Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

He stood on the ridge as the darkness gathered. “I know you’re here,” he said without turning round. The she-wolves picked their way over the stones, their heads low. He ran among them up the slope into the high meadow, among the red-star columbines. The wolves coursed after him but could not reach him, because as he ran he gripped his totem stick and muttered his evocations, until he could feel the coarse hair on his back and down his arms, and he dropped down to all fours.

Everything she’d asked he had accomplished, no matter what the sacrifice. Tonight she would understand that there was no remaining trace of the boy whose shape had so disgusted her. She would recognize how love had changed him.

Before moonrise he paused at the stone gatepost on the mountainside, whose runes, he now saw, spelled out a name, or else part of a name: CENDR. The remaining letters on the other side had crumbled away, and the post itself had broken into pieces in the coarse grass. The wind had died. Black clouds hung above him, obscuring chunks of stars.

And when he saw the sky glow silver behind the eastern peaks, he picked his way down the avenue of statues, his feet delicate on the uneven stones. At the limit of his senses he could hear the noise of rats or rabbits in the empty houses; they would not show themselves. They would crawl into their crevices and holes, not knowing they were safe from him; he wasn’t hungry. All day he had fasted, in preparation. Now finally he reached the rim of the stone basin and lowered his head to drink. But at the last moment he did not break the surface with his long tongue, and as the moon rose he saw his countenance reflected as in a mirror, his yellow eyes and cruel teeth. Baring them, pulling away his dark lips, he allowed his breath to trouble the water, while at the same time a small wind came out of nothing, following his secret command. It stirred the surface, sparing him the sight of his ugliness as he regained his mortal shape.

When the circle of the moon was bright in the water, he heard her laughter from the other side of the pool. She sat on the far lip of the basin, weeds in her yellow hair, which gleamed with phosphorescence. She was examining the bottom of one foot when she raised her head.

“Haggar,” she said, her voice soft and musical, and he wondered if he’d ever told her his true name, and if not, how she came to know it. “So many years you’ve disappointed me. When I tell my friends, they laugh at me. But it’s time to prove them wrong. I need your help. I have an urgent need. I hope things are different now.”

So many years-nine years. During that time he had changed utterly in body and mind, but she had not changed. He stood in his leather breeches and his father’s wedding shirt, his totem stick slung in his belt. Now she stood and beckoned, and as he stumbled forward, it occurred to him that he was older than she, or at least he looked older, a full-grown man. And at the same time he thought about what she’d said: she needed him. What for? Need, he knew, was different from love, however similar they felt. And friends-what friends? He’d always thought she was alone in the world, last of her race, of the people who had lived here in this city, perhaps.

He paused, the water around his shins. She stood within a stone’s cast away, one hand on her slim hip. She smiled at him, a mocking smile, he understood, and for the first time he listened to his doubts-he had learned much in the solitary study of his craft. He knew the evocations that summoned clouds and rain, and those that summoned lightning from the sky. He had his hand on the druidic chain of being that linked all beasts with the primal spirit, and he knew the evocations that would pull him closer to that spirit up the evolutionary links, so that he could find the dividing lines, and sink back down again into another body, bird, or fish, or reptile, or warm-blooded beast. And though he had the practical mind of his mother’s people, he could not have learned these things without some knowledge of the rest, of other worlds or planes that joined to this one in small places, of the Feywild and the crystal towers of Cendriane, where the eladrin had once lived, tall and proud and slender, but blind in their suspicion that all other races were animals to be used. Worse than humans in that way.

“When I tell my friends…” Now suddenly he imagined her not as a solitary gift to him, but as an emissary from that world. He took a step backward, and at the same time watched the smile fade from her lips. How had she known his name, and not even his clan name but the secret name his mother called him? For an instant he imagined his mother’s cottage in the woods, and heard in his mind’s ear the drums of the summer festival, and saw the bonfire and the women dancing among the trees, among them Uruth, his mother’s cousin, but younger than him, a sweet girl with big eyes, but not beautiful, not like this.

Her smile dwindled as she saw his doubts. She stood with her hand on her hip, while the moonlight spread across the surface of the water. “Catch me,” she said, and she dived into the depths-the pool was deeper than it looked, he knew. With a cry, he dived in after her, struggling to follow, to seize her as she swam down. For an instant he thought he’d clasped her in his arms, but then she’d slipped down deep, her wet silk slippery as eel skin. The water was murky, suffused with light, and he saw nothing.

His lungs were bursting, but he held his shape. He knew this was a test, a last test, and if he failed it she would not come again. Last year he’d tried to follow her down, and in the hole at the bottom of the pool where the current changed and the water turned cold, he’d lost his nerve. Defeated, desperate, he had clawed his way up to the surface again.

But now he saw a glimmer down below, and imagined her small feet kicking through the weeds. He imagined diving down to her, touching her body with his outstretched fingertips as she twisted away. He imagined he would drown and die rather than lose her, and with all his strength he struggled grimly, even as he felt the weeds clutch at his legs. Below him in the phosphorescent depths of the pool he saw a shadow flicker, and with his lungs empty, his brain starved of air, he toiled down into the glow, first green, then blue until it burst around him, and he realized he’d been swimming upward to the light, and now had broken through the surface of another pool, under another sky.

And even so he might have drowned, because he found himself almost too exhausted to move, and too depleted to breathe, except he found the water shallow where he was. On his hands and knees, he dragged himself up a surface of smooth, blue-green tile until he lay at her feet.

The sunlight blinded him, it was so bright. The air was too rich to breathe. He had a vague impression of her standing over him, speaking not to him but someone else. “Humor me. I didn’t choose him for his looks. Take him and put him with the others. Leave him his rags until we find him proper clothes. And be careful. He doesn’t look it, but he has some skill. That’s why he’s here.”

Haggar rolled onto his back, forcing his eyes open so he could peer up through his lashes at the azure sky, so terrible and deep. He forced his ears and nose to open, fuzzily aware that if he tried to protect himself from the intensity of colors, sounds, and smells that distinguished this place, he would lose any hope of commanding nature here, as he could at home. Ignoring the long hands that snatched his wolf stick from his belt, he murmured an evocation. Leaving his body to be mauled and harried by the eladrin, he cast his mind into the air until he hung suspended far above, and looked down with an eagle’s eye on the small group of struggling figures at the edge of the tiled pool.