Robert Salvatore: The Ghost King

Their promises of fealty and riches rang strangely discordant to Jarlaxle at that moment. He would find her, or would try, at least. Of that, he had no doubt.

But to Jarlaxle’s surprise, he had no intention of taking a copper for his efforts, and wanted no promise of fealty from Drizzt Do’Urden. Maybe something else compelled him then.

She felt it like a heartbeat beneath her bare feet, the land alive, the rhythm of life itself, and it compelled her to dance. And though she had never been a dancer, her movements were fluid and graceful, a perfect expression of the springtime forest into which she had been placed. And though her hip had been wounded badly—forever wounded, they had all believed—she felt no pain when she lifted her leg high, or leaped and spun in an inspired pirouette.

She came upon Regis sitting in a small field of wildflowers, looking out at the ripples on a small pond. She offered a smile and a laugh, and danced around him.

“Are we dead?” he asked.

Catti-brie had no answer. There was the world out there, somewhere beyond the trees of the springtime forest, and there was … here. This existence. This pocket of paradise, an expression of what had been from the goddess Mielikki, a gift given to her and to Regis, and to all Toril.

“Why are we here?” the halfling, who was no longer tormented by shadowy, huddled monsters, asked.

Because they had lived a good life, Catti-brie knew. Because this was Mielikki’s gift—to Drizzt as much as to them—an expression of wondrous memory from the goddess who knew that the world had changed forever.

Catti-brie danced away, singing, and though she had never been a singer, her voice sounded with perfect pitch and tone, another effect of the enchanted wood.

They remained on Toril, though they didn’t know it, in a small pocket of an eternal springtime forest amidst a world growing dark and cold. They were of that place, as surely as, and even more so, than Cadderly had been of Spirit Soaring. To leave would be to invite the nightmares and the stupor of abject confusion.

For any others to enter would invite unto them variations of the same.

For the glen was the expression of Mielikki, a place of possibilities, of what could be and not of what was. There were no monsters there, though animals abounded. And the gift was a private one and not to be shared, a secret place, the goddess Mielikki’s indelible mark, Mielikki’s fitting monument, on a world that had moved in a new direction.

Two piles of rocks.

Two cairns, one holding Regis and one holding Catti-brie. Just over a month earlier, Drizzt and Catti-brie had been on the road to Silverymoon, and despite the trouble with the Weave, it had been a joyous journey. For more than eight years, Drizzt had felt complete, had felt as if all the joys had been doubled and all the pain halved as he danced through his life arm-inarm with that wonderful woman who had never shown him anything less than honesty and compassion and love.

Then it was gone, stolen from him, and in a way he simply could not comprehend. He tried to take solace in telling himself that her pain had ended, that she was at peace—with Mielikki, obviously, given the vision of the unicorn. She had been suffering those last tendays, after all.

But it didn’t work, and he could only shake his head and fight to hold back his tears, and hold back his desire to throw himself across that cold and hard cairn assembled in a decorated lower chamber of Mithral Hall.

He looked to the smaller stone pile and remembered his journey with Regis to Luskan, then thought back much farther, to their first days together in Icewind Dale.

The drow dropped his hand on Guenhwyvar, whom he had called for the ceremony. It was fitting that the panther was there, and if he had known any way to accomplish it, it would have been fitting to have Wulfgar there. Drizzt resolved then to go to Icewind Dale to inform his barbarian friend face-to-face.

Then it all broke. The notion of telling Wulfgar finally cracked the stoic posture of Drizzt Do’Urden. He began to sob, his shoulders bobbing, and he felt himself sinking toward the floor, as if the stones were rising up to bury him—and how he wished they would!

Bruenor grabbed him, and cried with him.

Drizzt shook himself out of it in short order, and stood tall with a cold grimace, and such a look it was that it chilled everyone in the room.

“It’s goin’ to be all right, elf,” Bruenor whispered.

Drizzt only stared straight ahead with cold, hard, unfocused anger.

He knew he would never be the same; he knew that the inner growling would not diminish with the passing of days, of tendays, of months, or years, or decades perhaps. There was no shining and hopeful light at the end of that dark passage.

Not this time.

When Regis wanted to find something he could use as a fishing line, he found it. When he searched for a hook and pole, those, too, were readily discovered. And when he pulled his first knucklehead trout from the small pond, the halfling gasped in surprise and wondered if perhaps he was in Icewind Dale!

But no, he knew, for even if that strange forest was located in that land it was not of that land.

Scrimshaw tools were not far away, and Regis was not surprised to find them. He wanted them and they were there, and so he began to wonder if the place itself was a dream, a grand illusion.

Heaven or hell?

Would he wake up?

Did he want to?

He spent his days fishing and at his scrimshaw, and he was warm and happy. He ate meals more delicious than anything he had ever known, and went to sleep with his belly full and dreamed beautiful dreams. And the song of Catti-brie filled the forest air, though he saw her only in fleeting moments, far away, leaping onto sunbeams and moonbeams as if they were ladders to the heavens.

Dancing, always dancing. The forest was alive through her movements and her song, and the songs of birds accompanied her gaily in the sunshine, and with haunting beauty in the soft darkness of the night.

He was not unhappy and not frustrated, but many times, Regis, for the sake of his own curiosity, tried to walk in a straight line, to veer neither left nor right a single step in an attempt to find the end of the forest.

But every time, somehow, inexplicably, he found himself back where he had started, on the banks of a small pond.

He could only put his hands on his hips and laugh—and retrieve his fishing pole.

And so it went, and time became meaningless, the days and the seasons mattering not at all.

It snowed in the forest, but it was not cold, and the flowers did not stop blooming, and Catti-brie, the magical soul of Mielikki’s expression, did not slow her dance nor quiet her song.

It was her place, her forest, and there, she knew happiness and serenity and peace of mind, and if challenges came against the forest, she would meet them. Regis knew all of that, too, and knew that he was a guest there, welcome forevermore, but not as intricately tied to the land as was his companion.

And so the halfling took it upon himself to become a caretaker of sorts. He cut a garden and tended it to perfection. He built himself a home within a hillside, with a round door and a cozy hearth, with shelves of wondrous scrimshaw he had sculpted and plates and cups of wood, and a table always set …

… for guests who never came.