R. Salvatore - Bastion of Darkness

In the face of such simple and indisputable logic, the wizard ran out of arguments, so he went to the campsite, muttering every step of the way, and began packing their provisions. “Cold up there,” he mumbled repeatedly, and unhappily, though he didn’t disagree with the ranger’s decision that they set out again on their way.

Before they ever got the pegasus readied, though, Desdemona gave a long mew, announcing the return of the missing ghost.

“Good that ye’ve returned!” Belexus beamed, trotting to the spot before the descending spirit. “We were just about to leave.”

“Why?”

“Ye been gone a long while, me friend.”

Del regarded the ranger curiously, not quite understanding. “I said I would go to find the peak,” he replied at length, as if that should explain everything.

“So ye did say, but we were thinking ye’d check back with us at day’s end,” the ranger tried to explain, though he was beginning to catch on that he and this ghost were not reasoning along the same lines.

“Why?”

“Oh, never mind,” Ardaz interrupted, hopping between the two, impatient for news. Ardaz saw it, if Belexus did not: the spirit’s calm demeanor hinted at success. “The peak. The peak. Oh, did you find the peak?”

DelGiudice pointed to the northwest. “Not so far,” he explained.

Belexus moved as if to give the spirit a hug, but backed off immediately, remembering their unsettling first encounter.

“But it’s hard to see,” Del explained. “You have to approach at just the right angle, or all it looks like is rocks. Except from that way,” he added quickly, pointing straight north. “From that way, it looks like a shark’s fin on an ocean swell.”

“Ye’re sure it’s the peak?” Belexus asked, his excitement ebbing as doubts began to creep in.

“From the south it is,” Del replied happily. “An old man, just as you drew. But only from the south. Come along, I will show you; we can get there before the sun goes low if Calamus is swift of wing.”

The ranger and the wizard went at their packing with vigor. “Oh, come along, Des,” Ardaz called repeatedly to the sleeping feline. “And do hurry, for a grand day it is! It is!”

The wizard stopped in midpirouette and considered the cat carefully. “Grand?” he asked. “I call it a grand day, though I’m about to walk into the lair of a great dragon? Oh, silly me!”

Desdemona spat at him and turned away.

Ardaz shrugged and finished his work.

They were airborne soon after, the wizard and ranger and the still, sleeping cat, atop mighty Calamus, following Del’s speeding spirit through ravines and around great jags of stone. They had to stop several times so that the ranger and wizard could warm their bodies, but, as the spirit had predicted, they came in sight of the mountain-and there was no doubt that it was indeed the mountain-shortly after noon.

They circled it once, then put down on a lower ledge, having found no obvious entrance of any sort.

“Well, if this is the place-and I do not doubt my sister-” Ardaz reasoned, “then the dragon has been inside a while, I daresay, and the snow and the wind have apparently sealed the wyrm away. Not that that’s a bad thing!”

“But not a good thing for those meaning to get inside,” Belexus replied. “I’m not even for guessing where we might start looking for a door.”

“I can get in,” Del said suddenly, and both his companions turned on him.

“I thought that nonliving matter presented a barrier even to you,” Ardaz reasoned. “Or why haven’t you fallen under the ground, after all?”

“Fall?” Del echoed, as if the concept itself seemed foreign to him. “Oh, yes, of course. I cannot fall, for gravity has no hold on me,” he explained. “But you are correct in that I can touch stones and the like. They’re more dense than your own bodies, you see, and so I cannot pass through them.”

“Then how’re ye meaning to get in?” Belexus asked.

“Cracks in the wall, of course,” Del answered.

The ranger turned to inspect the stone, but saw no obvious cracks.

“You have to look closer,” the spirit explained. “They’re there, I know, and I can get through them.”

“It seems that our meeting was good fortune indeed,” the ranger said.

“Lead on,” Ardaz bade.

Del did just that, his form becoming two-dimensional, a most disturbing sight, and then slipping into the stone wall easily. He came back soon after, announcing that the particular crack was a dead end, but he tried again, and then again, and over and over, until finally, he did not return so quickly.

He had come to an inner chamber, a tunnel winding through the mountain. To his relief, and surprise, he found that he could see as readily in the dark as in the light. It made sense when he thought about it, for he wasn’t actually here, in this physical place, for he wasn’t actually corporeal at all. Darkness was an obstacle to physical eyes, but not to the entity that Del had become.

He considered the tunnel before him, its arching ceiling and fairly smooth walls. If he could only find a way for his friends to get in, it would be wide enough for them, he knew. But which way was out, and which deeper in?

On a mere guess, Del went left, floating swiftly along, until he came to a wall, again with cracks through which he could maneuver. He found that the wall was not so thick, only a foot or so, coming out of the mountain under an overhang of rock not so far from where he had left his friends. “Belexus could knock through that,” Del reasoned. “Or Ardaz certainly could.” The spirit smiled as he remembered the first time he had met the bumbling wizard, the time Ardaz had used a bolt of lightning to remove a huge rock from the meadow at Brisenballas. How the wizard had hopped about, his fingers burned by the stroke!

But the spirit reminded himself that Belexus was in rather a bit of a hurry, and he filed the memory away for another time. “Not yet,” he decided, and he went back through the crack, back into the tunnel. Before he brought Belexus and Ardaz to the spot and got their hopes up, he thought it wise to make sure that he was leading them correctly. And so he went the other way down the tunnel, past the spot where he had first entered, and farther on into the mountain. Down and down he traveled, the corridor widening and narrowing, sometimes with a low ceiling, and other times covered by long and high shafts, so that there was no ceiling visible. He came to one chamber filled by dark water, which he merely floated over, and was relieved to see that there was enough of a ledge for his friends to get by.

Then came a steep, descending slope, and down Del went. He sensed something different about this area, and in tuning his other senses, found that the air was warmer and that a subtle, rhythmic vibration was all about him.

As he neared the bottom of the slope, he understood the rhythm to be the breathing of a dragon-a huge, sleeping dragon.

Now he moved more cautiously, though he could rationally tell himself that this wyrm, however magnificent, could not hurt him. There was something in the air, beyond the warmth and the snores, some tangible aura, inciting terror. Del tried to tell himself that it was just his expectations of what a dragon might be that were making him tentative, but soon he came to understand that it was indeed something more than that, something very real.

He went through another few passageways, a veritable maze now, though the sound and the heat proved a ready guide. Then he turned a final corner and came into a chamber, and such a chamber as poor Del had never imagined! All those past legends of dragons flooded back to him now, ignited by the incredible scene: the wealth, the jewels, and mostly, the great wyrm itself, fifty feet long though it was curled in a ball. If Del had been a corporeal being, needing to draw breath, he knew that he would not be able to do so. If he had been a corporeal being, if he had made even the slightest sound, the dragon would have awakened and he would have been destroyed. It was that simple, that cut and dried. He would have been destroyed, with no other possibilities plausible.