Dragons - Worlds Afire

If They Ever Happened Upon My Lair R. A. Salvatore

“Fill the buckets, grab a fish,” muttered Ringo Heffenstone, a dwarf with exceptionally broad shoulders, even for a dwarf, and a large, square head. Ringo was quite an exception among the group of dwarves who had ventured out into the mud lands of northeastern Vaasa in that he wore no beard. A gigantic handlebar mustache, yes, but no beard. An unfortunate encounter with a gnomish fire-rocket a few years before back in the hills of northwestern Damara, the southern and more civilized neighbor to Vaasa, had left a patch of scarred skin on Ringo’s chin from which no hairs would sprout.

It was a sad scar for a dwarf, to be sure, but with his typical pragmatism and stoicism, Ringo had just shrugged it off and redesigned his facial hair appropriately. Nothing ever really bothered Ringo. Certainly he could grump and mutter as well as the next dwarf about present indignities, such as his current position as water mule for the troop of dwarves, but in the end everything rolled out far and wide from him, eventually toppling off his broad shoulders.

He came to the bank of the pond, his friends a few hundred feet behind him tipping beers and recounting their more raucous adventures with ever-increasing volume.

A burst of howling laughter made Ringo cringe and look to the south. They weren’t far from Palishchuk, a city of half-orcs. They could have been there already, in fact, sleeping comfortably in a tavern. The half-orcs would gladly have taken their coin and invited them in. But though the half-orcs were no enemies of the dwarves, the troop had already decided they would avoid the Palishchukians if at all possible. Ringo and the others didn’t much like the way half-orcs smelled, and even though those particular half-orcs acted far more in accordance with their human heritage than that of their orc ancestors, they still carried the peculiar aroma of their kind.

Another burst of laughter turned Ringo back to the encampment. As several of his drunken friends unsuccessfully shushed those howling loudest, Ringo shook his head.

He turned back to the pond, a vernal pool that formed every spring and summer as the frozen tundra softened. He noted the movement of some fish, flitting in and out of the shadows to the side, and shook his head again, amazed that they could survive in such an environment. If they could live through the extended Vaasan winter, in the shadow of the Great Glacier itself, how could he bring himself to catch one?

“Bah, but ye’re safe, little fishies,” the dwarf said to them. “Ye keep winning against this place and old Ringo ain’t got no heart for killin’ ye and eatin’ ye.”

He reached up and picked a piece of his dinner, a large bread crumb, from the left handlebar of his mustache. He’d been saving it for later, but he glanced at it and tossed it to the fish instead.

The dwarf grinned as the fish broke the surface, inhaling the crumb. Several others came up, making plopping sounds and creating interconnected rings of ripples.

Ringo watched the spectacle for a few moments then picked up one of his buckets and moved down to the water’s edge. He knelt in the mud and turned the bucket sidelong in the shallows to fill it.

Just as he started to tip the bucket back upright, a wave washed in and sent water overflowing the pail, soaking the dwarf’s hands and hairy forearms.

“Bah!” Ringo snorted, falling back from the freezing water.

He fell into a sitting position, facing the lake, and curled his legs to get away from the cold wash of the encroaching wave. His gaze went out to the water, where more rings widened, their eastern edges rolling in toward him.

Ringo scratched his head. It was a small pond, and little wind blew. They weren’t near any hills, where a rock or a tree might have tumbled from on high. He had seen no shadow from a falling bird.

“Waves?”

The dwarf stood up and put his hands on his hips as the water calmed. A glance to the side told him that the fish were long gone.

The water stilled, and the hair on the back of Ringo’s neck tingled with nervous anticipation.

“Hurry it up with that water!” one of the dwarves from the camp called.

Ringo knew he should shout a warning or turn and run back to the camp, but he stood there staring at the still water of the dark pool. The meager sunlight filtered through the clouds in the west, casting lines of lighter hue on the glassy surface.

He knew he was being watched. He knew he should reach around and unfasten his heavy wooden shield and his battle-axe. He was a warrior, after all, hardened by years of adventure and strife.

But he stood there staring. His legs would not answer his call to retreat to the camp; his arms would not respond to his silent cries to retrieve his weapon and shield.

He saw a greater darkness beneath the flat water some distance out from shore, a blacker spot in the deep gray. The water showed no disturbance, but Ringo instinctively recognized that the blacker form was rising from the depths.

So smoothly that they didn’t even form a ripple, a pair of horns poked up through the surface thirty feet out from the bank. The horns continued to climb into the air, five feet… seven… and between them appeared the black crown of a reptilian head.

Ringo began to tremble. His hands slid from his hips and hung loosely at his sides.

He understood what was coming, but his mind would not accept it, would not allow him to shout, run, or grab his weapon, futile as he knew that weapon to be.

The horns climbed higher, and the black head slipped gently from the water beneath them. Ringo saw the ridge of sharp scales, black as a mineshaft, framing the beast’s head in armor finer than any a dwarf master smith might ever craft. Then he saw the eyes, yellow and lizardlike, and the beast paused.

The awful eyes saw him, too, he knew, and had been aware of him long before the beast had shown itself. They bored into him, framing him with their own inner light that shone as distinctively as the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern.

“Hurry it up with that water!” came the call again. “I’m wantin’ to drink and pee afore the night comes on.”

He wanted to answer.

“Ringo?”

“Heft-the-Stone, ye dolt!” another dwarf chimed in, using the nickname they had given to their principal pack mule.

The playful insult never registered in Ringo’s senses, for his thoughts were locked on those awful reptilian eyes.

Run! Ringo silently screamed, for himself and for them.

But his legs felt as if they had sunk deeply into the gripping mud. He didn’t run as the water gently parted to reveal the tapering, long snout, as long as his own body but graceful and lithe. Flared nostrils came free of the water, steam rising from them. Then came the terrible maw, water running out either side between the teeth—fangs as long as the poor dwarf’s leg. Weeds hung from the maw, too, caught on those great teeth, trailing and dripping as the head rose up above the gray flatness of the pond.

Up it rose, and as it did, the beast drifted forward, slowly and silently, so that in the span of a few moments the dragon’s head towered above the paralyzed dwarf, barely ten feet from the muddy bank.

Ringo’s breath came in short gasps. Locked by the power of those awful reptilian eyes, his head tilted back as the head rose on the black-scaled, serpentine neck. Slowly, the dragon swayed, and Ringo moved with it, though he was totally unaware of his own motion.

Beautiful, he thought, for the grace and power of the wyrm could not be denied.

There was something preternatural, some power unbound by the limitations mere mortals might know, something godlike and beyond the sensibilities of the dwarf. Gone were any thoughts of drawing a weapon against so magnificent a beast. How could he presume to challenge a god? Who was he to even dare ask such a creature to think him worthy of battle?

Transfixed, entranced, overwhelmed by the power and the beauty, Ringo barely registered the movement, the snakelike speed of the strike as the dragon’s head snapped forward, the jaws opening to fall over him.

The dragon was in the lake, swaying methodically.

There was darkness.

And Ringo knew no more.

“Bah, Heft-a-stone, will ye be quick about it, then?” Nordwinnil Fellhammer moaned, rising from his cross-legged position beside the campfire. “Suren that me lips are par—”

Nordwinnil’s words caught in his throat as he turned to regard the pond and Ringo—or the two partial legs, knee-to-foot, standing in Ringo’s boots where Ringo had just been. Nordwinnil’s eyes widened and his jaw hung open as one of those legs tipped over, falling outward to plop into the mud.

“Yeah, me own throat as—” said another of the dwarves, and he, too, abruptly cut off his sentence as he turned toward the pond and saw the gigantic black dragon crouching in the water near the shore.

The beast chomped down, and one of Ringo’s arms fell free to splash into the pond.

“D-d-d-d-dragon!” Nordwinnil screamed.

He tried to sprint out to the side but turned so furiously that he twisted his legs together and wound up tumbling headlong into the tent behind him. He thrashed and scrambled as all the dwarves began to shout. He heard a thump and knew it to be an axe slapping defiantly against a wooden shield.

The ground trembled as the beast came forth from the pond, and Nordwinnil scrambled all the more—and of course that only entangled him in the canvas all the more.

More cries assailed him, screams of fright and a growl of defiance. He heard a crossbow crank back, followed by the sharp click of the bolt’s release, the hiss of the wyrm, the abbreviated shriek of the dwarf archer, and the sloppy, crackling impact of the dragon’s fangs biting the dwarf in half.

