Prophet of Moonshae

3

The black-haired princess closed the door behind her, welcoming the sheltering confines of the palace library. This was the only place where she felt that she was truly her own mistress. Often she buried herself in the great works here. She loved the histories of peoples and nations, the subtle mysteries suggesting powers great and deep-knowledge that lurked discreetly amid the volumes, waiting only for the one who had the patience to seek it out.

Now, however, she felt tense and impatient, finding it impossible to sit down and read. She paced the wooden floor over boarskin rugs and finally found herself before one of the three narrow windows in the library's outer wall. As usual, it was shuttered against the weather.

Now Deirdre threw open the shutters to reveal a landscape of moors and hills, all blanketed by a heavy overcast. No rain fell-at least, not for now-so she left the window open and then cast open the other two pairs of shutters. Finally she turned to regard the room in the increased illumination.

Several heavy tables stood between the boarskins, as well as soft chairs that formed a casual semicircle before a fireplace and hearth of heavy, rounded fieldstone. Oil lanterns occupied each of the tables, as well as the mantel over the hearth, but the princess much preferred the natural lighting, even filtered as it was by the charcoal-colored clouds.

Dark boards paneled the walls of the library, framing the great shelves with their rows of scrolls and tomes of arcane or historical import and the thoughts of learned sages-the most extensive library in all the Moonshae Islands.

Many sources, Deirdre knew, had been added to the royal collection only during the last twenty years. These tomes and volumes had been discovered in Caer Allisynn, the tall castle that now rested on the shores of Corwell Firth beside Caer Corwell, her father's home.

The tale of that castle had become a common legend in the isles, the topic of numerous ballads. The tomb of Queen Allisynn, bride of the hero, Cymrych Hugh, it had been built centuries ago to serve as a resting place for the young wife upon her untimely death. Bereaved, Cymrych Hugh had used the power of his druidic council to send the fortress into the sea, where for hundreds of years it had rested on the bottom, secure from trespass and plunder. But then, at Tristan Kendrick's hour of greatest need, the goddess had sent the castle forth from the depths. Its magnificent presence had helped to place him on the High Throne.

Upon the King's ultimate victory over the forces that threatened to drag the Moonshae Islands into darkness and chaos, the castle anchored itself upon the shores of Corwell Firth. There it remained proudly, a sign of the Kendrick reign. The fractious nations of the Ffolk-Moray, Corwell, Callidyrr, and Snowdown-had, for the first time since the rule of Cymrych Hugh himself, united under a strong leader. Together they formed a kingdom strong enough to stand against their traditional enemies to the north.

The northmen, savage warriors who had long ago sailed into the islands upon their sleek longships, seeking war and plunder, instead found homelands and farmsteads. Since well before Tristan Kendrick's birth, fully half the islands' land was controlled by the sea raiders. King Kendrick, however, had forged a lasting peace with their neighbors to the north. While the northmen swore no fealty to the High King's crown, they had nonetheless ceased raiding the lands of the Ffolk. In this state of truce, with the two cultures standing side by side, the isles had no cause to fear any outside threat.

All of this, Deirdre knew, was her father's legacy. His reign had changed the face of the Moonshaes and given the Ffolk the hero they had sought for centuries. For fifteen years, the promise of that gleaming coronation had been sustained. It was an auspicious start, she thought bitterly, to a reign that had slowly degenerated into a struggle for the Ffolk's survival. The threat to the people had come from an unexpected source: the skies, and the clouds, and the sea. The Ffolk had always lived as a part of their land, using the earth and her fruits as a means of prosperity, but never vanquishing the elements of nature and beauty. Led spiritually by the druids, who formed the staunch spine of their religion, the Ffolk had cared for their wild places with all the devotion they had given to their pastures and fields.

The first clerics of the New Gods had journeyed to the Moonshaes several centuries before the reign of Tristan Kendrick, and their words had been filtering through the cities and towns through all those years, enticing and converting many of the island people to the worship of deities such as Chauntea, Helm, Selene, and Talos. And though they welcomed these New Gods, and many people took them into their homes and their hearts, always the Ffolk remained rooted firmly in the earth-and the benign goddess who was the land's true mother.

