Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

Periodically the seal grows weak, and must be reinscribed. The quill that may inscribe the seal is kept far away, in a location known only to the Knights of Kul, the dragonborn elite given the Duty of Moidan’s Quill after the great victory at the Bridge of Iban Ja…

“That’s you, isn’t it?” Remy said.

Biri-Daar nodded. “Me, and my ancestors stretching back perhaps a hundred generations. I am given a most sacred trust.”

“We have the quill now?”

“No.” Biri-Daar looked out over the Crow Road, where shapes danced in the gloaming as the sun fell into the mountains behind them and the sky darkened through violet and toward black in the distance ahead. “Moidan’s Quill was first held by Bahamut himself. He inscribed the symbols that hold the Abyss bottled in the bowels of the dungeons below Karga Kul. Never have the dragonborn guardians of the quill failed to present it when the seal grew faint and needed reinscription. I will not be the first.”

Remy worked out in his head what he was already assuming to be the truth. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“Yes,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“How did the Inverted Keep get… inverted?” Remy asked. Also he wanted to ask what were those shapes dancing at the edge of the darkness ahead of them, but they were far enough not to worry about just yet… and in any case could be just illusions born of the road’s bizarre origins… and the story Biri-Daar told was too fascinating. Remy couldn’t imagine listening to anything else…

There was a jerk around his waist, and Remy flew off his horse and hit the ground hard. The impact jarred something loose in his shoulder, and also in his mind. He had been ensorcelled! Something…

The thing wrapped around his waist was a vine. Remy dug his heels into the earth and found his knife. He slashed at the vine until it snapped, and fell backward against the embankment of the Crow Road.

Suddenly the earth around him was alive with the vines-no, they were roots. And one of the great old trees at the edge of the road was moving. “Treant!” shouted Lucan. “A blackroot!”

Treants, those legendary guardians of the forests, were as vulnerable as other kinds of life to the undead transformations that occurred along the Crow Road. This one moved with the sound of crackling bark and the whisper of long-dead leaves that did not fall from its branches. The roots binding Remy dragged him toward it. “Behind it,” he called out as the rest of the group leaped off their horses. “There’s something behind it!”

From either side of the treant, sword wraiths appeared, their blades catching the moonlight. Remy struggled to draw his own sword but his arm was bound fast. All he could do was saw with his knife at the roots that drew him ever closer to the treant’s great fists, which would pound him into a bloody paste in the undergrowth.

If the sword wraiths didn’t kill him first.

Keverel was the first to reach him. Forbidden by his oaths to use bladed weapons, he lent his weight to Remy’s struggle against the roots, while raising his holy symbol high with one hand and calling out. “Back, spawn of the Shadowfell! By Erathis, you shall not have this boy!”

The wraiths paused and flitted smoothly away from Keverel, keeping Remy between them and the cleric. “We will have either him or what he carries, holy man,” one of them said. “Or perhaps both.”

“And perhaps we bring you along as well. The Shadowfell has delights for the mortal who denies himself worldly pleasures,” the other added. One of Lucan’s arrows passed right through it, wisps of black the only sign of its passage until it thunked into the trunk of the treant. Rumbling, the undead tree spirit took a step toward Remy.

Paelias landed next to Remy, sword drawn and ready to engage the wraiths. “You surely draw a lot of attention, youngling,” the eladrin said. His sword flicked out and was parried by one of the wraiths. “Lucan! Even the odds, mind?”

From the wraiths’ side, Lucan attacked, driving one of them into the other. Both glided out of his reach, but Paelias was watching the shadows and was ready when the first emerged from the shadowglide. His sword struck home, bringing a miserable screech from the wraith, whose return stroke caught only Paelias’s blade. Pressing his advantage, the eladrin struck again, and with a trailing scream the swordwraith vanished. Lucan awaited the other’s return from its shadowglide, looking hard for any trace of moongleam on its blade.

Biri-Daar thudded to the ground next to Keverel as the blackroot treant took another slow, implacable step forward. “I am loath to do this,” she said.

Landing next to her with flint and steel in one hand and an oil-soaked torch in the other, Kithri said, “If you let it squash Remy, it will probably go away.”

“Life is never that easy,” Biri-Daar said. She took a running step and leaped, new twin katars from Crow Fork Market reversed in her hands to use as improvised climbing axes. Below her, Kithri ignited her torch.

Lucan and Paelias backed slowly toward each other, keeping Remy and Keverel in the corner of their fields of vision. “You didn’t accidentally hit both of them?” Lucan asked.

Paelias shook his head. “Just the one. Might have killed it. Or whatever it is you do to finish a wraith.”

Then the second swordwraith appeared, all the way on the other side of Keverel, emerging from the shadows cast when Kithri lit her torch. She reared back and threw it at a knot of branches halfway up the treant’s trunk, on the side opposite where Biri-Daar slowly worked her way up to the suggestion of a face in the dead branches of its crown. It swatted at her but could not dislodge her, and the torch caught its bark on fire. Immediately the treant devoted all of its attention to putting out the flames; using the distraction, Biri-Daar reached the base of the crown, where its ears would have been if the treant had been human. Instead of ears it featured a knotted hole on either side, with a multitude of tiny branches sprouting like whiskers above and around it.

On the ground, the swordwraith’s blade flashed out to strike an unwary Kithri, who was striking flint over another torch-but with a clang, Keverel flung out his mace at the last moment, deflecting the blow. His protective blessing wavered and the swordwraith turned on him, slashing open his mail shirt and the flesh underneath.

Her torch lit, Kithri swung it around and swept it through the denser shadow of the swordwraith’s head. The flame bloomed up and down its body and its screech pierced the night, spurred to a higher pitch when a leaping Paelias landed next to the prone Keverel and dispatched it with a stroke of his sword.

All of them looked up at Biri-Daar then, as she drew a deep breath and put her beaked mouth to the blackroot treant’s ear.

She did not want to use fire. She did not want to burn the forest or destroy the spirits that lived therein. But she did very much want this blackroot treant to find death, to return to the soil that had given it life. All of that time spent with elves and rangers had made her too sensitive, no doubt-but whatever the cause, when Biri-Daar unleashed her dragonbreath into the knothole at the side of the blackroot’s head, she did so with more pity than anger.

Flames flared out through the great rotting holes of its eyes and mouth, roaring along with the agonized roar the blackroot made. Blindly it grasped at Biri-Daar, found her, flung her away into the trees-but too late, as the flames caught the dead leaves of its crown and exploded into a great mushroom of fire. The roots holding Remy spasmed, twisted, and fell limp. Kithri sawed them away from his legs with a knife. “Lucan! Paelias! Find Biri-Daar!” she yelled over the sound of the flames.