Nordwinnil tucked his legs and drove forward as a rain of dwarf blood sprinkled over him and the tent. He finally came out on the far side and kept on scrambling, crawling on all fours.

He couldn’t shout past the lump in his throat when he heard his companions crying out, horribly shrieking, behind him. He didn’t dare look back and nearly fainted with terror when he felt a slap on his back.

But it was a dwarf, good old Pergiss MacRingle, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him along.

Good old Pergiss! Pergiss wouldn’t leave him behind.

With his friend steadying him as they went, Nordwinnil managed to get his legs under him and climb to his feet. On they ran, or tried to, for the ground shook as if an earthquake had struck. The dragon stomped down on another dwarf, crushing the poor fellow into the soft ground. Pergiss and Nordwinnil tangled up and crashed down, and both fought to regain their footing.

Nordwinnil looked back as the dragon turned their way, and those horrible eyes found him and held him.

“Come on then, ye dolt!” Pergiss cried, but Nordwinnil couldn’t move.

Pergiss looked back, and the dragon snapped its great leathery wings out wide, stealing the meager remnants of daylight with its magnificent blackness.

“By the gods,” Pergiss managed to say.

The dragon’s head shot forward just a few feet, its jaws opened wide, and it blew forth a spray of green-black acidic spittle.

Nordwinnil and Pergiss lifted their arms before them to fend off the deadly rain, but the sticky, burning substance engulfed them.

They screamed. They burned. They melted together so completely that anyone who happened upon the scene would never know where Nordwinnil ended and Pergiss began.

There was silence again by the still pond near Palishchuk. The buzzards watched with interest, but they dared not take wing and caw.

He was Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian. He was Urshula, the black wyrm of Vaasa, the Beast of the Bog, the bane of all who thought to civilize this untamable land. He had razed entire villages in his youth. He had decimated towns so completely that those who subsequently returned to the scene could not know that structures had once stood there. Tribes of goblins had paid homage to him, sacrificed to him, and carried his likeness on totems.

In his youth, those centuries before, Urshula had dominated the region from the Galena Mountains in the south and running up the eastern border to the base of the Great Glacier that described Vaasa’s northern edge.

But he had grown quieter. Age had brought contentment and piles of treasure whose smell and taste—and magical energy—provided an irresistible bed for Urshula. Rarely did the dragon come forth from the soft peat and cool stones of his subterranean lair.

Every now and then, though, the smell of fresh meat, of dwarf, human, orc, or even the occasional elf, drifted down to him, and when it was accompanied by the hum of magic and the metallic taste of coins, Urshula roused.

He sat before his conquest, the dwarves all slaughtered and devoured. His forelegs, so deadly and delicate all at once, picked through the treasures as he mused whether he liked the taste of dwarf raw, as with the first kill by the lake, or acid-bathed, as with the pair to the side. A great forked tongue slipped through his fangs as he considered his options, seeking remnants of one or the other morsel to better help with his internal debate.

He soon had all of the treasure worth pilfering in a single sack. He clutched it in one claw and turned his senses to the south, from whence drifted the pungent smell of orc. Urshula wasn’t really hungry any more, and the thought of sleep was inviting, but he spread his great leathery wings and lifted up high on his hind legs, his serpentine neck craning to afford him a view far to the south.

The dragon’s eyes narrowed as he considered the plumes of smoke rising from the distant city. He had known of the settlement, of course, for he had heard the ruckus of its initial construction, but he had never given it much heed. The smell of orc was strong, but they were not known to be rich in either magic or coin.

The dragon looked back to the pond and considered the tunnels beneath the dark waters that would take him home. He looked back to the south and flexed his wings yet again.

Still clutching the sack, Urshula leaped into the air. Great wings rolled parallel to the ground, bent slightly, and caught the air beneath them, driving the wyrm higher. From fifty feet up he saw the city and was surprised at the size of it. Thousands of people lived there, or so it seemed, for its walls ran wide and far to the south. Scores of structures dotted the interior, some of them extensive and multi-storied.

A wave of hatred rankled the beast, and Urshula almost gave in to it and dived headlong for that intrusion. How dare they build such a place upon his land!

But then he heard the horns blowing and saw the black specks—the guards of the distant city—scrambling along the walls.

Urshula had gone against a city—not a town, but an organized and defended city—only once before. One wing, his rear right leg, and his lower torso still ached with the memory of stinging pain.

Still, these intruders could not go unpunished.

Urshula climbed higher into the darkening sky. He let forth a roar, for he wanted terror to precede his attack.

He leveled off once he passed above the clouds, and he could imagine the poor fools along the city’s wall scanning the skies in desperation.

He drifted south for a short while, then he dived, a power swoop that shot him out from the cloud cover at full speed, the wind shrieking over his extended wings. He heard the screams. He saw the scrambling. He smelled the tiny arrows reaching up to him.

He crossed over and strafed with his acidic breath, drawing a line of devastation down the center of the city. A few of the arrows nipped at him. One spear lifted up high enough for Urshula to bite it out of the sky.

And he was gone, out over the city’s southern wall. A slight tilt of his wings angled the dragon to climb into the air once again.

The dragon knew they’d be better prepared for his second run, but there would be no second run. Urshula rose up even higher. He banked back to the north and flew over the city from on high, well out of reach of the puny arrows.

He glided down, swooping past the remains of the dwarf camp, then dipped and plowed into the lake, lifting a wall of water high into the air.

Wings tucked back as he descended, the dragon’s great body swayed to push him through the cold current of the underground river that brought water from the spring melt at the Great Glacier. Urshula would never run out of breath, though, for black dragons were perfectly adapted to such an environment. Some minutes later, the dragon turned into a side passage, a lava tube from an ancient volcano that gradually climbed so that, after a long while, he came free of the water.

He followed his subterranean network of trails unerringly, traversing corridors so wide that he could occasionally flex his wings, and so narrow that his scales scraped the worms and roots as he snaked his way through. In one of those narrow corridors, Urshula paused and sniffed. He nodded, knowing that he was parallel to his lair.

He turned his head into the soft ground and brought forth his acidic breath but sprayed it gradually, melting and loosening the dirt before him as he bored through.

He broke into the southern rim of the side room of his lair, crawled forth, and shook the peat and dirt from his interlocking scales. He stopped and snapped his long, thick tail against the wall of dirt, collapsing the tunnel behind him, and issued a growl that sounded almost like a cat’s purr. His lamplight gaze fell over his bed of coins and gems, suits of armor and weapons. He flung his newest sack of treasure atop the pile and slithered forth.

He collapsed in pleasant thoughts of devastation and considered again the taste of dwarf, raw and cooked. His tongue snaked between his great fangs, seeking morsels and sweet memories.

Then the dragon’s lamplight eyes closed, the lair fell into pitch blackness, and Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian, the Beast of the Bog, slept.

“Minor damage from a meager wyrm,” said Byphast the Frozen Death. She appeared in all ways an elf, except that her hair shone silver rather than the usual golden or black, and her skin was a bit too white. Her eyes, too, did not fit the overall image, for they showed a cool shade of yellow, with a line of black centering them, like the eyes of a hunting serpent. “Palishchuk shows the scars you predicted, several years old, but they are of little consequence.”

In the room was one other, seated at a small table before a trio of large bookcases, who slowly swiveled his head Byphast’s way. The fabric of his gray cloak was torn in strips to reveal the velvety blackness of the robe beneath. His voluminous sleeves hung below the edge of the table, but when the man turned, his fingers showed.

Fingers of bone. A living skeleton.

Beneath the great hood of the robe, there was only blackness, and Byphast was glad for that.

Her relief did not hold, though, as Zhengyi lifted one of his skeletal hands and drew the hood back. The gray and white skull came into view. The pieces of rotting flesh and the inhuman, unearthly eyes—points of red and yellow fire—forced Byphast to glance away. And the smell, the essence of death itself, nearly backed her out of the room.

Zhengyi pulled the hood back all the way to reveal the splotches of his white hair, clumped at all angles across his bony pate. If most people coifed themselves to appear more attractive, it seemed quite apparent that Zhengyi did the opposite.

