Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

“Eat,” she said. “You’ve had nothing, and you need your strength.”

The chamber was lit with magical lights that burned with a hard, white flame. They were set in niches in the walls. Haggar leaned forward on his stool and stuck his spoon into a wooden trencher: grilled mushrooms in black sauce. “What do you know of the Far Realm?” she asked. “The Living Gate, that’s where it leads. No-‘leads’ is not the word I want.”

When he didn’t reply, she frowned. “I told you how to find the texts to study these things. Months ago-years ago, for you. Because I knew I wanted you for this. So try and talk to me. Try to be cleverer than you are. The Far Realm is outside of time and space-”

Haggar interrupted. “The words we use to describe these things, we can’t control them.”

Astriana looked at him, grease on her lower lip. “So?”

“So-nothing. This is what I took from what little I read, before I forced myself to stop: It makes us vulnerable to think about these things. Outside time and space-what does that mean? Objects and creatures that we can’t perceive. What we see is only indirectly, by its effect upon our minds. And this is corruption. Creatures from this world that are pulled from their true nature and transformed.”

Astriana stared at him, chewing slowly. “That razorclaw shifter,” she said. “Hazel is her name. She told me Themiranth and the others are still alive down there. Mind slaves. Servitors of something called an aboleth.”

“Did she see it? How does she know its name?”

She laughed. “I told her.” Then after a moment: “The important thing is sealing the gate. These creatures, the aboleths, mind flayers, and their slaves. They will try to prevent us.”

She kept chewing, pointing at him with her chicken bone. “You and me.”

And when he said nothing, she paused, looked down. “Because you promised.”

He cleared his throat. “When we have done with this, I won’t be content with any knowledge or money or the worthless thanks of some archfey. The Far Realm is not the only thing that can’t be thought of without damaging ourselves.”

“So,” she said, “you’re saying we can use stupidity to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s not so bad, to cultivate the minds of animals.”

“It’s what our people do,” he said, not meaning orcs or eladrin, but followers of druidic knowledge from the dawn of time, before the higher races had evolved.

She smiled. The scar across her lips was livid in the dim light. “That’s a lofty reason to have no plan at all. Eat,” she said.

He chose a leg from the bowl of capon parts and brought it to his mouth, wondering if she could see his heavy teeth, the long tearing incisors, and if so, whether she’d grown accustomed to them. “Lord Themiranth and the others, I’m sure they were full of plans. Scholars of the Far Realm. Mind slaves now. After this, we won’t think or talk when we fight against these creatures. Instinct only. Kick me if I have a thought.” He stuck the leg bone in his mouth and snapped it off.

“I’ll kick you anyway,” she said.

After they finished, she left him for a few hours to rest. In a lighted alcove off the main chamber, he found a mirror set into the wall. Standing before it, he unbuttoned the remnants of his father’s shirt and slipped it off, put it aside. He poured water from a crystal ewer over a linen towel and used it to clean his body, wipe away the mud that obscured the tattoos on his hairy arms and chest.

Like all shapeshifters, he wore only leather, which absorbed into his skin during the transformation, as did the bone of his totem stick. Doubtless Astriana at that moment was dressing herself in armor, choosing her swords and knives and spears, but he couldn’t use any of that. Instead he stared at himself in the dim glass, while in his mind he allowed himself to climb the curving helixes of evolution away from his finished nature. These were the shapes he would take with him on this adventure, and he moved through them in the new air of the Feywild, to see if anything was different in this world.

He watched his jaw lengthen, and his neck grow thick and slope down toward his shoulders, which swelled first and then receded as he sank down to all fours-a wolf, the totem of his clan. It was his most comfortable shape, but he didn’t stop there. Instead he increased the pace of transformation, while in his mind he scampered up the ladders: the coarse hair thickened on his forearms turned into plumage, while at the same time a web of skin stretched from his shoulders to his wrists, and his jaw turned cruel and sharp. And then his feathers receded into patterned, oily skin, and the scales spread from his nose as his legs fused together and his arms clung to his sides, and he dropped down before the mirror in a coiling heap.

But he was curled up asleep in his wolf’s shape when she returned. She was dressed in the war garb of a shiere knight in the Summer Court of Queen Tiandra, an armor of overlapping scales, alternating blue and green, made from carapaces of insects, lighter and tougher than steel, and so tight and fine that they covered her body like a second skin. Her hair was brushed back from her face and held at her nape with a silver ring. She wore ridged gauntlets of silver mail and carried a mace in her left hand, while a long scimitar hung at her waist. In the dark alcove, her body seemed to glow.

“Time to move,” she said, and he got to his feet and stretched, lowering his shoulders, letting his tongue loll out between his teeth.

He followed her through the studded door and down through a warren of deserted ward rooms and low-ceilinged corridors. In ordinary times, this place was full of life, the borderland between the Feydark and the surface world, where the fomorians of Harrowhame and the eladrin rangers of the woods maintained a queasy peace. This nest of warriors was now empty, but when Haggar and Astriana reached the endless staircases that led deeper into the guts of the rock, they found them packed with refugees, goblins and cyclopses and fomorians all crowding toward the surface, their possessions on their backs. And in their terror, all these pale citizens of the underworld had forgotten their differences, though they came from a dozen clans and races and competing powers. They waited in long lines so that they could pile on upward toward the sunlight, which many of them had never seen.

Hunchbacked women with bloated hands and faces carried their children on their backs, and they shrank against the damp, black walls to allow Haggar and Astriana to pass, the last guardians of the Living Gate. Occasionally they touched their foreheads or else murmured some vestigial token of respect before they bent to their burdens again and resumed their place in line. Now the wolf bounded ahead to clear the path, the long staircase that was lit not by torches or burning chemicals, but by glowing crystals in the rock, which shone blue and green and purple as they climbed down.

In time they came to Harrowhame itself, the dismal fortress of King Bronnor, built in an enormous cavern of quarried salt. They came out suddenly onto the salt floor, where the stone and iron ramparts rose above them. Here at least were light and soldiers also, the myrmidons of the fomorian king. From the citadel came the sounds of drumbeats and brazen trumpets, which echoed from the crystal walls. But the gates were closed, and there was no guard to acknowledge them as they crossed the salt plain under the battlements to continue their descent.

They entered a gigantic fissure in the rock, where the ground sloped downward. And here the world changed. Above, nearer the surface, the rock was cut, quarried, and dead. Here it was still alive, growing in a landscape as varied as any forest or mountainside. They climbed down through glowing forests of mushrooms. Animals lived here, snakes and lizards and rodents of all kinds, but also tiny deer and goats perched upon the rocks, and even a few pale birds. Flowering vines and creepers covered the distant walls, and hung from the stalactites above their heads. The air was lighter, richer here, and breezes wafted through the endless caverns, as if freshened from below.