But with the epic battle waged by Tristan Kendrick against the dark and warlike Bhaal, a transformation had come over the land. The Moonwells, once the lustrous sources of power for the druids, had faded to mundane ponds. The druids themselves had lost their powers. Although many of them still survived, dwelling hermitlike among the oaks, aspens, and pines of the Moonshae forests, their magic no longer flowed from the earth. Many of the Ffolk blamed the last five years' onslaught of storm, drought, blizzard, and hurricane upon the loss of this faith. They had called upon the druids to save them, to plead with the goddess for a return of her power, her benign influence and protection.

These prayers had gone universally unanswered.

Even years ago, at the wide-eyed age of fourteen years, Deirdre had known they would. She could not have explained then, nor could she now, the source of this knowledge. She only knew it to be a fundamental truth that she sensed in the deepest core of her being.

The goddess was dead! The Ffolk would turn to the New Gods and bring them into their hearts and souls. Only then would the storms cease and bounty once again return to the land. Yet the young princess inherently mistrusted gods and considered dependence upon them to be a mistake.

Still impatient, Deirdre tried to force herself to sit at the table. Opened there was a rare volume she had been perusing, The Military History of the Sword Coast, by the famed sage, Elminster of Waterdeep. She had spent more than a week with the volume and had come to the conclusion that the famed scholar was in reality a pompous old windbag. There was perhaps an element of parochialism in her opinion-the ancient authority had spent little space on the wars waged in the Moonshaes or the southern realms of Calimshan and Amn, preferring instead to prattle overlong about the crucial role of Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate to the advance of civilization in the world.

Angrily she pushed the book aside, knowing that it didn't contain the things she desired to know. She paced before the great shelf, examining scrolls-The Ballad of Cymrych Hugh, by the famed Greater Bard Dolsow. . Mastery of Arcane Transformation, a stack of parchments containing essays by many of the mightiest wizards of Waterdeep … a fresh scroll, barely ten years old, containing the epic poem called The Darkwalker War, by the bard Tavish of Snowdown.

Deirdre knew Tavish well, having called this loyal friend of her parents "Auntie" since the days she could say her first words. This, the bard's greatest ballad, related the tale of Tristan's rise from the small kingdom of Corwell to his status as High King. Several years ago, Deirdre had confounded and embarrassed her parents by analyzing the structure of the verse and comparing it-unfavorably, and in Tavish's presence-to Dolsow's earlier work on Cymrych Hugh.

But none of these volumes, nor any others around her, answered her purpose of the moment, for in truth Deirdre sought neither knowledge nor wisdom. Her hunger was simple and well focused in a fundamental craving for power.

Anger flared within her-the old, familiar anger, mostly directed toward her older sister. Alicia was flippant and irresponsible, far less diligent than Deirdre. Yet one day Alicia would be queen! The bitter injustice rose like gall in her throat, and she paced the library, unable to contain her agitation. Power! That was the door, and knowledge was the key that would open it.

For a time, Deirdre had sought this power through the mastery of sorcery. She studied the tomes of the mages. She pleaded and begged with Keane to teach her the beginning elements of sorcery, enchantments she had mastered with an ease that had amazed her tutor.

Then suddenly Keane had told her that he would teach her no more. He offered no acceptable explanation, making some lame excuse about "time away from her serious studies," which she knew to be a blatant falsehood. Yet the man had evaded her every attempt to draw an answer from him, all the while refusing to aid her in any further development of her magic-using skills.

This had left Deirdre to labor on her own, and to this end, she used the library. For long hours, sometimes all through the night, she squinted at sorcerous sigils, straining in the light of a sputtering lamp to decipher the instructions left by some long-dead practitioner of enchantment. This was where Deirdre had found her solace-and where also, she sensed, she would discover her future.

Still, she couldn't bring herself now to sit and read or even to meditate. She continued to pace the room, crossing to each window in turn and gazing across the moor, seeing the rain falling in sheets, still miles away but creeping inexorably closer.

Finally her pacing worked some of the tension from her muscles and she collapsed into a soft chair, facing the open window. Slowly, reluctantly, she closed her eyes. In a few minutes, she slept, but it was not a restful slumber.