For as most people, as most creatures, reveled in life, so did Zhengyi revel in death. He had passed beyond his human form into a state of undeath. Of the many variants among the walking dead on Toril, none was more abhorrent and revolting than a lich. A vampire might charm, might even be beautiful, but a lich was not a creature of subtlety. A lich didn’t enter a bargain with Death, as did a vampire. A lich wasn’t an unwilling participant in the state of undeath, as were the minor skeletons, zombies, and ghouls. A lich was a purposeful creature, a wizard who by powerful enchantments and sheer force of will had defeated Death itself, had refused to surrender consciousness and self-awareness or to give in to some otherworldly, godly being.

Even Byphast the Frozen Death, the greatest white dragon of the Great Glacier, shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot in the presence of Zhengyi. She wished the corridors of Castle Perilous were wider and higher so that she might face Zhengyi in her awe-inspiring dragon form.

Realistically, though, Byphast didn’t believe the lich would be impressed by even that. Certainly Zhengyi had shown no fear when he’d traversed the icy corridors of Byphast’s lair to confront her in her very treasure room. He had passed through the remorhaz pit, where several of the mighty polar worms, minions of the white dragon, stood guard. He had so dominated the ice trolls Byphast used as sentries that they hadn’t even warned their dragon deity of Zhengyi’s approach.

“Tell me, Byphast, what lingering damage might your own deadly breath have caused to the stone of Palishchuk?” the lich replied at last.

Byphast’s reptilian eyes narrowed. Her breath was frost, of course, powerful enough to freeze solid the flesh and blood of living enemies but largely ineffective against stone.

Or against a lich.

“A black dragon’s spittle is concentrated,” Byphast replied, her teeth gritted. She felt the twinges of anger ripple through her elf form, screaming at her to revert to her natural state. “Blacks can wreak devastation indeed, but in a smaller area. The breath of a white dragon fans wider and is deadly even at the fringes. And more effective. I can kill all within without destroying the city itself. The people die, the buildings remain. Which is the wiser choice, Witch-King?”

“You know I favor you,” Zhengyi replied, the meager flaps of dried skin at the corners of his mouth somehow turning up in a frozen smile.

Byphast hid her disgust. “And I am possessed of potent spells, beyond the abilities of Urshula the Black, I am sure.”

“You would not wish him as an ally?”

Byphast leaned back at that, her surprise showing.

“He came forth a few years ago,” Zhengyi went on, letting the question drop. “That is good. He is below that pond north of the city—of that, I am certain.”

“When Zhengyi wishes to find a dragon…” Byphast muttered.

“I will conquer Damara, my friend. The spoils will be grand, and my dragon allies will be well rewarded.”

Byphast’s eyes narrowed again, and with the gleam of eagerness glowing behind them.

“Do you not think Urshula worthy of our war?” asked the lich.

“Urshula is the father of all the black dragons in the Bloodstone Lands,” Byphast replied. “Enlist him and you are assured a flight of blacks at your service. They are most effective at weakening a castle’s walls before your ground fodder advances.”

“Oh, I will enlist him,” Zhengyi promised. “Remember, I have the greatest treasure of all.”

Byphast’s eyes flared and narrowed yet again.

He did indeed.

“Urshula is not possessed of a magical repertoire?” Zhengyi asked. He tapped a skeletal finger to the bone where his lip used to be and turned back to his small desk and the crystal ball that sat atop it.

“He is a black.”

“And you are a white,” Zhengyi replied, glancing back. “When first I learned of Byphast, I asked the same question of Honoringast the Red.”

Byphast’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the domineering red dragon, the greatest of Zhengyi’s allies. Few creatures in all the world disgusted Byphast as thoroughly as did a red dragon, but she was not fool enough to test her strength and cunning against Honoringast, who was mighty even measured against his red-scaled kin. And red dragons were the most formidable of all, save the thankfully elusive, rare, and haughty golds.

“ ‘She is a white,’ was his answer, in a tone no less dismissive than your own,” Zhengyi continued. “And yet, to my great pleasure and greater gain, I later learned that you were quite skilled in the Art.”

“In all the centuries, I have not heard of Urshula ever using a spell of any consequence,” Byphast replied. “I have encountered him only once, at the base of the Great Glacier, and as we had both just finished devouring respective camps of fodder, we did not engage.”

“You feared him?”

“Even the weakest of dragons is capable of inflicting great damage, Witch-King. It is a truism you would do well to remember.”

Zhengyi’s laugh sounded more as a wheeze.

“Shall I accompany you to visit Urshula?” Byphast asked as the Witch-King sat down facing the crystal ball and shrugged his cloak from his shoulders. Byphast wasn’t quite sure of why he was doing that. It was her understanding that they were to travel to Urshula’s lair straight away. “Or are you summoning Honoringast? Surely your arrival with a red and white at your side will intimidate Urshula more fully.”

“I’ll not need Honoringast, nor even Byphast,” Zhengyi explained. “If Urshula is not wise enough to understand the power of spellcasting, it would not be wise to venture into his lair.”

“If he has no spells then he is not as formidable as I,” Byphast growled.

“True, but did you not just warn me about the weakest of dragons?”

“Yet you did not fear me?”

Zhengyi looked over at her, and she realized how ridiculous she must have seemed at that moment with her arms crossed over her chest.

“I did not fear you because I knew that you would understand the value of that which I had to offer,” the lich explained. “Byphast, wise enough to engage in spells of mighty magic, was of course wise enough to recognize the greatest treasure of all. And even if you had refused my offer, you would not have been fool enough to challenge my power in that place and at that time.”

“You presumed much.”

“The Art requires discipline. If Urshula has not that discipline, then better that I approach him in a manner where his impetuousness can do no damage.”

Zhengyi leaned over the table and peered into the crystal ball. He waved one hand over it, and a bluish-gray mist appeared inside, swirling and roiling. A moment later, the Witch-King nodded and slid his chair back. He stood up, reached into a pocket of his robe, and produced a small amethyst jewel, shaped in the form of a dragon’s skull.

Byphast sucked in her breath; she knew a similar gemstone quite well.

“You have located Urshula?”

“Precisely where I said he would be,” Zhengyi answered. “In a lair in the peat to the side of the vernal pool.”

“You will go to him without me?”

“Pray watch,” Zhengyi answered. “You may be there in spirit, at least.”

As he finished, he began waving his arms slowly before him, the wide sleeves of his robes rolling hypnotically like a pair of swaying, hooded snakes. He spoke a chant, intoning the verbal components of a spell.

Byphast knew the spell, and she watched with interest as Zhengyi began to transform. Skin grew over the bones of his fingers and face. Hair sprouted from all the bare patches on his skull, and it was not white like the clumps that already adorned his head but rich brown in hue. The white hair, too, began to darken. The robes expanded as Zhengyi grew to considerable girth, and his white grin disappeared beneath full, red lips.

He appeared as he had been in life, robust and rotund. A dark beard sprouted from his chin and jowls.

“Less of a shock, you think?” he asked.

“Urshula would try to eat either form, I am sure.”

Zhengyi’s laugh sounded as different from his previous wheeze as his round, fleshy form appeared different from his skeletal body. The chuckle rose up from a jiggling belly and resonated deeply in the man’s thick throat.

“Shouldn’t you have waited until you were near to the lair?” asked the dragon.

“Near? Why I am practically inside even as we speak!”

Byphast moved up beside him as he turned to the crystal ball and began casting another spell. Looking into the ball, the dragon could see Urshula, the Beast of the Bog, curled up in his subterranean lair on a pile of treasure. She couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the ball illuminating the stone and dirt walls of the chamber, or if there was some glowing lichen or other light source actually inside Urshula’s home.

But it did not matter, for Byphast knew that it was no illusion. The image in the scrying ball was indeed that of Urshula and was real in time and space. Byphast turned back to regard Zhengyi just as he completed his casting.

His large body glowed for just a heartbeat then the glow broke free of his form and came forward, a translucent, glowing likeness of the man who stood behind it. It shrunk as if it had traveled a great distance away, reaching out toward the crystal ball, then disappeared inside the glass.

Urshula opened one sleepy eye, and his lamplight gaze illuminated a conical area before him. Like a spotlight, his roving eye probed the cavern. Gemstones glittered and gold gleamed as his eye’s beam slipped through the shadows. The dragon’s second eye popped open, and his great head snapped up when his gaze settled on a portly, bearded man, standing at ease in black velvet robes.

“Greetings, mighty Urshula,” the man said.

Urshula spat at him, and the floor around the man bubbled and popped. A pile of gold melted into a single lump, and a suit of plate mail armor showed its limitations, its breastplate disintegrating under the acid breath of the black dragon.

