Umber

Terrlen Darkseeker woke with a strangled cry. This was not a new phenomenon: ever since the revelation of his were nature his dreams were often disturbed, but tonight a lingering horror pricked at his skin even after he sat up and, shivering but not with cold, pulled his blanket around his shoulders. This dream had been different; the usual teeth and claws rending the flesh of those he had sworn to protect were replaced with the smell of burning and an immense heat threatening to ignite his fur. And the odor didn’t fade as he came to full wakefulness – it was distant, yes, but not so distant as memory. Something was very wrong in the Seven Pillared Hall, or very soon to be. If it were only his own life at stake he might have lain there and let oblivion take him. Instead, throwing off his blanket, he went in search of Phaledra.

* * *

Humming somewhat less than tunelessly to himself and happily covered in kank grease, the dwarven engineer Wrong bolted the last of four kruthik-skin wings onto his brand new flying machine’s fuselage. They had outdone themselves, Skarp’s children, truly they had in finding him parts, and as an expression of gratitude he’d designed the plane – originally intended for one – to seat several more than that. They were far, far too young to have experienced the delight of flight and had no idea what they were missing. It was the least he could do for them.

Moments later his singing became a groan as he heard the rumbling of disturbed earth from a corner of his workshop. That would be Skarp, and in a hurry or he would have come in by the door. He knew he owed the old priest the workshop that provided him the only moments of happiness he had known in this gods’-forsaken world. It was Skarp who had led him here and encouraged him to take up his old trade again, with tools the like of which he hadn’t seen in centuries.

But it was a given that he did indeed owe the priest, a debt he could never fully repay, and while Skarp didn’t collect interest often Wrong had a feeling today would be one of those days. And although he knew it wasn’t very honorable, he tried to tuck himself into the shadow of the wing and hide.

“Is that airworthy?” Skarp asked as if Wrong were standing in the middle of the room.

The dwarf crawled out from under the fuselage, wrench still in hand. “No, of course it isn’t! I’ve only just –”

The priest had finished a circuit of the plane. “All the pieces look in place.”

“Well, technically, yes, but I haven’t fully tested her subsystems let alone hauled her out and taken her for a –”

“First flight in half an hour,” Skarp cut him off bluntly.

“That’s – that’s impossible, I –”

The priest tossed him a piece of paper which after he unfolded it with trembling hands proved to be a map of the nearby mountain range. An X was heavily penciled over one of the peaks. “No time for discussion. The children need you.”

“The children?” His heart grew cold as he realized what Skarp was proposing. “No, no, no, there are seven of them and the Dragonfly only seats –”

“I must go back. Plan for refugees from the Seven Pillared Hall as well,” he said as he turned away.

“Refugees? Utterly impossible!” Wrong protested. “I can’t change the laws of physics!”

“There may be none. In fact, I expect there won’t,” Skarp said, a distinct note of sadness in his voice. “But you never know.”

“But – but – but – ”

“Half an hour,” Skarp repeated. Then he was gone.

* * *

“Phaledra, what are you doing?” Surina fretted as Darkseeker hurriedly helped her into her armor. “We must be away!”

The priestess of Erathis turned from her bookshelf. “I at least have to take these,” she said, clutching a pair of tomes to her chest, “and I should –”

Darkseeker grabbed her by the arm, gently but firmly. “We’re out of time. We need to go.”

“You see Phaledra to safety,” Surina said, “and I’ll rouse the town.”

Terrlen thought to argue with her. The temple was the high point of the Seven Pillared Hall. If what he feared was in fact occurring the descent could be dangerous, the ascent even more so. Surina had things to live for – her duty to the priestess, her new-found absorption in the sword style one of the overworlders had brought with her. While he had…but there was no time to debate who deserved the safer path. “See you topside,” he said with a confidence he did not feel and a desire he did not have.

But even as they exited the temple they heard a massive rumbling and then a throaty roar that echoed through the Underdark. The temperature jumped by tens of degrees and Darkseeker swore aloud. “Holy mother Erathis,” Phaledra breathed, “it’s all gone.” Where the Seven Pillared Hall had stood there was now only a crater, filling all too rapidly with molten lava. They could feel the ground shaking under their own feet and the walls around them growing hot, but Terrlen thought they might have just enough time to escape.

