around to stay focused on him. He crept down to the bottom stair and crouched above what would be the crown of the dragon’s head. There was a definite rise where the skull swelled up out of the ground, and he could feel a rhythmic shuddering in the steps beneath his feet. Vangerdahast reached out and ran his hand down the nearest scale. It was the size of a tournament shield and as warm to his touch as his own flesh.

“I’ve lost my mind,” he gasped.

“Yes, you have lost something, but not your mind,” the voice rumbled. Ten paces beyond the eye, the row of white triangles moved in time to the words. “You’ve lost only your big belly-and soon your life, too, unless you eat.”

Vangerdahast scrambled up the stairs, but grew dizzy half a dozen steps later and had to stop. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. When he looked again, the dragon face remained, the eye in the basin still staring at him.

“Why have you less faith in your eyes and ears than the doubts of a spent and weary mind?” asked the dragon. “I am as real as you. Touch me and see.”

“I’d rather, uh, trust you about that.”

Vangerdahast remained where he was, his mind whirling as it tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Insanity still seemed the greatest likelihood, save that he had always heard the insane were the last to know of their illnesses-but down here, he would be the last to know. He had been trapped in the goblin city for… well, for some while. In the eternal darkness of the place, time had no meaning. The only way to mark hours was by the duration of his spells, which all seemed to fade far too quickly.

When Vangerdahast remained quiet, the dragon spoke again. “You don’t believe in me, or you would ask my name.”

The admonishment jarred Vangerdahast back to a semblance of his senses. Concluding that if he was going insane he had already lost the battle, he decided to treat the dragon as though it were real. He gathered up his courage, then sat down on the step and addressed the dragon.

“I’m interested less in who you are than what,” he said. “If you are some chimera manifested by my guilty soul to abuse me in the lonely hours before death, I’ll thank you to spare me the nonsense and get down to business. I know the evil I’ve done, and I’d do it again, fully conscious of the costs to myself and others.”

“Fully conscious?” the dragon echoed. “That is impressive.”

“Cyric’s tongue!” Vangerdahast cursed. “You are a phantasm! I suppose that’s my reward for letting Alaphondar and Owden prattle on about symbols and meaning.”

“Meaning has power,” answered the dragon, “but I am nothing of yours, I promise. I am a true dragon.”

“Dragons are hatched, not…” Vangerdahast paused and glanced derisively at its emerging figure. “… not formed.”

“And hatched I was, in the days when rothe ran free and elves ruled the woods.” The dragon’s eye shifted from Vangerdahast and stared at a magic sphere of light fading above it. “But now I am a prisoner, and more than you.”

“A prisoner, you say?” As Vangerdahast spoke, he was doing a quick set of mental calculations. The dragon’s accent and its reference to rothe-the extinct buffalo that once roamed the forests of Cormyr-placed its age at well over fourteen hundred years. Even for such an ancient wyrm, however, it was too large by far. The distance from its eye to the last white fang had to be sixty feet, which would make the length from snout to tail somewhere in excess of six hundred feet. “I doubt that. The wizard has not been born who could cage such an ancient wyrm.”

“Nor the warrior who could imprison a mage so great as yourself,” replied the dragon. “Yet I have seen you casting your spells-teleporting here, plane-walking there, dimension-dooring all places between, sending thoughtpleas to anyone who might hear-and yet you remain here with me. It was no wizard who caught me, or you. We were trapped here by our own folly and pride, and prisoners we will stay.”

Vangerdahast rolled his eyes and stood. “If you’re going to talk like that-“

“Oh, yes, go and starve to death!”

A tremendous boom resounded from the dragon’s one visible nostril, and a fireball the size of an elephant went sizzling into the darkness. It crashed into a distant goblin manor, spraying blobs of melted stone in every direction.

Vangerdahast cocked a brow. “I won’t be stepping in front of you, I think.”

A scaly red lip drew away from the dragon’s teeth, creating a snarl as long as some streams Vangerdahast had seen. “Die if you like, but leave your wishes for me.”

Vangerdahast folded his hands behind his back, concealing the ring he had been contemplating earlier. “Wishes?”

“In the ring.”A wisp of yellow fume streamed out of the dragon’s distant nostrils. “Everything else you have tried, but the wishes are too dangerous. You don’t understand this place, and if you wish wrong… puff, no more wizard!”