“Impressive,” the man said, glancing around him. He was unharmed, untouched, as if the acid had gone right through him.

Urshula narrowed his reptilian eyes and scrutinized the man—the image of a man—more closely. The dragon sensed the magic finally, and a low growl escaped through his long fangs.

“I have not come to steal from you, mighty Urshula. Nor to attack you in any way. Perhaps you have heard of me. I am Zhengyi, the Witch-King of Vaasa.”

The tone in his voice told the dragon that the little man thought quite highly of himself. That made one of them.

“Ah, I see,” the man went on. “My claim of kingship means little to you, no doubt, for you perceive me as one who holds claim over humans alone. Or perhaps over humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, and all the rest of the humanoid races in which you have little interest, other than to make a meal of them now and again.”

The dragon increased the volume of his growl.

“But you should take note this time, Urshula, for my rise holds great implications for all who call Vaasa, or anywhere in the Bloodstone Lands, their home. I have united all the creatures of Vaasa to do battle with the feeble and foolish lords of Damara. My armies swarm south through the Galenas, and soon all the land will be mine.”

“All the creatures?” Urshula replied in a voice that was both hissing and gravelly at the same time.

“For the most part.”

The dragon growled.

“I am no fool,” said Zhengyi. “Naturally I did not approach one as magnificent as you until I was certain that my plans would proceed. I would not enlist Urshula, the Beast of the Bog, to fight the initial battles, for I would not be worthy of such a creature as Urshula until the first victories were achieved.”

“You are a fool if you think yourself worthy even then.”

“Others do not agree.”

“Others? Goblins and dwarves?” The dragon snorted, little puffs of black smoke popping out of his upward-facing nostrils.

“You have heard of Byphast the Frozen Death?” Zhengyi asked. The dragon’s nostrils flared, and his eyes widened. “Or of Honoringast the Red?”

Urshula’s head moved back at the mention of that one. The black dragon, suddenly not so sure of himself, glanced around.

“Am I now worthy?” Zhengyi asked.

Urshula lifted up to his haunches. The movement, frighteningly fast and graceful for so large a beast, had Zhengyi stepping backward despite the fact that he was just a projected image, his physical form far from the breath and bite of the black wyrm.

“If you are worthy, then you are worthy of naught but the title of fool, and no more, to disturb the rest of Urshula!” the dragon roared. “You have found my home and think yourself clever, but beware, ‘Witch-King,’ for none who know the home of Urshula shall live for long.”

The thunder of his roaring was still reverberating off the cavern’s walls when the dragon came forward. His jaws opened wide and dropped over the projected image of Zhengyi. The great dragon’s teeth clamped together hard and loud right where the lich’s knees appeared. Urshula bit only insubstantial air, of course, for Zhengyi wasn’t truly in the cavern, but the dragon thrashed and flailed anyway, its forelegs slapping down at that which its mouth had not bitten. And when those clawed dragon fingers passed through the insubstantial Zhengyi and slapped at the floor, Urshula flexed his great muscles and drove his iron-strong claws into the stone, raking them across, digging deep ridges.

The dragon finished by spreading wide his wings and crouching upright on his rear legs, his lamplight gaze fixed on the continuing image of the Witch-King.

“The other notable dragons of the region have joined with me,” Zhengyi went on, unperturbed and apparently unimpressed. “They recognize the value and the gain of this winning campaign. When all of the Bloodstone Lands are under my command, they will be well rewarded.”

“Urshula does not need others to reward him,” the dragon countered. “Urshula takes what Urshula wants.”

“They find security in my ranks, mighty dragon.”

“Urshula kills whoever threatens Urshula.”

“You are aware of the young lord gaining strength in the southland?” Zhengyi asked. “You have heard of Gareth?”

The dragon snorted.

“You know his surname, of course?”

“You have confused me with someone who would care, it seems.”

“ ‘Dragonsbane,’ ” Zhengyi replied. “The young leader of those who oppose me holds the surname of Dragonsbane, and it was one earned through deeds in his rich family lines. Would he be a friend to Urshula if he somehow managed to defeat me?”

“You just claimed to lead a winning campaign,” the dragon reminded him.

“Indeed, and that is in no small part because of the wisdom of Byphast, Honoringast, and others who see the choice clearly.”

“Then why have you disturbed my slumber? Go and win, but leave Urshula be. And consider yourself fortunate in that, for few ever leave Urshula except scattered in piles of excrement.”

“Magnanimity?” Zhengyi asked as much as stated. “I offer to the dragons rewards for their assistance. I would be remiss if I did not extend the courtesy to Kazmil-urshula-kelloakizilian.”

The dragon chuckled, a sound like stones being crushed by boulders in a pool of acid, and said, “You see yourself as salvation, then, as a soon-to-be-king of all you survey. I have outlived many such fools. You see yourself as one of note, but I see a pathetic human, and a dead one at that, wearing but the guise of life. Lay down, lich. Seek your kingdom and peace in a world more befitting your rotting corporeal form. Bother me no more, or I will lay you down myself.

“And if you do come against me, with or without your dragon companions,” Urshula went on, “then do inform Byphast the Frozen Death that she will be the first to feel the bite of my wrath.”

“You have not yet heard my offer, grand beast,” Zhengyi said. He brought forth a small gem shaped like a dragon’s skull. “The greatest treasure of all. Do you recognize this, Urshula?”

The dragon narrowed his eyes and issued a low growl but did not respond.

“A phylactery,” Zhengyi explained. “Prepared for Urshula. I have beaten Death, mighty dragon. And I know how you might—”

“Be gone from here, abomination!” the dragon roared. “You have embraced death, not defeated it, and you only did so because you are of the inferior race, the short-lived and infirm. You presume the death of Urshula, but Urshula is older than the oldest memories of your race. And Urshula will remain when the memory of you has faded from all the world!”

The image closed its hand and slid the phylactery away. “You do not appreciate its value,” Zhengyi said, then he shrugged and bowed. “Sleep well, mighty dragon. You are as impressive as I was told you would be. Perhaps another day.…”

“I will never see you again, else I will see you destroyed.”

Urshula’s words echoed and rebounded, and it seemed as if their vibrations shook the image of Zhengyi to nothingness.

The black dragon remained crouching for some time, still as a statue, listening for any indication that Zhengyi or his minions were within the chamber or the corridors beyond.

Many hours later, the great black curled back up to sleep.

The Witch-King stood on a high, flat stone, looking north to his kingdom of Vaasa, his skeletal fingers balled into fists of rage at his sides.

The campaign had been going well. He had pressed deep into Damara, conquering enemies and enlisting new allies—many of them the rotting corpses of the men his army had just slaughtered. His enemies remained divided, often too concerned with one another to pay sufficient heed to the true darkness that had come to their land.

Gareth Dragonsbane and his friends worked furiously to remedy that, to unite Damara’s many lords under a single banner and stand strong against Zhengyi, but they had acted too late, so Zhengyi believed, and his victory seemed assured.

But then a small but powerful force had swept into Vaasa in his own army’s wake. They had broken the siege at Palishchuk and gathered the remnants of refugees from across the wasteland into a single, formidable force. Several caravans of supplies from Castle Perilous had not reached Bloodstone Pass in the Galenas. Zhengyi’s main supply route had been interrupted.

The Witch-King understood that he should not be looking north at so critical an hour. He had not the time to chase a splinter group of rebels with Gareth Dragonsbane rising to prominence before him.

“Where are you, Byphast?” he asked the cold northern breeze.

He had sent the dragon back to her glacial home with instructions to put down the rebels and their Damaran supporters, but the news coming back to him had been less than promising.

He stood there a while longer, then snapped his black robes and gray cape around him in a swift, angry turn. He strode back down the mountainside, his undead form easily gliding over the treacherous descent, and soon he walked among the rear guard of his army again, appearing once more as he had in life. The living humans who slavishly followed him would not have suffered the terrible sight of his true form.

He waited out the night in his command tent, perusing the reports and maps that were coming in from the battle fronts in the south. Truly Zhengyi’s preparation for the campaign would have garnered the appreciation of the greatest generals throughout Faerûn. Information was power, Zhengyi knew, and his command tent, with its tables full of maps and miniatures of various strategic stretches of the Bloodstone Lands’ terrain, and markers depicting the relative size and strength of the armies doing battle, was a testament to that knowledge. There, Zhengyi could plot his army’s movements, his defensive positions, and those areas most vulnerable to attack. In that tent, the grand strategy—including the decision not to throw his weight fully against Palishchuk—had been formulated and continually refined.