Just enough time, that is, until the magma seethed in a dozen places and they found themselves surrounded by a small host of fiery beings. None of them looked friendly. With a snarl Terrlen shifted – he was already gaining some control over his curse – and Surina drew her sword. “I’ll hold them off,” Darkseeker growled, “and you get Phaledra to –”

But the temple guardian was already away, her blade reflecting the eerie shades of the cavern, toward the thickest concentration of foes. “I’ll clear a path!” she called as she ran, but no sooner had Terrlen snatched Phaledra’s hand and made ready to follow than a ten foot column of fire shot up between him and the Dragonborn. Red eyes filled with malice regarded he and Phaledra, and as thick tendrils of flame reached out like arms to enclose them both in a fiery, fatal embrace Terrlen could do no more than leap backward with her to delay the inevitable a few moments longer.

Before it could advance, however, the ground churned in the space Darkseeker had created and a man – or rather a manlike creature seemingly formed of rock – rose out of the earth itself. The angry roar of a conflagration burst from the fire lord’s core and, Terrlen and Phaledra momentarily forgotten, it hurled itself against the newcomer. Watch the ground, the very stones seemed to speak to them, and wait.

Then Terrlen heard other voices as well – distant, and panicked. Turning he could just make out the overworlders ascending from the depths along the only remaining path to safety, and from the shaking of the earth and small eruptions of magma, that for not much longer. Floor, ceiling – every surface bucked and heaved around them. Impossible for them to escape without some casualty, he thought, and a desolate yet strangely welcome thought came to him.

Phaledra had followed the line of his gaze to the youths but misunderstood his expression. She laid a hand on him. “Go to them. I’ll wait for you here.”

He squeezed her fingers where they rested on his arm. “Surina will come for you,” he said.

“Terrlen, you will –” A dawning worry came to her eyes, too late. He was already away, and if she finished her sentence he didn’t hear.

Regan had sprinted to safety by the time he reached them and Saphira was close behind. Sugar Primrose – she seemed to have acquired horns and a tail but he recognized the eyes and who was he, after all, to criticize an altered form – was a middling distance away but crossing the fire and only nearly dodging falling rocks had taken their toll; remaining where she was would certainly kill her but likely so would going forward. “Let me do one good thing,” Darkseeker muttered. Leaping into the flames that separated him from the druid, he picked her up and threw her to safety.

Reign slipped near him but quickly regained her balance and joined her companions worriedly watching Zane, Kerac and Po traversing the collapsing passage, slapping out embers on their cloaks as they came. Regan had drawn a rope from her pack and was conferring with Reign and Sugar Primrose stared into the flames with wide-eyed intensity but only a fool would run back into them.

He winced and groaned softly as fire singed his fur and attacked the skin beneath, skin that the werecurse sought doggedly to heal while doing nothing to dull the spreading pain. It took more effort of will than he expected to press on rather than retreat. The spirit might toy with oblivion but the flesh was life’s tenacious ally, and if other, worthier lives hadn’t been at stake flesh might have won the battle.

But they were and so he pressed on; just as he reached Po he heard Sugar Primrose cry out – a shout of determination tinged perhaps with desperation – and a sudden, welcome blast of cold blew up from the ground before them, forming a momentary barrier against the half-molten ground. Zane, Kerac and Po hurried across, Darkseeker following behind them.

Just a few steps from solid ground the crumbling passage finally gave way. Darkseeker might have been able to leap to safety. But why? he wondered. Phaledra is in better hands now than she would have been with me. The Hall is gone, the man I was is gone…There is nothing left. The fall would deliver him straight into the rising sea of magma drowning what was once his home and there was, he thought, some justice in that. Why should the affliction that had been the death of so many be his salvation now? So he let himself fall, his prodigious self-repair prolonging the agony of a fate there was no escaping any longer. And there was, he thought, justice in that too.

Then he heard Sugar Primrose’s high, clear voice, filled with distress beyond measure. “We have to save him!” she cried. He looked up and through the waves of heat saw the druid, the avenger and the paladin teetering deliberately on the edge of the abyss for his sake. Po and Regan looked at one another helplessly; they had few options, all of them bad. Regan prepared to toss the rope that he had once seen snake up a wall under its own power, a magical device that would do no more here than incinerate in the lava. And Po’s hand went to his sword not with the touch of war but in a gesture of healing that Darkseeker had also once seen.

Save the rope! he wanted to call. Save the healing power, save yourselves and Phaledra and Surina! But the noxious vapors choked back the words in his throat. He felt Po’s surge of health flow through him but it was too little, too late. He lacked the strength to catch the rope even if Regan could throw it far enough to reach him; in moments he would lack the flesh, or the awareness, or the life.

