 |
| Marner |
Cinniúint is more than just a mage, Marner had said. He’s an adventurer.
What does that mean? Hradji had asked.
The world, Marner had answered, somewhat illusively, Hradji
thought.
The door creaked open, revealing
this Cinniúint—a Flan, for the love
of Lendor! —, ushering in a breath of the storm sweeping up the coast. It
smelled like home: the spray of brine, kelp washed up on the rocks, of fish,
mollusks, oysters, clams, shrimp, and crabs. It smelled like the sulphurous conflagration
of blue and green; and it smelled like those who dwelt within its confluence.
Not like the weakling that washed in with it. He smelled like the dusty tombs and
ink he carried.
Hradji shook his head. What
worth could this Flan possibly have? Had they ever been a proud and valorous
people? Some say they were, once. The crone swore by that notion. But in the
songs of the skalds they had always been as weak as they were now. Why did they paint themselves, like that?
Hradji wondered. And what did those runes and figures on their flesh mean?
 |
| Cinniúint |
“I didn’t ask you to,” Hradji
said.
“Be that as it may,” the mage
began before Hradji cut him off.
“It was their idea that we meet.”
“It was,” this Cinniúint said. “Alright,” he continued
after a moment’s pause, “I understand your peoples’ prejudice regarding magi….”
“No, you do not.”
“Actually, I do; and better than
you do, I imagine.”
Hradji crossed his arms. “Do
you?”
“I do. You blame us for the Rain
of Colourless Fire. And for the Fall.” The mage raised his arms as if to say, guilty as charged … whatever. “I also
know that a certain Zelligar the Unknown rained death upon your people not so
long ago. But shouldn’t you also hate anyone who wields steel then, too,
considering how many of your kin Rogahn the Fearless slaughtered?
“Stupid descriptors,” Cinniúint
pondered. “Unknown… Fearless… One imagines a less than learned scholar
translated those from Old Oeridian; or from Suloise to Oeridian to Aerdian….”
He shrugged. Whatever. “Magic is a
tool to those who wield it. So too the channelling of divine will, and you don’t
censure your Sisters of Mercy. Or hate them. Or your skalds, either. Or your
forest rangers, for that matter. And they all practice one Art or another.”
A silence lingered between them.
“Now,” Cinniúint said, “I’ve
taken the liberty to gather together what we know of Tostencha and the Griff
Mountains.” Cinniúint glanced up at Hradji and recognised the Friztii’s
confusion. “Shrellingshald …?”
The silence between them lingered.
***
A cacophony filled the void’s
absence.
What happened? What was that? Is
Fridmund dead? Each frantic question hurled at Cinniúint entwined with another,
and fell into another void, as Cinniúint seemed disinclined to answer any. His
eyes darted from one dark corner to another. No new void was gathering. Indeed,
the darkness that filled the void’s absence was a benign comfort in the wake of
the horror that had passed.
“I don’t know,” he said once the
questions abated. To which question, he did not say.
Hradji took hold of the mage; he
shook him, he lifted him off his feet, and hammered him into a runic pillar.
“Do something,” he shrieked at the mage. Hradji was wild with fright, fertile
soil for the anger that grew within him.
Ylva cried, “Don’t,” pulling at
Hradji, restraining the blow sure to follow; but Hradji was deaf to her plea.
“What would you have me do?”
Cinniúint asked.
“Get Fridmund back!”
“From where?”
Hradji’s shriek deepened to a
growl. “From where that … thing … took him.”
“And where is that? I detected
no magic where the vortex was. It was no gate, no portal; it was nothing at all.”
Hradji dropped the mage, who
fought to keep to his feet. “Then what good are you?”
Hradji remembered then how
Cinniúint stared at Fridmund before they descended into the bowels of the
temple. He recalled how Cinniúint shivered, and had not uttered a word of
warning. “What did you see before we entered this place,” Hradji asked? “What
did you … divine?”