The Witch-King didn’t like surprises.

Despite his preparation and confidence, Zhengyi’s firelight eyes often glanced back over his shoulder, to the north, in the hope of word from the white dragon. Splinter groups of powerful heroes were harder to keep track of and often more trouble than regiments of common soldiers.

The long night passed without incident. It wasn’t until the next morning that Byphast, in her elf form, came walking down the trail. Zhengyi spotted her some distance off, and first sight told him that the news from the north was not good. Byphast limped, and even from a distance, she appeared more disheveled than Zhengyi had ever seen her.

The Witch-King’s robes fluttered out behind him as he strode through his camp, determined to meet the white dragon on the trail beyond the hearing of his guards and soldiers.

“The rumors are true,” Zhengyi said as he approached. “A band of heroes reached Palishchuk.”

“To the cheers of the half-orcs,” Byphast replied. “That city is more fortified than ever. Their preparations do not cease. They have thickened their walls and set out crates of stinging arrows.”

Her use of that particular adjective told Zhengyi that the dragon had personally tested those defenses.

“And they have constructed greater engines of defense, catapults and ballistae that can be quickly swiveled toward the sky to strike back against airborne creatures. When I flew over the city, barbed chains rose to impede me, and I only narrowly avoided giant spears hurled my way.”

“Palishchuk will be dealt with in time,” Zhengyi promised.

“Without the aid of Byphast, and without any other dragons, I would guess,” the white dragon replied. “The treasures of Palishchuk are not worth the risk to wing and limb.”

Zhengyi nodded, still not overly concerned with the half-orc city. Once Damara had been conquered, Palishchuk would become a tiny oasis of resistance with no help forthcoming from anywhere in the Bloodstone Lands. They would not hold out for long, and Zhengyi had not yet given up hope that the half-orcs would ultimately throw in with him. They were half-orcs, after all, and would not likely be as deterred by moral issues as were the weak humans, halflings, and others of Damara.

“These heroes hid within the city?” Zhengyi asked, getting back to the problem at hand.

“Nay, they came forth quite willingly. When I escaped the chains and the spears and flew off to the north, they burst out of Palishchuk’s gate in pursuit.”

“And you killed them?”

Byphast’s twisted expression gave him the answer before the dragon began to speak. “They are accompanied by mighty wizards and priests. Their knights glow with wards to defeat my deadly breath; their armor sings with magic to deter the rake of my claws.”

“A small band?”

“Fifty strong and well designed to do battle with dragons.”

“Byphast would not normally flee from such a group.” Zhengyi did nothing to keep the contempt out of his voice, nor from his expression, as he narrowed his eyes and sneered.

“If forced to do battle with them—if ever they happened upon my lair—then I would surely destroy them,” the dragon replied without hesitation. “But scars would accompany that win, I am sure, and in that place, at this time, they were not worth the trouble.”

“You serve Zhengyi.” Even as the Witch-King took the conversation in that direction, Byphast’s statement, if ever they happened upon my lair, resonated in his thoughts.

“I agreed to fight beside Zhengyi’s forces,” the dragon replied. “I did not agree to wage such battles alone in the bogs of Vaasa.”

Zhengyi produced a phylactery, the one to which Byphast had attuned herself. If the dragon was slain, her energy and life-force would transfer to the phylactery, and she would become undead, a dracolich.

“You forget?” the lich said.

“It is a final safeguard, but not one I am anxious to use. If in the course of events I am slain, then so be it. That is the risk my kind need take whenever we come forth into the world of lesser creatures. But I’ll not chase after the undeath you offer.”

“Ah, Byphast, it is a piteous thing to see a creature of your reputation reduced to such fear.”

Lizardlike eyes narrowed, and a low growl escaped the dragon’s elf lips.

“Very well, then,” said Zhengyi. “I will deal with the intruders myself. I’ll not have them nipping at my heels all the way through Damara. Go and rejoin the commanders at the front. Lay waste to the foolish Damarans who stand in our way.”

Byphast didn’t move, nor did her expression change from the hateful look she shot Zhengyi’s way.

If that threat bothered the Witch-King at all, though, he didn’t show it. He turned his back on the wyrm in elf’s clothing and stalked back to his vast encampment.

“Donegan!” cried Maryin Felspur, Knight of the Order.

“Sir Donegan,” the senior knight corrected. He walked his armor-clad horse out from the ranks, the heavy hooves making plopping sounds as the fifteen-hundred-pound steed, with three hundred pounds of armor and two hundred pounds of rider, crossed the soft, wet ground. Donegan paced right up to Maryin, the only female knight of the ten who had come out from Lord Gareth’s ranks in Damara, accompanying more than fifty footsoldiers, half a dozen priests, and a trio of annoying wizards.

“Sir Donegan,” Maryin corrected herself with outward humility.

She didn’t have her helmet on, though, and her smile betrayed her tone. Serving as scout for the group, the lithe Maryin was the least armored of the knights, and her horse, a fine, strong young pinto, barely larger than a pony, wore only protective breast- and faceplates. Maryin preferred the bow and used her speed to skirt the edges of the encounters with Zhengyi’s minions, thinning their ranks at advantageous points so that Donegan and Sir Bevell could best exploit their enemies.

Donegan did not dismount. His mail of interlocking plates made such movements tedious, particularly in trying to get back up onto the nearly eighteen-hand charger. Instead he leaned over as far as his encumbering suit would allow and lifted the visor of his helmet.

Maryin crouched beside a depression, a tear in the ground that was half-filled with brown water.

“Only a creature the size of a dragon could make such an imprint,” Maryin said.

Donegan straightened and scanned the area. He noted a second and third imprint behind and several more ahead but beyond that, nothing.

“Master Fisticus,” he called to the leader of the trio of wizards, “pray you and your companions ready your components and our shielding spells. These tracks are not old, and it would appear that the wyrm has taken to the air. It could swoop upon us from on high at any time, and I’ll not have its deadly breath decimating our ranks before we’ve had a chance to engage the beast.”

“Perhaps we should slide back toward Palishchuk, my lord,” Maryin offered quietly. “In reach of their ballistae—”

“Nay,” Sir Donegan began before Maryin had even finished. “The wyrm is too smart to be goaded near the town again. The half-orcs nearly brought it down the first time.”

“If it is the same dragon.”

That thought gave Donegan pause, for he could not dismiss the reasoning. Until a few months ago, Donegan had seen only one dragon in all of his twenty years of adventuring, and that was a small white up near the Great Glacier. With the coming of Zhengyi, the Knight of the Order had learned far more than ever he had intended regarding dragonkind, for evil chromatic wyrms of many colors filled the sky above the Witch-King’s advance. Reds and whites had laid waste to many villages, including Donegan’s home town, and the knight had done battle with a pair of blues, an encounter that had cost him a horse and had left a blackened line of lightning scarring across the back of his otherwise silvery armor.

Too many dragons, Donegan thought. Far too many dragons.…

Zhengyi stood on the northeastern bank of a small pond a few miles to the north of Palishchuk. Gone were the human trappings of his former self; he saw no need for such vanities out there, alone. He had his hood back, revealing his skull, the splotchy patches of hair, and the flaps of rotting skin. His robes smelled of mildew, hanging in tatters and showing green spots of mold. He clutched a twisted oaken staff, leaning on it heavily, and stared out to the south.

He saw their approach, the glint of the sun off their lance tips, off the armor of their mounts. He heard the thunder of hooves and marching soldiers.

The remnants of the Witch-King’s lips curled in a wicked smile. He thought of Byphast’s declaration: that she would not go against such a contingent except in her lair.

Any dragon would fight against any odds to protect its lair. To the death.

More flashes showed in the south. They followed the trail Zhengyi had dug with his magic, thinking it the tracks of a dragon.

He lifted his twisted oaken staff again, located a suitable spot, and uttered a command word. The ground erupted where he’d pointed his staff. Clumps of dirt flew into the air. The magic dug at the soft ground, bursts of energy tore up and threw aside yards of ground as efficiently and powerfully as a dragon’s talons might.

Zhengyi glanced southeast, to the distant troop of warriors. Perhaps they had noted the disturbance, perhaps not. They would be there soon enough, in any case. His spell completed, the deep hole dug, Zhengyi stepped into the water. It did not feel cold to the Witch-King, of course, for he could no longer experience any such sensations. In any case, no chill was more profound than the icy embrace of death.