Instead, she twitched in the chair, clenching and unclenching her hands, groaning between taut lips or kicking restlessly with her feet. As she slept, the storm crept closer, and tendrils of mist reached forward like clutching fingers, struggling to pull Callidyrr into the clouds' rain-lashed embrace.

One of the tentacles probed at the castle wall, swirling like a miniature whirlwind beyond the open window of the library. It probed inward, wisping around the sleeping princess, caressing her long black hair. It poised there only for a moment as huge gray clouds massed, and then the rain swept across the city and the castle and bay, swallowing the small tendril. Yet, as proven by the thunder and by the exultant, battering rain, the storm was well pleased.

The opening of the library door startled Deirdre awake, and she sat up quickly, rigid, prepared to rebuke whoever dared enter without knocking. She paused when she saw who was there.

"Hello, Mother," Deirdre said quietly.

Robyn Kendrick, High Queen of the Isles, nodded wearily at her younger daughter. It seemed, Deirdre thought, that her mother did everything wearily these days.

"Are you reading, Daughter?" she asked. Robyn's black hair, unlike her husband's of brown, showed no trace of gray. It fell straight and full over her shoulders and back, past her waist, to the level of her knees. Her eyes, of deep green, were bright and alert, though lines of care now spiderwebbed outward from the corners. She walked with all the grace of her station, but Deirdre suspected that her mother sometimes wanted to cast that mantle aside and return to her life of simple tenderness and care, the life of a druid.

Twenty years before, Robyn had been the most accomplished member of that order, studying under the Great Druid, Genna Moonsinger herself. With the passing of the land from the hands of the Earthmother into the watchful protection of Chauntea, goddess of agriculture, Robyn-unlike most of the other druids of the Moonshaes-had changed her faith to the worship of Chauntea.

Deirdre thought that perhaps, unlike the bulk of her compeers, Robyn had sensed the truth of the Earthmother's passing and had turned to a living deity to pursue the pathway into the future. More likely, thought Deirdre, she had understood that her role as queen would take her from the lands and wilds she had grown to love. Her daughters sensed that this choice of their mother's-to take the hand of the man she had loved, at the expense of the places she had sworn to tend-was a burden that she carried with her to this day.

"Did you meet with your father and the lords?" inquired Robyn, sitting in one of the chairs before the cold fireplace. Though the hearth was bare, she leaned forward, as if seeking some sort of residual warmth.

"Yes. Earl Blackstone, as always, was quite persuasive."

Robyn sighed. "We need him, now-you know that. Without the gold he mines and pays in tribute to the king, we wouldn't be able to trade for even minimal goods. His efforts keep thousands of Ffolk from starving each winter."

"I know. You don't have to convince me of that." Deirdre didn't particularly care about the lord and his mines, or the trading needed to sustain her people. She did, however, know that Lord Blackstone was the most powerful lord on the island-after her father, of course-and thus, on his visits to Callidyrr, she made every effort to impress him with her acuity and intelligence. She remembered that he still had two sons and had determined that one day she would meet them.

"And you know that your father sails for Waterdeep in a week?"

"Yes. You were to remain here in his place."

"But now I am needed in Blackstone to inspect the new mines our esteemed lord wishes to open-to sanction the violation of a Moonwell." Robyn's voice remained quiet, her manner somber. Nothing in her tone betrayed other than the logical necessity of the mine, yet her daughter saw a deep bitterness in her mother's eyes.

Robyn looked out the open windows, her expression wistful. The rain did not enter the room but lashed against the courtyard beyond the window. They could feel the moisture on the freshening wind. The queen wished to close the windows, Deirdre knew, but the princess stubbornly remained seated. Something about this storm appealed to her, and if it caused her mother to leave her alone, so be it.

Surprisingly, Robyn rose and crossed to the windows herself, pulling each shutter closed and latching it in turn. When the last shutter was closed, a cloak of semidarkness pervaded the library.

"Mother," Deirdre said, suddenly bold, "what does Chauntea tell you of these storms? Does she offer us no succor? Should we not pray to a different god for deliverance?"

She expected her mother's response to be anger at her sacrilege. Indeed, that was part of the reason she had asked the question. Instead, Robyn surprised her again.

"We can pray to whatever gods we like," she said, her voice level. "But I am beginning to think that they have all forsaken us."

