Fate of Thorbardin

FOUR

"Er, Your Majesty,” said General Blade Darkstone tentatively. “Could I have a word?”

King Willim of Thorbardin glared at his military commander-glaring, at least, as much as a dwarf with no eyes could glare. He could see Darkstone clearly enough because of the spell of true-seeing that the monarch cast upon himself at all times, but he knew that the image of his face, with eye sockets stitched shut and scars irregularly marking his facial features, presented a horrific sight to those who dared to look at him. And he liked that.

“What is it?” he asked petulantly. His mind was already wandering, bored with whatever matters his chief general wished to discuss.

“It’s the security situation throughout the city. I strongly suggest we reform Norbardin’s militia and resume patrols. There are unruly elements, criminals and gangs organized along clan lines, that are beginning to claim control of their neighborhoods.”

Willim the Black sighed. He was an accomplished magic-user and master wizard in the Order of the Black Robes. He had vanquished countless enemies, including the captors who had gouged out his eyes and scarred his face, not to mention the recent king who had made him an outlaw. He had killed more victims than he could possibly count. He had killed for vengeance, for practical gain, for power, and for the simple pleasure of inflicting death. He relished killing and violence, and he craved power.

At the same time, he had grown increasingly restless in his new role as high king of Thorbardin. In truth, it seemed as though the pursuit of the crown and the destruction of its previous holder had constituted a far more exciting endeavor than did actually ruling the place. He spent much of his time stalking around the capital city, terrifying his subjects and surveying a shockingly damaged and battle-scarred domain. When he sat on the rocky chair that served as his throne and looked out-quite literally since the palace walls remained broken and pockmarked, the aftermath of the war that had brought him to the throne-over his capital city, he saw a wasteland. And that wasteland held very little real interest for him.

That city, Norbardin, was indeed shattered. A pall of smoke lingered in the air, a layer of sooty murk that seemed to remain suspended a dozen feet above the ground. Neither did it reach to the lofty ceiling of the subterranean city; instead, it hung there like a stratus, a layer of gritty foulness in the cake that had once been Thorbardin’s greatest city.

He tried to force himself to think about Darkstone’s suggestion. There was clear danger in letting the clans organize around distinct power bases. His own clan, the Theiwar, had long been oppressed by the others-most notably the Hylar and Daergar-who feared the Theiwars’ skill at magic. For the first time in modern history, one of their own had gained the throne of Thorbardin, and that certainly created an opportunity for the Theiwar to advance their status throughout the city of Norbardin and, indeed, within the entire great nation.

But Willim really didn’t care that much about the fortunes of his clan or any other clan. For a moment he thought wistfully about his chief apprentice, the voluptuous Facet. She was gone from Thorbardin, sent by the wizard on an important mission. Yet even that crucial task seemed to pale in comparison to his immediate desires. He missed Facet and wished she would return to him soon.

His head remained down, but his spell of true-seeing allowed him to inspect the wasteland that was Norbardin, to scrutinize the vast plaza-still covered with the wrack and ruin of war-where his army had at last prevailed over the forces of the late king, Jungor Stonespringer. He remembered a bitter truth: it was not Willim’s army that had prevailed, but his creature of Chaos, the fire dragon named Gorathian. The wizard had unleashed the monster from its magical bonds, and it had embarked upon an orgy of destruction, boring through the solid rock of Thorbardin’s foundation, incinerating anything combustible, burning to death countless dwarves. It was Gorathian that had had most of the fun.

One of those victims had been the former king, and his death had sealed Willim’s victory. Yet it was the fire dragon, not the victory, that most occupied Willim’s attentions.

“What was that?” the wizard demanded, springing up from his chair, tense and trembling. He probed the murky distance with every fiber of his mind, injecting the spell of true-seeing into shadowy crevices, around corners, even under slabs of heavy rock.

“I didn’t see anything, lord,” Darkstone said firmly.

“There!” cried Willim, his voice cracking. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you feel it?”