His robes floated out behind him as he stepped in deeper, and soon he was under the water, not breathing, not moving. As the surface stilled, Zhengyi’s otherworldly eyes peered through the film to the northeastern bank. His trail would take them to the dig.

He clutched his staff more tightly, preparing the next spell.

Maryin crept along the muddy ground, staying low and letting her elven cloak, a garment of magical camouflage, hang down around her. She had left her horse back with Donegan and the others, who marched along some hundred feet behind her. Maryin’s job was to detect any potential ambushes, and to keep them moving toward the dragon. Given the dirt flying high into the air a few moments earlier, the knight had every reason to believe she had completed that task.

She had found another few tracks not far back, for the beast had apparently set down, but then she came upon a great hole, not far from the bank of a small pond. She crouched at the rim, considering the tunnel at the bottom.

“Did you go to ground, wyrm?” she whispered under her breath.

Maryin lingered for a few moments, then, hearing the approach of her companions, she straightened, glanced around, and moved her hand out from under the protection of her cloak, raising her fist high into the air.

She glanced at the water, not realizing that the eyes of the Witch-King looked back at her. Behind her, Sir Donegan slowed his contingent and approached with some caution. He walked his horse up beside the knight scout.

“Into the tunnel?” he asked, inspecting the hole. “Or is it a ruse, and the beast has gone under the pond?”

Maryin pulled back her cowl and shrugged. “I’m finding nothing to say it is and nothing to say it isn’t.”

“A wonderful scout you are.”

Maryin smiled at him. “I can track almost anything, and you know it well—even that little lass who thought to sneak into your room. But you cannot expect me to track a dragon that keeps taking to the sky. Do you think its beating wings will flatten grass from on high? Do you think the beast will cut a wake through the land as a boat might do across a lake?”

Sir Donegan laughed at her endless sarcasm and the wicked little jab against him. He still had a bone to pick with Maryin over that wench incident, for Donegan had been anticipating the visit, and the interception had not been appreciated. But that was a fight for another day, and a thought came to him.

“Has the water risen?”

Maryin looked at him, curious, then caught on and moved to the pond’s bank where she began inspecting for signs of a recent swell. The pond wasn’t very large, after all, and surely the displacement would be noticeable in the event a creature as large as a dragon had entered its depths.

A moment later, Maryin stood straight again and shook her head.

“And so the wyrm did not enter the pond,” Donegan said with a sigh. “Good enough, then.”

“There are no tracks from the hole to the water, and if the beast had taken to the air for any distance, we should have seen it—or should have heard the splash when it dived in. My guess is that the dragon, confident and oblivious to our pursuit, took to the tun—”

She hunched forward, and Donegan leaped back. Behind them, horses and soldiers bristled. From the hole came a low, throaty growl, a resonating rumble befitting a beast of a dragon’s stature.

“Form up!” Sir Donegan commanded.

He turned his charger and thundered back to the ranks. Maryin pulled her cowl back over her head and face and appeared to melt into the shadows at the pool’s edge.

The growl continued for a few moments, then gradually receded.

Lances were lowered, swords were drawn, and wizards and priests prepared their spells.

Then it was quiet once more. And through the long hush, no great monster sprang from the hole.

When Donegan and the others finally dared to approach, they stood on the edge of the deep, wide, funnel-shaped pit, looking to the broad tunnel at its base, which ran off both east and west.

“It would seem that we have found our wyrm,” Sir Donegan told his troop.

“Are we certain that a dragon dug this pit?” another knight asked.

“There are spells that can facilitate such things,” Fisticus the wizard replied. “As there are beasts.…”

“A dragon?”

“There is little turmoil a dragon cannot create,” Fisticus explained. “Such a wyrm as the one that attacked Palishchuk those days ago would have little trouble boring through the soft ground of the Vaasan summer.”

Sir Gavaland, another Knight of the Order, said, “One would think that if the dragon meant to announce its presence in such a manner, it would have burst forth to attack us in that moment of surprise.”

“If it knew we were here,” Donegan replied.

“The growl?”

“A purr of satisfaction before settling down to sleep?” the wizard offered. “Such beasts are known to growl as often as a man might sigh or yawn.”

“Pray it is a yawn, then,” said Donegan, “and one announcing that the beast is ready for a long and sound nap.” He looked around at his soldiers, grinning from ear to ear beneath his upraised visor. “One from which it will never awaken.”

That brought a host of nods and grins from the rank and file.

Off to the side, Maryin neither nodded nor grinned. She knew what was coming, and what her role would be, before Sir Donegan even motioned to her to enter the pit. It occurred to her that perhaps she would do well to don her heavier plate mail and hire an elf to handle the scouting.

Under the water, Zhengyi nodded with contentment as he watched the troop disappear over the pit’s rim. His spell mimicking the dragon’s roar had been well placed through use of his complimentary enchantment of ventriloquism, or so it would seem.

The Witch-King knew that he should be away at once—back to the south and Damara, where the battle raged—but he lingered a bit longer in the pond, and when all of the soldiers had gone into the pit save those few left to guard the horses, he emerged again on the northeastern bank.

The three fools standing with the horses still stared at the pit, oblivious to the danger, when the Witch-King came calling.

She knew that her elven cloak could protect her from prying eyes, but still Maryin felt vulnerable as she edged her way down the enormous tunnel—certainly high and wide enough for a dragon to charge through it. Lichen covered the walls, emitting a soft light, like starlight in a forest clearing. Though thankful for that illumination—for it meant she had to carry no torch—at the same time she feared the glow might make her just as plain to the wyrm’s clever eyes.

She felt the beast’s presence before she smelled or heard it—a pervasive aura of fear hung in the air.

Maryin went down to all fours and crawled along. No retreat would be fast enough if the beast spotted her, so her only hope lay in not being detected at all.

She rounded a bend and held her breath as she peered into a distant chamber. There it was, and it was not the beast that had recently attacked Palishchuk. For even in the dim light, she could see that its scales glistened black, and not white.

She retreated slowly for some time, inching out backward. Then she turned and ran, two hundred yards or more up the tunnel, to where Donegan and the others waited, including the armored horses of the knights Donegan and Bevell.

“A large black,” she explained in as soft a voice as possible while she drew the chamber’s layout for them in a patch of soft dirt.

Fisticus and the other wizards went to work, coordinating the spells they would need to fend off the acidic breath of a black dragon.

“A white would present fewer challenges,” the lead wizard complained. “Our spells to defeat its freezing breath are more specialized and complete.”

“Perhaps I can borrow some fence paint and change the beast’s color while it sleeps,” came Maryin’s sarcastic reply.

“That would be helpful,” Fisticus shot back without hesitation.

“Enough,” Donegan scolded them both. “Black dragons are comparable to whites—at least it’s not an ancient red awaiting us.”

“We have spells specifically to defeat the fiery breath of a—” Fisticus began.

“And any red worth its scales would have mighty spells to dwarf your own,” Donegan interrupted. “In this case we need only defeat the black’s initial spray and get our forces in close. Once by its side, we will take the beast down quickly.”

Fisticus nodded and moved to stand next to Maryin’s map. “The distance from the tunnel to the beast?” he asked. “And where in the approach are we likely to be engaged?”

Getting into the heart of the dragon’s lair was little challenge for the Witch-King. In his two-dimensional shadow form, Zhengyi merely slipped into a crack in the stone and slithered his way down. Now he stood off to the side of the main floor, not far from Urshula but concealed by the nature of his form and by enchantments so that the dragon did not sense him.

He watched with great amusement as the stealthy female knight crept back down again to observe the dragon. A pair of wizards followed, magically shielded and hidden.

“Pathetic,” Zhengyi mouthed under his breath.

He raised his bony hand and added an illusion—from the dragon’s perspective—to further hide the intruders, for he did not want Urshula to detect the approaching force too soon.

The wizards cast their spell and hustled away, and as he considered their creation, Zhengyi had to admit their cleverness. Nodding, he knew what was coming next. He waved his hand again, and his illusion disappeared.

Urshula’s eye opened just a bit. Zhengyi watched the muscles along the dragon’s great forelegs tighten with readiness. Down the tunnel came the warriors in a sudden charge, weapons and armor clattering.

Urshula sprang into a crouch, his great horned head swiveling in line.