Deirdre looked at her mother in surprise. The princess was startled to find the queen's eyes boring into her own, flashing with an emerald intensity that the young woman found unsettling. Immediately Deirdre cast her eyes down to the floor, her face flushing. She felt guilty, as though she had been caught doing something wrong.

As softly as she had entered, Robyn left the room. Deirdre, standing in the center of the dim library, looked after her mother and wondered.

The expanse of ice stretched to the encircling horizon, and for uncountable leagues beyond. Windswept, so bleak it was almost featureless, the glaciers and snowpack would have glared beneath rays of bright sunlight. But so far north did they lie that even now, in late spring, the sun was a pale sphere climbing through a shallow arc, never moving far from the southern limits of view.

Winds moaned, breathing frost across snowdrifts and jagged shards of ice. No other sound disturbed this region; no wolves howled, no birds cried, nor seals barked, for the glacial waste was utterly devoid of life.

Then one day, after eternal seasons of lifeless chill, something moved. It began as a patch of ice buckled, sending shivers across the face of whiteness. Cracks appeared, and light snow puffed away, flying from niches and crannies where it had escaped from the wind.

Then a great sheet of the surface pitched into the air, toppling to the side, crashing into a million pieces. Below, a vast chasm lay revealed, and in the depths of that chasm, a presence stirred.

Gotha moved for the first time in more than two centuries. Talos the Destroyer had summoned him to his task and imbued the dracolich with the strength to free himself from the crushing tons of ice.

The creature that emerged from the depths of the glacier resembled only superficially the powerful wyrm that had come here more than two hundred years before. The scales, blood-red chips of plate as hard as bone, still coated the serpentine crimson body. Yet now, as the monster moved, many of those scales cracked and fell away, revealing flesh that had long since frozen and organs that had ceased to serve any purpose, for the dragon was now a being of the undead.

The huge wings unfurled, and they, too, cracked and splintered, grown brittle from the long generations of frozen inactivity. When they finally reached their full span, they looked more like spiderwebs than wings, for most of their leathery surface had broken away.

Yet, when Gotha pressed them downward, he flew, borne aloft by a dark power that transcended the mere pressure of wing surface against air. He sprang into the air and gained altitude slowly, driving the great limbs against the wind and feeling the air pass through the shattered membranes. And then he knew: It was the power of his undeath that supported him, the might of Talos coursing through the corrupt body.

At the thought of that capriciously malevolent deity, Gotha raised his head and uttered a bellow of rage. His hatred, having festered for centuries, now spewed forth, and all of it exploded toward that hated presence, the whispering voice in his brain that he had known as Talos the Destroyer.

Yet now, as he flew, Gotha sensed the god's will, a compulsion that came into his mind. He struggled to resist, but he could not. The vow he had made so long ago still bound him. He would do the task toward which Talos compelled him.

Deep in the dragon's mind, however, hatred and resentment seethed, building into a volatile compulsion for vengeance. Someday, somehow, the dracolich would strike out at the god who had betrayed him, but having passed so many centuries already, he would remain patient.

After hours of flight, the ice fell behind, breaking into a fringe of alabaster chips bobbing in the storm-tossed waters of the northernmost oceans. The vista below evolved from the unending, still, and lifeless white of the icecap to the constantly pitching and heaving surface of gray water, flecked with foaming whitecaps. For long hours, the monster passed no island, no settlement, human or otherwise, in its great southward flight.

The seascape below held no fear for the dracolich. Indeed, Gotha felt as though he could fly forever. But he also knew that he would not have to.

The first spots of rock showed as little more than bald crowns thrusting up between the waves like desperate swimmers struggling for air. When the gray water rose, it often buried these tiny bits of land, too small, really, to be called islands. Nevertheless, these rocks were important, for they confirmed to Gotha that he followed the right course.

Indeed, shortly afterward, the dracolich saw larger rocks, some with patches of green showing on narrow shelves perched high on steep shoulders, out of reach of the grasping brine.

The Korinn Archipelago.

The name entered the creature's mind unbidden, and again he felt the hateful presence of Talos. But Gotha couldn't resist the compulsion in his master's instructions. His vow, made in good faith to the god more than two centuries ago, bound him to obey until he had performed the task commanded by Talos.