“Nothing that I can describe.”
Hradji advanced on Cinniúint again,
but stopped short when he sensed Scáthú’s presence in a nearby shadow. Hradji backed
away, raising his axe. Use me! invaded his mind. He had
the thought of pressing the orb to the mage’s head, and incinerating him.
“Try.”
“I believe this is a temple
venerating the Elder Elemental God.”
“What’s that?”
“An evil older than the eldest
evil. Little is known about it. Nothing concrete, anyway. It may be older than
creation, itself.”
“And that took Fridmund?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“I do not know.”
“You knew; and yet you said
nothing.”
“I felt fear and horror when I
read the cards. Mine, yours, Fridmund’s, everyone’s. Of what could I have
warned us?”
Hradji gripped the agate,
listening to its murmur. The mage covets me. Use me.
Collect us all.
“Collect
the other baubles,” he commanded.
Gunnar’s
eyes darted from Hradji to the others in turn, before his gaze settled on
Hradji again.
Hradji
did not break sight with Cinniúint and Scáthú. “Don’t touch the black alter,
and you’ll be safe.” Gunnar was not convinced of Hradji’s certainty.
“Leave them,” Cinniúint begged.
“I will not leave here
empty-handed.”
A glance from Hradji set Gunnar
to his task. He approached the first with caution. Nudged it with a toe, and
then a gloved finger before daring to lift it to inspection. It was cold to the
touch, a simple stone. It did not become the golden globe he worried would deal
death by touch. He gathered the rest, each making its way into a pack. And gave
it to Hradji, as bid.
“Nothing can be done for
Fridmund?”
Cinniúint shook his head.
 |
| The passage out... |
The passage out was swift. And
silent. None spoke. Each was lost in their thoughts. Each strained to hear what
might lurk in the darkness, wary that more of the Sons of Kyuss or some other
horror might spill out from every echoing chamber, from behind every blind
corner. None did.
Did this Keraptis create them, Hradji wondered.
…and they waste away, to this very day, the crone had said, before
cackling her pleasure at presumably having foreseen his and their deaths. She
would pay for her silence, Hradji vowed. The mage too, he decided.
Day had dawned upon their crawling
out of the temple’s depths. Brightly. Dazzlingly. Hradji had to shield his eyes
to the glare, regardless that its radiance was muted by the temple’s tarnished
magnificence. Even so, they stumbled about in the dull glare, and despite their
care, their exit echoed as piercingly as had their entrance, the scattered
kaleidoscope of shattered glass crackling underfoot. If the temple had been
bright, the courtyard was truly blinding. And as blessedly vacant as before.
The snow scintillated without the earlier windswept clouds to dampen its
ghastly brilliance. The air was still. Silent. Casting a portentous shroud of
warning over the court.
 |
| The air was still. Silent. |
Shattered by a screech. One.
Another. A sudden discordance of them.
A whirl of arrow shafts cut
though the discordance. Scáthú ducked under the volley and sprang for the
enclosure ahead. Until a kobold, then two, then ten, then a score more burst
out of the radiating streets, from the gaping wounds of the surrounding
blackened buildings. There seemed no end to them.
 |
| Kobolds! |
Hraji took no note of what
Cinniúint and Ylva intoned, rushing to aide his soon to be hard-pressed kin,
Gunnar close on his heels. It was then that Hradji spied the gigantic kobold, who
had led that ill-fated attack on his people, leading the fray. The kobold
bellowed its rage, the same bellow that had almost lured Hradji to his death
upon the trail. It howled; it bayed. It flourished its spear above its head and
clashed it against the scaley shield it brandished. Hradji hurled his small axe
at it, only to see it ricochet off the seemingly flimsy defense without any
perceptible effect.