A golden light flared above, rushed toward him: a courier to the afterlife, or more likely a comforting hallucination in his final moments. Then it snatched him in a most ungentle manner and, straining with the weight of him and coughing from the hot poisonous gases, flew upward out of the magma. Unceremoniously and more than a little awkwardly Po dropped Darkseeker beside a beaming Sugar Primrose; from the shocked stares of the paladin’s companions and Po’s own bemusement as the wings that sprouted from his shoulders evaporated into golden mist, Terrlen gathered that his facility for flight was newly birthed.

Their tenacity and dedication shamed him. If the ground itself no longer thwarted their escape the enemies the fire vomited forth did, and as a flock of creatures with flaming bat-wings rose from the incinerated town he hauled himself to his feet and made ready to stand with the overworlders. Past the bats he saw the mysterious earthen being still wrestling with its fiery counterpart and past them still Surina nearly surrounded by burning creatures throwing incendiary rocks. No one’s survival was assured or even likely, but still they all continued to fight, for themselves and more importantly for each other.

A knot of conviction formed in Darkseeker’s chest, small but something to hold on to. The time for self-loathing was past. To honor the extraordinary effort the youths had put forth to save him he must help them save themselves. And after that…well, death by his own hand would be a poor repayment of the life debt he now owed.

For a time it seemed his newfound commitment to life would be all too brief. The bats swarmed he and the overworlders, diving in to attack and then swooping back over the magma out of reach. Surina fell, and then their mysterious earthen ally. Reign and Saphira had run ahead but the others clustered together, uncertain where to attack or how to advance.

Then strange, crystalline creatures the like of which Darkseeker had never seen before swarmed out of the walls and ground and launched themselves at the enemy. Apparently impervious to fire, they swept their foes away with ease. Then he heard a voice in his head, low-pitched and musical and brittle like thin glass. “Go up, always up. Beware the Witch.”

They wasted no time taking the beings’ advice. “What was that?” he asked Saphira as they ran.

“Shardmind,” she replied. “I’ve heard of them, but never seen them before. Fragments of the Living Gate, something associated with the World Seed – I’m not certain of the precise connection.”

“Living Gate? World Seed? I’m afraid the explanation,” he said wryly, “is more confusing than the question.”

“I’m sorry,” she panted slightly from exertion as the path’s grade steepened, “I don’t have the time or the energy to explain it now. After we’re out of here, perhaps.”

He marveled at her conviction that they would get out, that there would be a time after this time for idle talk. “Of course,” he said. “Forgive me.”

He also marveled that they met no further opposition for a time, but his rising spirits plummeted as they reached the temple of Erathis and saw Phaledra collapsed on the ground. Darkseeker increased his pace, but Kerac and Regan were ahead of him. Kerac was kneeling beside her and shaking his head when Terrlen caught up. “She’s dead.” The avenger gave him a meaningful glance. “No, I don’t want to leave her either.” She picked up the corpse, then hesitated. “I’ll take her,” the priest said, holding out his arms. “There may be sword work yet to do.” Regan nodded and passed the lifeless body to her companion, then retrieved the two books that Phaledra insisted on taking with her, partly singed but largely sheltered beneath her when she fell.

They climbed for what seemed an eternity but could see daylight beyond a cavern entrance when the shadar-kai fell upon them. They were skilled fighters, and the Witch who led them was a dangerous foe, and they seemed to care not at all that they would die by molten flame so long as the interlopers did not escape. Darkseeker was inclined to despair from their sheer numbers and ferocity even before he heard the sound of some approaching monster from without, but to his surprise the noise, rather than chilling his companions’ spirits, lifted them. “Wrong with his flying machine!” they cried with an astonishing certainty in their good fortune. “We have to get to the ledge!”

Truer words were never spoken, as a rumbling from the ground made it plain that the lava was still rising and time running out. Regan and Zane moved to block a passageway through which more shadar-kai were attempting to emerge and Sugar Primrose threw down a thorny wall in a corner of the room, buying them crucial moments to retreat toward the exterior. Seeing Kerac considerably burdened by Phaledra’s body Darkseeker dropped back and relieved him of the corpse; he heard Regan swearing as, misunderstanding how long the exchange would take, she had retreated and left Zane alone.

Still they managed to evacuate to the ledge and Zane warded the door against the shadar-kai with an arcane lock as the others scrambled up into a strange machine resembling a dragonfly in both form and, Terrlen thought doubtfully as it bounced and rocked, fragility as well. The dwarf pilot tried to keep the craft some semblance of stable even as he threw down parachutes and ropes, but each additional weight brought it perilously close to crashing. “I need more manpower!” he cried. “Someone get up here and start pedaling!”