Zhengyi marveled that the soldiers did not break ranks. Not one of them fled from the sight of a great dragon. Glad he was that he had come back to the dragon’s lair, for the fortitude of the troop of knights could not be underestimated.

Urshula crouched back, and Zhengyi felt the beast’s rumbling inhalation, the preparation for its first devastating strike. The warriors did not slow, approaching the place where the wizards had set their enchantment. Urshula’s neck shot forward, his jaws opening wide, a cone of acidic spittle bursting forth.

It hit a barrier—a solid, impenetrable wall of magical force—and spattered and sizzled. Only a bit of it splashed over the wall, stinging a few of the warriors. But their charge was not slowed. They parted and flowed around the edges of the magical barrier in perfect unison. On the near side, their troop flowed back together, guided by the armored knights, and closed in on the confused dragon.

Urshula reared and lifted his head high—and was promptly engulfed by a fireball, then a second and a third before he could even react. And when he ducked back down, the warriors were there, slashing, stabbing, and hacking away with abandon. They filtered around the wyrm, cheering and shouting, trying to overwhelm the beast with sudden and brutal fury.

But Urshula was a dragon, after all, the beast of beasts. A sudden frenzy of stamping legs, raking claws, swiping tail, and battering wings quickly stole the advantage.

One knight stood above the fray, barking out orders, lifting his sword high and calling for the warriors to rally around him.

The dragon’s maw closed over him to the waist, and lifted him high for all to see. Warriors cried out for him as his armored legs thrashed helplessly.

Urshula clamped down, and the knight’s lower torso dropped to the floor. The rest came flying free as well, as Urshula snapped his head about, the knight serving as a missile to crash through several ranks of warriors. Those who fell farthest aside proved the fortunate ones for the time being, though, for the armored missile was fast followed by a second blast of acidic spittle.

Men melted and died.

Before he could begin to applaud the wyrm, Zhengyi looked around to see a barrage of energy bolts—green, blue, and violet—swarming the dragon’s way. Urshula’s victory roar became a cry of pain as the bolts burned into him, stabbing through scales that could not protect the beast from such attacks.

The dragon spotted the wizards, grouped inside the tunnel entrance just to the left. Ignoring the stabs from the warriors still thrashing as his sides, Urshula spat again.

Stones all around the wizards sizzled and popped, but the three were protected. One did wince in pain, though he still managed to join his companions in the next missile barrage.

Zhengyi, fearing that the dragon would be overwhelmed too quickly, thought he should intervene.

But Urshula reared on his hind legs and spread wide his wings. He beat them furiously, lifting dust, coins, and pebbles from the floor to fly at the distant wizards. The debris did no real damage, but it prevented any further casting—and more importantly, Zhengyi realized, it worked through the protection limits of their magical shielding.

“Brilliant,” the Witch-King applauded.

The dragon’s reaction was not a surprise to Sir Donegan. Trained by Gareth Dragonsbane himself—a man who had well-earned his surname—Donegan had designed the attack in four specific phases: first, the defeat of the beast’s initial killing breath. Second, the charge. Third, a barrage of magic that should force the dragon’s attention away from the last part, the most deadly part.

The knights Donegan and Bevell sat on their horses back up the tunnel awaiting the dragon’s reaction. As it reared, they spurred their mounts to charge. Lances lowered, the two skilled knights swerved left and right around the magical wall of force, rejoined on the far side of the barrier, and thundered in together at the still-oblivious dragon.

They caught the beast side-by-side in the belly, the weakest point of a dragon’s natural armor. With the weight of their huge steeds driving them on, and the enchantments placed upon those lances, the weapons struck home, cracking through the hard shell of scales and driving deep into the beast’s soft innards.

Down came the roaring beast. But Donegan and Bevell were already moving, turning their mounts aside and leaving their lances quivering in the dragon’s belly. As one, the skilled knights drew forth swords from over their shoulders. Bevell’s broadsword flared with fire at his silent command, while Donegan brought forth a two-handed blade that gleamed with an inner, magical light. As the dragon’s wing descended over him, Donegan clenched his legs tightly and thrust his weapon up with both hands. The beast howled again and retracted.

Bevell found less success against the opposite wing, and though he landed a solid slash, the limb buffeted him and sent him tumbling from his mount and sprawling to the floor.

“Rally to me!” Donegan called his warriors, and those still capable of battle did just that.

The dragon spun to face him, and Donegan nearly swooned, thinking the moment of his death at hand.

But the wizards struck again, a fireball engulfing the beast’s head and a host of magical missiles disappearing into the flaming sphere.

Donegan used the moment to charge his rushing mount in hard against the dragon’s side. He dismounted and slapped his horse away, then took up his sword in both hands and drove a mighty slash against the beast’s scales. All around him, his warriors cheered and attacked, stabbing and hacking with abandon.

The beast was hurt; the beast swayed.

“Be done with it!” Sir Donegan cried, thinking the moment of victory upon them.

But the dragon spun, its tail flying across, slapping Donegan and the others aside, launching them across the stone and dirt floor.

The knight tried to rise. His helm had turned, stealing his vision, and his sword had flown from his grasp. He fumbled about before a hand grabbed his shoulder and steadied him.

He adjusted his helm and saw Maryin grinning at him and nodding. She handed him his sword.

“Let us be done with this,” she said.

Zhengyi enjoyed the spectacle. He marveled at the troop’s preparation and fortitude; few men could stand so long in the face of an angry wyrm. Impressive, too, was Urshula’s resilience and ferocity.

But the dragon was sorely wounded, the Witch-King realized. One of the lances had snapped off, and blood poured from the hole—and no doubt the remaining lance head tore at the creature’s insides.

And those wizards came on again, relentless, their fireballs and energy bolts taking a heavy toll.

Zhengyi had come to serve as an equalizer, but surprised he was to find that it was Urshula, and not the humans, who needed his efforts. He could not allow it to be so easy for them.

The Witch-King slipped back into his shadow form and slid into a crack in the wall.

“Fire, this time,” Fisticus the wizard told his two companions. “When the wyrm lifts high its head, engulf it.”

All three wizards readied their spells, watching intently as Fisticus determined the pattern of the dragon’s movements.

“One…” he counted, “two…”

“Do say ‘three,’ ” a raspy voice behind the trio interrupted.

Zhengyi watched the trio stiffen, and he grinned as he imagined the expressions on their faces. He didn’t let that distract him, though, as he began casting his favorite spell.

The wizards whirled around, right in the face of a sudden burst of intertwined multicolored beams of shimmering light.

Fisticus threw his arm up before his eyes while the wizard to his left was bathed in blue. That unfortunate man, blinded by the brilliance of Zhengyi’s spell, tried to scream, but his skin hardened to stone, and he froze in place with his mouth agape.

Purple light engulfed Fisticus and he was gone, just gone, removed from the Prime Material Plane and launched randomly through the multiverse, though at least his abrupt departure allowed him to avoid the blast of lightning that jolted and seared the man to his right. The bolt arced through where Fisticus had been standing and crackled against the wizard statue across the way. The solid rock he had become exploded under the pressure of the lightning, sending finger pebbles and elbow rocks flying.

And a second hue washed over the wizard who had borne the initial shock of the lightning strike. Already down and near death, he mustered all of his remaining energy for one final shriek of agony as a red glow washed over him and he erupted in flames. He couldn’t even manage to roll on the floor, however, so he just lay there burning.

Zhengyi gave a raspy sigh and shook his head.

“Appreciation, dear Urshula?” he whispered as he turned his attention back to the dragon and the larger fight, to find that his intrusion had not gone unnoticed.

“The Witch-King!” one man yelled.

At the dragon’s side, Sir Donegan grimaced at the thought that such a foe had come against them at so desperate a time. He could only pray that his soldier was wrong and could only hope that they could be done with the beast quickly.

“Fisticus, finish it!” he yelled as he struck his great sword again against the dragon’s flank.

He managed a roll as he completed the strike to gain a view of the wizards—or of what remained of them. Donegan took note of a shadowy figure against the stone, but he couldn’t pause long enough to consider it at any length.

“Fight on, my warriors! The wyrm is failing!” he cried, rallying his troops and throwing himself with abandon against the great beast.

Urshula heard that claim, and couldn’t rightly dismiss it. The wizards’ strikes had wounded him badly, and he could feel the tip of a lance rattling around beneath his scaly armor, tearing up his insides.