Hradji roared and rushed it. It
rushed at him, and sidestepped Hradji’s hastily swung axe with ease. It ducked
beneath his return swing and stabbed at him, and backed away, discovering in
panic, that the press of its clan had cut off its escape. Its eyes widened as Hradji
hued down on its lesser height. Hradji expected his axe to cleave the leathern
shield with ease. Only it didn’t. It rebounded. And the impact numbed his grip,
causing the axe to spiral away. The kobold barked laughter. Oh no, you don’t, Hradi seethed as he
threw himself on the shield and the kobold under it, satisfied by the bleat flattened
beneath it. He drew his poniard, and thrust it under the leather frame. It
kicked. And flailed. But it could not throw Hradji, who stabbed under the oval
frame repeatedly, until it bucked and flailed no more. It was Hradji’s turn to
laugh as he pulled the leather-wrapped frame from the dragon dog’s arm,
surprised that it did not tear from its body from the strain. He used it to beat
back the press. Before long, they were too beaten by it to approach again.
Hradji held the shield and
poniard wide, begging them to try to kill him. When they did not, he retrieved
his axe, and stepped towards the craven beasts.
“Come and play,” he whispered.
But before he could take another
the oerth shook beneath his feet. A thunderous roar followed. The kobolds tittered,
and scattered, their chittering laughter lingering even after they had
clambered back into the buildings from which they had only just boiled.
Hradji turned to meet the next
thunderous roar, into a resounding flap of wing, like canvas taken by the wind.
A moment later, an enormous blue-white shape resolved out of the sunlight and
lit atop the temple’s dome, where it glared and blew icy torrents about its
reptilian head. Its wings beat at the air, stirring the once placid court into
whirls of snow, each flap punctuated by the barbed tips of its leathery wings,
each rush suffused with the smell of snow and ice and the taint of carrion. It
flung its head higher than the spire it curled around, and shrilled into the
heavens.
“Fuck me,” Hradji breathed.
He might have heard a whisper
enticing him to: Use me, but if he did, he was
deaf to it as the dragon stretched its wings to their fullest, draping the
court in shadow.
It leapt.
They scattered, each to the
closest cover they could find.
But as Hradji looked left and
right, he knew all too well that he could never find shelter before the drake
was upon him. If he ran, he was sure to be crushed, or impaled, or played with
as a cat might a mouse before the slaughter; but if he closed with the
descending behemoth, it just might overshoot him. Or so he hoped. Kord hates
a coward, he reasoned, as he leapt forward, convinced that this was the
biggest mistake he had ever made in his life. And his last. Arrows flew at the
dragon as it plummeted, each deflected and snapped, not one able to find any
weakness it its scaley hide. Hradji knew, even as he began, that he would not
succeed. The dragon dropped too quickly and would soon land before him, if not atop
him. So be it! He raised the kobold’s scaley shield and prepared to spend his
life in the futile hope that his axe would do what the barrage of arrows had
yet to accomplish.
A hot, blistering cackle of
lightning flew up at the drake, engulfing it, and the monstrous lizard
shrieked. It twisted in agony, it crumpled in on itself. It no longer flew
unerringly at the doomed Hradji; but fell like the weight it was without its
wings darkening the court below its path, its impact shaking the oerth and
showering the then levelled Hradji in a blizzard of blinding snow.
Hradji rose and prepared to meet
his fate when the burley Gunnar swept past his thane and battered the prostrate
beast with his sword. It clanged as it bounced from the dragon’s hide, its
rebound carrying the brave swordsman back from the stirring white horror. He
and Hradji were thrown further back when the White pummelled them aside with
its forelimb, tumbling them hard across the cracked and broken cobblestones. Hradji
decided then that Kord had no use for the foolhardy, either. He gripped Gunnar
by the cloak and hauled his kinsman up and back towards the temple gate, their
only hope of shelter when he realised that the enormous beast was inhaling.
Hradji grasped that that inrush of air could only mean one thing: It was going
to blow such cold on them as they had never known!