The great cavern seemed warmer already and was growing hotter by the second. Willim felt sick to his stomach, picturing the vicious, treacherous beast approaching from any direction. Indeed, Gorathian could fly through stone, could melt the very bedrock of the world. It was Willim’s sincere belief that Gorathian would appear someday without warning, bursting from the floor-or the ceiling, or the walls-to devour the powerful wizard in one lethal, incinerating bite. Willim feared only one thing: the return of Gorathian.

“It comes!” croaked Willim. “It is near!”

“I presume you refer to the fire dragon,” the general replied. “But I am sorry to say I detect no sign of the cursed beast’s presence.”

“It’s coming!” shrieked the wizard king. “It’s coming; it’s here!”

And with a word of magic, Willim teleported away to the safety of his dark, cold lair.

Yes, the creature of Chaos had a name: Gorathian; and it had a form: fire dragon.

And it had a hunger that gnawed and ached and burned within. It was a being of dark power, chaos fueled by the magic that thrummed and lurked and seethed in the very bowels of the world. And magic was the only thing that could infuse it with more power, that could soothe the ache, ease the hunger.

Willim guessed right. There was one target the fire dragon sought more than any other: the former master who had imprisoned it, taunted it, and finally released it to, he had dared to hope, serve his will.

But the fire dragon was not a subservient being nor did it willingly forgive those whom it hated. So it stalked the underworld darkness of Thorbardin, relentlessly seeking the spoor of the wizard whom it hated and that, someday, would consume. True, Willim the Black’s powerful spells made him an elusive target, for he could teleport away at the first hint of danger. But the dark wizard must sleep and eat and slake his other mortal needs. Those needs could not help but distract him in the end, and the end would come; if Gorathian could strike when the wizard was distracted, the wizard would surely die.

Each narrow escape only served to fuel the fire dragon’s hunger. Soon, it would feed.

Gorathian swept through the bedrock of Thorbardin, flying through solid stone with little more effort than a fish needed to pass through water. Behind it, the fire dragon left a wake of smoldering stone, a wormhole passage of melted rock and acrid, bitter smoke. The nation of the dwarves was permeated by such passages, nearly all of them created during the Chaos War, when scores of dragons like Gorathian had scourged the cities and warrens of the ancient nation.

Many of the cities had been so weakened by those boreholes that they had collapsed, in part or in total, heavy layers of pavement and stone buildings crumbling downward to crush the lower environs in cities such as Theibardin, Daebardin, and other vaunted clan homes.

The most violent destruction had been wrought upon the greatest city of all: Hybardin, the Life-Tree of the Hylar, which had tumbled and collapsed and fallen into a mass of rubble. Once the great community had been one of the wonders of the world, rising as a pillar from the middle of the Urkhan Sea, extending all the way to the ceiling of the vast cavern holding the sea, and serving as Life-Tree to so many of Thorbardin’s great cities. Wracked by war, weakened by the onslaught of Chaos, the Life-Tree had collapsed, and with it had fallen the Hylar-inspired dreams of a prosperous and peaceful future for all dwarfkind.

The scar of the place where the Life-Tree had been rooted was called the Isle of the Dead. It rose from the still waters of the Urkhan Sea as a pile of loose rock, with an occasional section of shattered column or ruined facade discernible amid the broken stone.

For many years after the Chaos War, the Isle of the Dead had been truly that, a place where broken shards of rock, some of them bigger than a house, had frequently snapped free from the cracked and jagged upper tier, where the city had once supported the vast cavern ceiling. The deadly missiles had fallen steadily and relentlessly, ensuring than any dwarf-or other creature-who sought to remain upon the isle would eventually be crushed by falling stone.

Almost unnoticed by most of Thorbardin, however, that bombardment had slowed and virtually ceased over the past decade. Nearly all of the broken stones had finally broken loose, so the ceiling that remained was relatively, if not perfectly, intact.

It was on the Isle of the Dead that Gorathian came to rest, to contemplate, and to wait. The wizard had a lair and a palace and other places that he frequented, and the fire dragon knew all of those places. It could go to any of them, at will, and it frequently did, sallying from the island to wherever it wanted to go in Thorbardin, killing dwarves with thoughtless abandon-often they died merely from proximity to its incendiary transit-and further eroding the bedrock of the undermountain realm.

Sooner or later it would catch its prey. It would feed.

And at last its hunger would be sated.