“Zhengyi? My ally?” Urshula grumbled in the course of his continuing growl, and he was glad indeed to see one of the wizards smoldering on the floor, and the remaining piece of a second standing as stone, blasted to nothingness from the waist up.

But where was Zhengyi?

A sting in Urshula’s side brought him from his contemplation and reminded him of his immediate concerns. He thrashed and stomped a man flat with his hind leg then battered down with his wing, knocking aside several others. His tail whipped out the other way, driving back yet another group of the stubborn warriors.

Zhengyi watched patiently from within a crack in the stone, the material components for several spells ready in hand. He silently applauded Urshula’s ferocity as the dragon scooped up a man in his jaws and crunched him flat. Then the dragon snapped his head and let fly the human missile, bowling several men over.

In that instant, Zhengyi thought the dragon might prevail.

But Urshula lurched to the side, and Zhengyi spied the great knight who had struck the devastating blow. Urshula tried to turn at the man, too, but a second warrior, the same female scout Zhengyi had first seen enter the dragon’s lair, had cunningly made her way to the dragon’s back and up his neck. When the distracted wyrm focused on the knight, she drove a slender sword under the back of the dragon’s skull.

Zhengyi shook his head and produced the dragon skull phylactery.

“Witch-King!” Urshula bellowed in a great voice that echoed through the chamber.

Then the wyrm reminded Zhengyi and all of the others exactly why dragons were so rightly feared. Urshula leaped up, snapping his head back, forward, then down. The motion flipped the female warrior right over the crown of the dragon’s head spikes so violently that she could never have held on. The fall from twenty feet to the stone might have killed her, but the dragon never let it get that far. Biting out, his maw covered her so that her head, feet, and one flailing arm fell free from her body.

And through all of that, the dragon continued his leap and mid air roll. Urshula’s size became his primary weapon as he crashed down atop the bulk of the remaining force, crushing them under his great weight.

Zhengyi grimaced as the black dragon’s eyes tightened in pain, for that crushing attack forced weapons and ridges of armor through the dragon’s scales, injuring him badly as he crushed and thrashed the life from many of his enemies.

But not from the resourceful and valiant knight with the huge sword, Zhengyi saw, as that man danced out from under the tumbling wyrm and spun, slashing hard at the dragon’s flailing foreleg then moving past the limb to stab hard at the beast’s torso.

He tried to, at least, before an invisible force grabbed at the knight, the hand of telekinesis. As he leaped at the wyrm, he rose up over the beast and kept climbing into the air.

Zhengyi, quite pleased with himself, kept the man climbing.

Sir Donegan whipped around with great ferocity, trying to break free of the magical grasp. Rage gripped him as surely as the dragon’s spell as he saw again and again that image of the great wyrm biting Maryin apart. He went up twenty feet, fifty feet, and more, helpless as the dragon continued to slaughter his warriors, many of whom stared up at their flying leader, mouths hanging open, hope flying from their widened eyes.

Donegan slashed his great sword, as if trying to cut through some physical hand, but there was nothing to hit.

The knight turned his attention to the ceiling, which he fast approached. He braced himself for the impact, but never quite got there.

The invisible force let him go.

Screaming and cursing as he dropped, Sir Donegan refused to accept his fate. His startled cry became a roar of defiance, and he twisted himself around, lining his sword up with the head of the dragon, who did not see him coming.

Donegan’s blade drove in against the beast’s skull, cracking through the bone. Donegan held on until he, too, smashed into the wyrm, head first. His helmet jolted down, cracking his collarbone at either side. His neck compacted so forcefully that his spine turned to powder. He crunched into place and held for a moment, twisted over backward.

Then he rolled away, off the wyrm, whose great head was held suspended in the air, Donegan’s sword quivering in place like a third horn.

“Witch-King?” Urshula bellowed again, in a voice bubbling with blood. He peered at the wall where the wizards had been felled, and red filled his vision. “Witch-King!”

And Zhengyi answered him, not physically, but telepathically. Urshula spied a dark tunnel before him, and at its end, in bright light, stood the lich, holding the small dragon skull phylactery. Urshula instinctively resisted the pull of it. But there, in Zhengyi’s outstretched hand, was the promise of life, where otherwise there was only death. In that moment of terror, the blackness of oblivion looming, the wyrm surrendered to Zhengyi.

Urshula’s spirit flew from his dying body and rushed down the tunnel into the dragon skull gem.

Zhengyi marveled at his prize, for the skull glowed bright, seething with the spirit energy of the trapped dragon soul, the newborn dracolich Urshula.

Zhengyi’s newfound ally.

The Witch-King lowered the gem and considered the scene. He had timed his intervention perfectly, for only a couple of the warriors remained alive, and they lay helpless, squirming, groaning, and bleeding on the floor.

Zhengyi didn’t offer them the courtesy of a quick death. He cast another spell and magically departed with his prize taken and his victory complete, leaving them to their slow, painful deaths.

“You thought you had won those months ago when you defeated the force that had slipped behind you into Vaasa,” Byphast scolded Zhengyi on a cold Damaran winter morning.

“I won the day, indeed,” the Witch-King replied, and he looked up from the great tome on his desk to regard the dragon in elf form.

“My kin are fleeing you,” Byphast went on. “Lord Dragonsbane is a foe we will not face again. The allies arrayed against you are more formidable than you believed.”

“But they are mortal,” Zhengyi corrected. “And soon enough they will grow feeble with age and will wither and die.”

“You believed your kingdom secured,” the dragon countered.

Zhengyi had to refrain from laughing at her, so shaken did she seem by his calm demeanor. For her observations were correct; it was indeed all crumbling around him, and he knew that well. Gareth Dragonsbane could quite possibly win the day in Damara, and in that event the paladin would, at the very least, drive Zhengyi into hiding in a dark hole in Vaasa.

“It amuses me to see a dragon so fretful and obsessed with the near future,” he replied to her.

“Your plan will fail!”

“My plan will sleep. Cannot a dragon, a creature who might raze a town and retire comfortably in her lair for a century or more, understand the concept of patience? You disappoint me, Byphast. Do you not understand that while our enemies are mortal, I am not? And neither are you,” he reminded her, nodding to the shelf beside his desk where several gemstone dragon skulls sat waiting for the spirits of their attuned wyrms.

“My power comes not from my physical form,” the Witch-King continued, “but from the blackness that resides in the hearts of all men.”

He slipped his hands under the covers of the great tome and lifted it just a bit, just enough for Byphast to note the black binding engraved with brands of dragons—rearing dragons, sitting dragons, sleeping dragons, fighting dragons. Zhengyi eased the book back down, reached into his belt pouch, and produced a glowing dragon skull gem.

“Urshula the black,” Byphast remarked.

Zhengyi placed the skull against the center of the opened tome and whispered a few arcane words as he pressed down upon it.

The skull sank into the pages, disappearing within the depths of the tome.

Byphast sucked in her breath and stared hard at the Witch-King.

“If I do not win now, I win later,” Zhengyi explained. “With my allies beside me. Some foolish human, elf, or other mortal creature will find this tome and will seek the power contained within. In so doing he will unleash Urshula in his greater form.”

Zhengyi paused and glanced behind him, drawing Byphast’s gaze to a huge bookcase full of similar books.

“His greed, his frailty, his secret desire—nay, desperation—to grasp this great treasure that only I can offer him, will perpetuate my grand schemes, whatever the outcome of the coming battles on the fields of Damara.”

“So confident.…” Byphast said with a shake of her head and a smile that came from pity.

“Do you seek to sever your bond with the phylactery?” Zhengyi asked. “Do you wish to abandon this gift of immortality that I have offered you?”

Byphast’s smile withered.

“I thought not,” said Zhengyi. He closed the great book and lifted it into place on the shelf behind him. “My power is as eternal as a reasoning being’s fear of death, Byphast. Thus, I am eternal.” He glanced back at the newly finished tome. “Urshula was defeated in his lair, slain by the knights of the Bloodstone Army. But that only made him stronger, as King Gareth, or his descendants, will one day learn.”

Byphast stood very still for some time, soaking it all in. “I will not continue the fight,” she decided. “I will return to the Great Glacier and my distant home.”

Zhengyi shrugged as if it did not matter—and at that time, it really did not.

“But you will not sever your bond with the phylactery,” he noted.

Byphast stiffened and squared her jaw. “I will live another thousand years,” she declared.

But Zhengyi only smiled and said, “So be it. I am patient.”