“C’mon,” he screamed! “Run!” And
he did. They did. For their very lives. For naught, Hradji believed. The temple
appeared a lifetime away, no matter their haste. The cobbles were slick with
hoarfrost, their traction unsure. And with the White so close, the very air
sapped their strength, exhausting them. Gunnar’s hard breath laboured next to
his, his heavy step skating as franticly as his own.
 |
| A blast of the White’s bellows... |
Deafened by the roar that chased
him through the cavernous arch, Hradji managed to take a few final steps before
collapsing to the tiled floor of a vast domed chamber amid a cacophony of
coloured glass. The ground shook as though struck by Jascar’s Hammer, far in
excess of the clatter of his axe as it rang upon the shards of glass and the
mosaic beneath it. A rush of ice crystals sparkled the arctic air around him.
His heavy breath added to it, its issue devoid of heat even as it blew from
him.
Got to keep moving, he thought, as he dragged his numbed self
further into the vault, scraping and grinding the shards of glass under him. It
took immense effort, but his legs slowly found pliable strength as sensation
returned. He could feel the cold sweat on his skin, winter’s sting piercing his
nose and his fingers.
 |
| The Haze of Ice and Snow |
Fool, the
whispers erupted. Did you think steel could save you?, they
scolded. Release
us, they commanded.
Hradji
fumbled with the pack, his fingers indifferent to his command. Finally, after
an eternity that was but a few seconds, the baubles of onyx and agate and jade
spilled out, but instead of rolling free amid the cacophony of scattered glass,
the now golden orbs took flight, and spun about him, their orbit as measured
and graceful as those of Luna and Celene. He was suffused with invulnerability
and power. The drake, fearsome a moment before, appeared a trifle then.
Hradji
stood and bewilderingly staggered back whence he came and perceived the chaos
that reigned in the courtyard below. Vatun must surely have taken a hand, His
radiance shimmering the haze of ice and snow that swirled throughout with
abandon, aiding his kin in their desperate fight, hiding them from the White’s
fury. The White was powerful, indeed, though, despite His favour. It spun and
clawed at the gnats that pestered it. It snapped, it bit. It tumbled the twins
with buffeting wing. And Ylva would surely have been called to Wee Jas’ side as
she rushed to the felled Scáthú’s aide had the Flan not blistered the wyrm with
another blinding bolt of lightning. It reared; its serpentine neck poised to
pounce.
“What shall ye risk?” the crone had whispered to him. “For fate is fickle,” she had said.
Repeat my word, a whisper commanded. And he did. And the wyrm froze. It writhed in
utmost agony, shuddered by that very Word. In the wake of that Word, its head
spun to face his. Hradji saw fear in its eyes. And then unequalled fury. It screamed!
It screeched! It inhaled as it unfurled its vast span of wing and lunged
towards him.
Fuck fate, he felt! And fuck
you, too, he fumed, cursing the crone, the dragon, and anyone else who thought they could stand against him.
Repeat my word, another whisper commanded. And he did. The White writhed in flight. It
crumpled. And fell. Its eyes remained fixed upon Hradji’s despite their lack of
radiance. Hradji knew that it was dead, that it had felled by the Word. A smile
cracked Hradji’s frozen face.
Snow settled. Silence reigned.
Ylva staggered around the then still
White, cold with disbelief. Then the twins. Runolf actually prodded the beast,
to what end, even he could not imagine, judging the shock that glazed his eyes.
Cinniúint was more cautious than the others, more wary, Hradji noted; but the
Flan’s scrutiny was not directed at the dragon, but at him, and the golden orbs
that continued to revolve around him. Scáthú was even more wary. Hradji
believed he recognised murder in the olve’s eyes.
Good, Hradji thought, let
them be wary. They have need to be.
***
They will come for the orbs,
Hradji understood. They covet them, he knew, every one of them.
Especially the mage. He was jealous of Hradji’s newfound power. Of his artifacts.
