Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

As they made good time along the current, Jisanne told him her story, and he shared his own. She didn’t seem at all astonished to hear of Praetor Yvoluk’s cruelty or how the fickle people of Balic had so easily turned on him. They had done the same to her. Jisanne explained how ancient sorcerer-kings had abused dark powers, draining the world year after year, spell after spell, war after war.

“Defiling magic did this to Athas-and now I have used it to bring us back to a time before the world was destroyed.” She shook her head in disgust at herself. “Ironic, isn’t it? In order to visit an Athas untainted by the parasitical magic, I need to drain more life force from the land.”

“Either way, we are here.” Koram rowed as hard as he could, carrying them far down the watercourse. They traveled for many leagues before the magic weakened. As Jisanne felt it fade, she urged him to pull the boat to the shallows.

With a wrenching disappointment, they watched the green shore and blue current curl and evaporate, changing from a verdant paradise to a barren brown wasteland. The Athas Koram was used to seeing. He felt suddenly hollow and lost, and he had to bite back a bitter cry.

The small boat ground ashore and fell apart with the sudden weight of age, disintegrating into dry and ancient splinters. The two found themselves in the rocks on the edge of a bone-dry canyon. “We’ll have to walk from here. Arkhold isn’t far,” Jisanne said.

He hesitated, looking around at the stark rocks and dry desert. “I did not intend to stay.”

She looked uncertain. “You saved my life. I prefer being alone, and I never said I wanted company… But stay and rest. You can find your own path tomorrow.”

Together, they trudged back to her skeletal ship, the dry docks, and the silt-buried old harbor city. He gave a gruff answer. “No place else to be.”

Dust-shrouded Arkhold was dead, empty… and peaceful. When she and Koram reached her makeshift home aboard Horizon Finder, Jisanne fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. It took days for her to recover from the magic she had used, and so Koram did not leave. He tended her, brought her food and water, and kept watch against the ever-present dangers of the desert.

She could not shake the disheartened realization of how willingly she had turned to defiling magic to summon the past centuries of Athas. When possible, she would use her own blood to work the spell, drawing upon willingly surrendered life energy to trigger the crystal. A spell could be more permanent if not forced and stolen-but she had to use what she could. Jisanne knew she would do it again. Every moment she experienced in that long-lost period was worth the sacrifice, even if she had to steal the energy from other living creatures. It could rapidly become too easy…

The gladiator from Balic wanted nothing from her, put no obligations on her, posed no threat. She had come to this place intentionally, hiding from her past; the other strangers she had encountered here were greedy, driven, dangerous. Koram, though, had cut himself off from the strings that bound him to his city and he had let the hot winds of circumstance blow him wherever they wished. And they had brought him to her.

While she continued to recover, Koram trudged off into the rugged land nearby. He returned a day later with three large iguanas he had caught, a pouch of leathery-shelled turtle eggs, and several wrinkled gourds that held water. If not for him, Jisanne doubted she could have survived.

For his own part, he also seemed to be healing just by staying with her in the empty quiet. The two kept their distance from each other, kept their silence, but eventually they talked more, surprised to find how much they were alike. Though the man carried no happiness within him, at least he seemed to find an inner contentment being there. In the evenings he would sit with her, and gradually opened up, talking more and more.

“I had to shut out all of my pain and anger just to survive in the arena. But I don’t like to be so empty. When you showed me the past, you made me see how healthy this world once was… and could be again. Maybe my life can become whole again, as well.” He hung his head. The bristles of hair had begun to regrow from his shaved scalp. “I will hold onto that hope.”

With a wistful sigh, Jisanne thought of the glorious, vibrant past. “If we could return there, I would turn my back on all of Athas without a second’s regret… the way you turned away from Balic.”

Koram made a rumbling sound in his chest. “I would do it in a second.”

The peace could last only so long.

Just as the first flames of dawn scorched the Sea of Silt, a bellowing voice echoed through Arkhold. “Gladiator Koram, come out and meet your master-and your death! The smell of your treachery makes you easy to follow.”

Belowdecks in the petrified old sailing ship, Koram recognized the voice, a sound that had come from beyond the grave. He leaped off his pallet and grabbed his sword, but did not have time to strap on his armor. Koram said to Jisanne, “Hide here. He doesn’t want you.”

She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. “Who is it? Who tracked you here?”

“Praetor Yvoluk. He survived somehow. I suppose a soul as twisted as his cannot be easily crushed.” He hefted his ivory-and-bronze sword. “If I kill him, I’ll be back.”

Jisanne took out the navigation crystal, drew a deep breath. “I am strong enough to use magic again. Let me help you fight him.”

“That would be a waste of your life. Yvoluk has already taken my wife and son. That is enough.” He stalked off and climbed the ladder out of the hold. He no longer felt empty and aimless. If he was going to face a hated enemy again, at least now he had a reason to fight.

He did not hear Jisanne whisper under her breath, “And I lost my sister and her whole family because I wasn’t there to protect them.”

Emerging onto the open deck, Koram saw a silt dromond bearing Balic’s flag. Powered by a psionic helm, the large ship hovered above the dust, separated by less than a meter from Horizon Finder’s starboard bow. In the fleet maneuvers of Dictator Andropinis, Koram had seen these fearsome ships glide across the desert like giant sharks in the sky.

Smug, Yvoluk stood on the dromond’s bow next to the thri-kreen tracker, the nihilist philosopher who had also fought in the Criterion; the chittering thri-kreen bobbed his rounded head, his faceted eyes gleaming in the bright daylight. “You see, Praetor-I told you I could track him.” In his segmented limbs, the thri-kreen held the rumpled sash of Andropinis that Koram had left behind in his cell. Five more Balic soldiers stood behind them, armed and ready to fight.

When the tracker saw Koram’s angry scowl at the betrayal, he shouted to the other ship. “It makes no difference. If we’d been pitted against each other, you would have killed me or I’d have killed you. It is nothing personal.”

The words were dry as they came out of Koram’s mouth. “I won’t hold any sympathy or any grudge against you. My grudge is with Yvoluk.”

The praetor’s laugh sounded like splintering wood. “And my grudge is with you, Koram. You cast me to my death, but magic cushioned my fall. Unluckily for the beast giants, they have a strong life force. Using it to power my magic was as easy as poking a hole in a wineskin. I was nearly buried among the corpses I had slain.” Behind him, the five warriors drew their blades and bows, ready to attack, but Yvoluk motioned them back. He seemed proud of what he had done.

“I crawled out of the zone of death just as Dictator Andropinis cast his own spell from the wall above. He unleashed such terrible magic that he felled dozens of giants, not to mention several hundred cowardly soldiers with a single spell. He called up a lava storm in the estuary, enough to send Skull Wearer and his minions fleeing. I barely scaled the wall myself.” The praetor shook his head like a disappointed parent. “But you had already run away, Koram. You gave us quite a chase.”