Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

The world changed.

Ruin

The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.

He realized he’d had that thought before. His memory was playing tricks. Or the scrumpy was.

Which was the point here.

He stared up at the barmaid as she swished past. Her skirt was made in dark, muted colors-had it been so earlier? The woman favored him with a sidelong glance, her expression somewhere between wise and malicious. He turned his head to watch her tend to a pair of tables by the fire.

Finally she made it back over to him. “Out of money yet?”

“I don’t know,” he answered with unfortunate honesty. “Out of scrumpy yet?”

Her laugh held a curious edge. “We’ll never run out of scrumpy when there’s the likes of you in the world.”

“I wanted… more.” He wasn’t sure if he meant more than scrumpy, or more than what life had given him in the world. The mansions of memory had grown crowded in his head, haunted by regrets.

“You seek what does not belong to you.”

Those words, so familiar. And had she just spoken Kyrie, or another tongue from too long ago when he was young and the world was colored with hope?

Horn peered closer. Her eyes were green. The color of the inside of a lime. “It’s you,” he said. “You healed me once. You threatened me once.”

Now her smile bordered on joy. Around them, the reeking, smoky tavern seemed to recede into abstract distance. “And I have come for that which I have been cheated of.”

Horn slipped his hand inside his vest, touching the ivory card box in its silk sling. He drew that box out for the first time in… how long? There wasn’t any way to be sure. The path of his decay had been as gradual as it had been inexorable, since drawing the second card.

The ivory card box lay in his hand. Malevolent. Powerful. The old monk’s great joke played upon him.

Fate.

“This was always yours, was it not?”

With a nod, she said, “And you have held it far beyond your time.”

He extended his hand. “Here. Take it.”

“Three times you said you’d draw. Three cards to chart a path through life.” She leaned close, her eyes sparking. “Draw the third, little man, and return to your life.”

Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all.

The box came open easily enough. The cards slipped into his hand. The pasteboard again seemed slick and heavy. Horn considered simply tossing them into the air, as if they might fly away like little birds. Instead, vaguely aware of the clink of tankards and the murmur of voices, he thumbed a third card from the middle.

Conclusions

Horn had grown into an old man of no little power and persuasion. The hills of his birth suited him fine these days. Like Feather had so long ago, he picked a boy every few years who showed a certain, special spark and took the child aside for training. The tribe traded in sellswords raised to the purpose, but their true power was in the quiet thread of wizards spawned down the generations.

Some nights he sat vigil in the high caverns. Some days he hunted alongside the young men with their tagalong brothers and cousins, for the sheer joy of the chase and the kill. Some evenings he found a high rock and looked down upon the plains that led toward the coast, and recalled Purpure, High Canton, the Lost Island of Ee, and so many other places his feet had touched.

But always he went back to his hut. There Margaine, his green-eyed foreign wife, awaited him after her own days of seeing to the sick or wounded, and teaching the little girls.

It was enough.

As for the card he’d never turned, it hung on the wall of his hut in a leather bag. Some nights it twitched, or even glowed-magic trying to escape. If he’d not been a wizard of some power in his own right, he would have been overwhelmed years before.

The barmaid had laughed when he’d palmed the card and slipped it into his vest. Then she’d left with him. The ivory card box remained behind, innocent trap for the next man. Nothing more had been said about cheating, or what belonged to whom. He was never sure if she retained the aspect of the Raven Queen, but Margaine’s eyes always sparkled that curious color.

Some day he would turn the card. Some day he would know what fate he had removed from the Deck of Many Things.

Just not today.

Today, his path was his own. Today, the mansions of his memory gleamed once more. Today, he would not flip the last card.