He was feeble without them, and he knew it, and he would have them. The orbs had
told Hradji so. He would have to deal with the Flan and his pet älva
before too long; soon, he realised. Before they reached basecamp, perhaps. Ylva
would surely intervene, and she would have to suffer the same fate as her lover
for her betrayal. That was unfortunate. The twins would protest afterwards, he
knew, but they would come to understand, in time. It was for the good of the
clan.
 |
| The Morning Woods |
Fucking magic, Hradji
fumed. Fucking coward, stealing away like that.
Hradji panicked. The mage would
not have just stole away; he’d have stolen the prize! Hradji snatched at the
pack that had lain tucked beside him and tore at the ties, sure that the
slippery elf had been at it while he slept. He breathed a sigh of relief when
he saw the onyx and agate and jade baubles jumble within.
Hradji stood and scrutinised the
surrounding woods. He spied their tracks. They had been in such a hurry to
escape that they had not even bothered to cover them. Not this close to camp,
anyway. Hradji knew they would disappear a short distance away, which they did,
despite the stillness of the air, or that there had been no snow in the night. That
was Angnar and Runolf’s doing, most likely. Hradji heard the crunch of snow
beneath his feet shortly after crossing the treeline.
“You’d better run,” he bellowed
into the woods, regardless his belief that they were hours away.
Traitors!
“I’ll get you. I’ll get you
all!”
What would he tell the host at
basecamp? That they had died. All of them. That was easiest. That they were
heroes to the cause. He also understood that he should never tell of what they
found in the depths of that dark temple. They would surely covet his prize,
just at the others had. And he had need of them if he were to survive the trek
out of the Griffs.
No, he realised, palming his prize,
his fistful of baubles. He would survive, so long as he had his orbs at
hand.
***
 |
| Her eyes clear and intent... |
After all this time, she would finally
gain Keraptis’ Crown, and be rid of this stinking hole. The Crown would abandon
Hradji as surely as they had betrayed every other fool who presumed to wield
them since they had revolved around their King’s noble head, unwilling to serve
anyone less worthy than their original master, their creator. They would serve
her, of course. Indeed, they would.
The fool would resist her; but
that was of no never mind. His would be a futile struggle. Her tongue slid
across her lips in anticipation. Tarnished souls were the most savoury.
She heard a tentative tap upon
her door. A cautious tap. A nervous rap.
“Baba,” the youth quavered. “Are
you there, Baba?”
“Come in, dear,” she rasped, her
back bent again, her vision seemingly sightless.
The End.
1. älva.” Elf
Special thanks to Kristoph Nolen of Greyhawk
Online and the Oerth Journal, who reached out to me to submit
something to the Journal. If he had not, this piece might not/would not have
been written.
It will see the light of day in Oerth Journal
#37 when published, and will be found there, forevermore. I encourage you to download the
issue, and many more, as the articles within are written by fans of the
Greyhawk setting for fans to savour and use as they see fit.
The Art:
The Haze of Ice and Snow, by Jeff Easley (?), from Wilderness Survival Guide, 1986
Copyright:
This
is a work of fiction, penned by myself, set in the world of Greyhawk.
It
is not to be copied or reprinted without the author’s permission.
Sources:
2023 Greyhawk Adventures Hardback, 1988
1015
World of Greyhawk Boxed Set, 1983
9025
World of Greyhawk Folio, 1980
11743
Living Greyhawk Gazeteer, 2000
2010
Players Handbook, 1st Ed., 1978
Players
Handbook, 5th Ed., 2014
Monster
Manual, 1st Ed.. 1978
Monster
Manual, 5th Ed., 2014
2011A
Dungeon Masters Guide, 1st Ed., 1979
9016 G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, 1979
9027 S2 White Plume
Mountain, 1981
9058 G123 Against the
Giants, 1980
9033
Return to White Plume Mountain, 1980,1981
