Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

“And you are from the Astral Plane,” whispered Charybole. “How did my race ever survive there next to creatures like you?”

She shot six, seven, eight arrows into it. It paid them no mind. She hurled her spear at it. It buried itself three feet into the dreadnought’s chest. The dreadnought ignored it. She fired two more arrows. They had no effect.

Somehow she knew this wouldn’t be like the other encounters. There was no way she could live through this. She wanted to check the cave, to see if Malargoten was awake yet, and if so to convince him to stay hidden, but she knew if she paid any attention at all to the cave’s entrance the dreadnought would know where the foundling was, and it was for the foundling that it had come.

She picked up her sword and her axe and edged to the right, hoping that the creature would follow her. Once she had moved away from the cave’s entrance, it paid her no further attention, and she quickly positioned herself between the dreadnought and the cave once again.

When it was within arm’s reach she buried the sword in its side. She knew from the arrows and the spear that she couldn’t kill it; her only hope was that she might somehow be able to cripple it. But though the sword plunged deep into the creature’s scales, it had no more effect than her other weapons. She swung her axe, but the dreadnought reached out its pincered claw, caught her head in it, and squeezed. It was over in a fraction of a second.

The dreadnought uttered a scream of triumph and cast her lifeless body aside. It couldn’t know it, of course, but that scream spelled its own doom, for it woke the sleeping foundling.

Malargoten walked to the cave’s entrance, briefly rubbing sleep from his eyes. He saw the lifeless body of his adoptive mother, then turned to face her slayer.

The dreadnought saw its prey and roared. The foundling showed no fear, and stepped out of the cave. The creature reached out a pincered claw to grab him.

“No,” said Malargoten softly, but with authority.

The dreadnought’s claw seemed to strike an invisible barrier, and bounced off.

The foundling stared at the creature, his expression a mixture of fury and contempt. Finally he waved a hand and snapped a finger, and the dreadnought collapsed, convulsing in agony, and died.

Malargoten paid it no more attention. Instead he walked over to Charybole’s body, stared at her crushed skull, and wondered what his people did with their dead.

Zat sat alone in her quarters. She was troubled, and she was confused. The reports had come in: She knew that the dreadnought had killed the annoying female who had withstood so many of her minions… but she also knew that the dreadnought itself was dead, though there was not a sign of violence on its body. And there was no trace of the foundling. Probably the dreadnought had eaten it, but she felt uneasy not knowing for certain.

Suddenly she became aware of another presence in the room, not a physical presence, but a presence nonetheless. She looked around, and saw a shimmering in the air, a shimmering that suggested something tangible, something more.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

You know who I am, a voice said inside her head. And you have made a serious blunder. For all of my life you have hunted me down like an animal. I was never in danger, of course, and until this latest attempt I was always able to protect my mother, even though she was not aware of it.

“You are githyanki!” spat Zat.

I could have been one of you, continued the voice calmly. Until now I bore you no ill will. But now you have killed my mother “Your false mother,” interrupted Zat.

The only mother I have ever known. You are safe for the moment, Zat. I will do nothing to you today, or this week, or this year. I will wait for my powers to mature, powers that could have served the githzerai. I wash my hands of your race, and my own kind will not have me after I have lived with yours. I will live apart from all living things until the time is right. And when it is, when I am invulnerable to the combined might of all the githzerai, I will return-and you, Zat, will be the first to know it.

She was about to reply, but before she could she sensed she was alone again.

She considered what she had heard.

Isn’t it ironic, she thought bitterly, that by defending the githzerai race, I may have doomed it?

Well, then, was there a way to soften his attitude? Zat smiled ruefully. Would she give up plans of vengeance were their positions reversed? Of course not.

Finally, was there a possibility, however slim, that he was wrong, that a five-year-old githyanki child was not the most potent and invulnerable force within the Elemental Chaos?

She didn’t hold out much hope for that-but suddenly she knew that she would spend as much time as she had before his return trying to find out. .

Ravon Kell slammed his shovel into the stony ground, cursing the hard jungle soil. They had already buried fifty slaves, and there was no end in sight.

The sun threw lashing rays on his back, cooking him in his rags, but the worst heat came from the ground itself, where the grinding magics of the genesis forge blistered the land, killing the jungle for a swath of a thousand feet around their prison.

Nearby, an orc guard wrinkled his snout at the stench of bodies. “Bury ’em three in a hole,” he ordered the halfling Finner.

“That’s against-” Finner started to protest, but fell silent as the orc loomed over him.

Ravon dug his hole deeper. Yesterday’s slave uprising had been doomed from the start. An army officer in the Last War, he’d weighed the odds and had stayed out of the fray. It wasn’t even a contest, here in this lost jungle of Xen’drik where no one knew there was a forge or slaves-both illegal under the Treaty of Thronehold.

Maybe the poor bastards knew the odds and just wanted to die. As the old marching song went, there were nine hundred and ninety ways to die. An orc’s blade thrust being merely one.

He looked up at the massive factory: an arms mill the size of a fortress, soon to produce an endless supply of lances, shields, cudgels, maces, swords, crossbows, spears-not to mention magic-infused spike wire, lightning spheres, and thunder shock implements.

A genesis forge, by the Devourer, though one had not been seen in the world since the fall of Cyre, as they were forbidden by the Treaty of Thronehold. But those laws didn’t apply in Xen’drik, a wild continent far from Khorvaire. Besides, a cloak of magic hid the forge. From the jungle, the misshapen fortress looked like nothing more than a vine-covered crag, not a hulking factory ten stories high, with massive iron walls studded with bulging armories and effluent towers disgorging steam and rank smoke.

At the top of the forge bulged the dome of the artificers’ keep. There, mages with their diagrams, spells, and sigils directed the magical workings of the forge. They drew enormous power from stockpiles of dragonshards and from the latent magic of the very ground on which the forge rested-the ancient burial site of a race of giants, it was said.

Ravon spat. His task-the task of every other slave, guard, and artificer-was to bring the forge to working order, and by so doing, bring the world to war. As a captain in Karrnath’s army, war had been his job, but he would never fight again. In the Last War Count Vedrim ir’Omik had thrown him in the dungeons, stripping him of his commission and very nearly his life. It was one thing to take his punishment like a man, and quite another to take it when innocent of the charges-charges trumped up by the count’s favorite vixen, at that. Earlier in the war a few of Ravon’s victories had come to the count’s attention, but by the Nine Hells, he wished that Vedrim had never visited the battlefield with his entourage. The attractive lady had taken a fancy to the celebrated captain, he’d declined to bed her, the count had been led to believe otherwise, and now Ravon wished that for all he’d suffered in the dungeon, he’d at least had the pleasure of what he’d been accused of.