On some of these islets, Gotha saw houses, with chimneys that puffed smoke into the air and fields speckled with white dots-sheep! Every fiber of the great monster's being urged him to swoop down to ravage these settlements, destroying the houses, slaying the humans, and devouring the sheep.

But such was not the will of Talos, and reluctantly the flying creature veered away. It suited his master's will that Gotha remain undiscovered by the island's inhabitants. Now the dracolich swerved to the west, once again over gray open water.

Something disturbed the water's surface, arrogantly carving a course through the tossing waves, leaving a foaming wake in its path. A single tall mast stood in the center of the sleek, narrow vessel, and from that mast a proud sail billowed. A long, slender hull trailed from an elegantly curved figurehead of a blond-haired goddess. The sleek craft flew over the sea, running before the full power of the wind.

Here Gotha could fulfill his master's command and also slake his expanded thirst for blood, for he knew there would be no survivors to report his presence.

Diving, the dracolich swooped toward the ship. He saw humans scurrying about in the shallow hull, heard their screams and even saw them raise bows and swords and axes, mere stinging annoyances to the monstrous apparition that settled toward the stern of the vessel.

Gotha's wings expanded, and the dracolich settled his rear legs on the transom, feeling the ship rock and groan under the massive weight. Two brawny warriors wearing horned helms sprang at the creature's momentarily exposed belly.

The beast slashed out with a single forepaw, pitching the shredded remains of the two northmen over the side as bait for sharks … or worse. Massive jaws gaped, and Gotha belched a searing cloud of fire straight into the bulging pocket of the longship's sail.

The canvas flared briefly and then collapsed, still flaming, onto the sailors crowded amidships. But these men of the north now rushed at the horrific thing that pressed the stern of their vessel into the brine. Gray water roared over the gunwales, each wave carrying the craft a little lower in the heaving swells.

Gotha met the attackers with his foreclaws, ripping their heads away or tearing open great wounds in their chests and bellies. The hull filled with blood and water as more and more corpses joined their fellows among the planks along the keel. Flames, meanwhile, coursed down the mast and spread through the forequarters of the vessel, hissing upward and greedily consuming the seasoned timbers that held the ship together.

More of the fierce northmen hacked at the monster that threatened their ship. One veteran succeeded in reaching the beast, driving a gleaming battle-axe against the decaying chest, but the axe bit against one of the exposed ribs, and the keen blade shattered into a thousand shards. Gaping jaws closed about the head and torso of the axeman, lifting him from the hull. His exposed legs kicked madly for a second, until the monster bit down. The severed limbs toppled into the sea.

Gotha knew a fierce joy that he had all but forgotten. The smoke wafting past his nostrils, the taste of warm blood, the sounds of shrieks and screams of terror-all of these combined to vitalize his undead heart, to feed his evil soul.

Finally he sprang back into the air, the force of his upward leap shoving the flaming vessel's stern beneath the waves for the final time. The bow, with its elegant female figurehead, loomed in the air for a moment, and then, with a sizzling hiss, the once-sleek ship disappeared beneath the waves.

Gotha flew onward, fiercely exultant. His hatred for Talos remained, but now it was easier for the beast to hold the emotion in the background of his awareness. Indeed, he had already begun to serve his new master, and that service had given the monster pleasure.

Ahead, another block of land rose from the water, a larger island than those the beast had first encountered in the archipelago. This rocky shore was bleak, all but uninhabited, and here Gotha settled to earth.

He dove toward the breakers erupting against the shore, knowing that he had arrived at the place where he had been sent. Here finally his work could truly begin.

Musings of the Harpist

Today I embark for Callidyrr. I knew when I awakened this morning that the time had come, for I saw the evidence of mighty portent before my very eyes.

Is it the power of the goddess, somehow miraculously resurgent? Or the presence of evil, once again threatening these shores? I cannot say for certain. Even a bard must sometimes stick to the unadulterated facts!

Yet the significance is great-as great as anything in the past twenty years. For as I look to the west this dawn, along the mist-shrouded shore of the firth, I see that Caer Allisynn is gone. The proud castle has silently vanished into the mist, sinking back beneath the sea. Its absence casts an unsettling pall over the town of Corwell.

Now I must take word to the king.