Reign and Po clambered up immediately. Darkseeker, still holding Phaledra, hesitated. “Give her to me,” Regan said, fishing the magical rope out of her pack and tying it around her waist and then to the dangling cable. “They need your strength up there.”

Kerac had taken a passenger seat and Sugar Primrose parachuted away. Zane, last through the door, was heading for the flying machine and Saphira had just settled her parachute on her back when the sealed door burst open and the wall along with it: the lava had finally found its own way to the open air. Darkseeker cried out as Wrong steered the copter steeply upward. “Pedal harder!” the dwarf shouted.

“Saphira and Zane!” he shouted as he watched them tumble toward the edge and certain death.

“Nothing we can do, lad!” the engineer shouted back. “Unless we want to die with them!”

Terrlen’s last, relieved sight before Wrong swung the dragonfly away from the exploding mountaintop was of Saphira snatching Zane at the very last moment before he went into freefall, pulling a cord on her chest and shooting past them to begin a gentle descent.

* * *

The machine limped back to Wrong’s workshop with a tattered, smoldering wing and other damage, and it took Saphira, Zane and Sugar Primrose some time to make their way there, but shortly after arriving they made preparations to return Phaledra to life and Darkseeker could find no words to express his gratitude. Consciousness was slow in returning to the priestess, and he remained at her side until it did.

“I – I was – the Hall was – ” Seeing Darkseeker beside her she reached out for his arm. “Where is Surina?” She tightened her grip as he turned his head aside. “Terrlen?”

“Phaledra, you’ve been through a great ordeal, you should rest –”

“I won’t rest until I know, Terrlen. Something has happened to her, hasn’t it?”

He took her hand from his arm and held it within his own. “I saw her fall at the crater’s edge – ”

She snatched it away and bit at her knuckle, tears coming to her eyes. “Surina. Oh gods – why did you abandon her body and not mine?”

Before he could even being to ponder how to explain that her body was consumed by the magma a soft voice spoke from the doorway. “She was with Opa Skarp.” Regan had slipped unnoticed into the room and came to stand beside them. “I believe she lives.”

“Who?” Darkseeker asked.

“The figure you saw fighting the fire lord.”

Terrlen pursed his lips, looking nervously at Phaledra’s hopeful face. “But I saw him fall as well.”

“By his own design. You may be certain of that.”

“But – but how do you know?” Phaledra said in a voice weak not only from fatigue.

“He asked me if Surina was worth saving. I said yes.”

The priestess held out her hand. “Erathis bless your kindness, child.”

“I didn’t do it out of sentiment,” Regan frowned. “I barely know the woman.” She withdrew the book of kata from her tunic, its cover battered and pages burned at their edges. “She was willing to study, willing to learn. There’s something important here, something we need to remember. Something we need to disseminate.”

Wrong bustled into the room and began making shooing motions at Darkseeker and Regan. “I’m no doctor, but Kerac is, and I’m sure if he weren’t so busy studying the mysterious shaft at the back of my workshop he’d be saying that this young lady needs rest. So out with you, both of you!”

Reluctantly Terrlen let himself be separated from the priestess, murmuring to Regan as they left, “If Surina is alive, why hasn’t she been returned to us?”

“I can’t answer that. But if she is dead, then Opa Skarp died with her.”

“You are certain? You know him that well?”

“He is the only father I ever had.” She tucked the book back out of sight and her expression grew closed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

* * *

“This is as far as I go,” the Jura Dai who had silently seen Darkseeker and Phaledra on a days’-long journey across endless desert from Wrong’s workshop to the outskirts of the city called Urik said. They had tarried with the dwarf and the overworlders but Surina never appeared. Wrong let them remain while he and the other overworlders made ready some manner of expedition, but when their time of departure approached he assured the last survivors of the Seven Pillared Hall that they would be safer in a city with friendly eyes to watch over them. “My kind is – unwelcome – in the city.”

Phaledra grew pale but said nothing about their abrupt abandonment, while Darkseeker set his jaw in grim determination and nodded. “Do not be afraid.” A voice came from what even Terrlen’s keen eyes had taken for a small boulder before the boulder unfolded into a severe woman with short-cropped hair wearing a dusty, hooded cloak. “I will see you past the gates.” She handed each of them a small packet. “These are your papers. Please do not speak unless spoken to, and then only briefly.” She raised a hand as Darkseeker opened his mouth. “I’m sure you have many questions, but I would prefer not to begin answering them until you are safely settled at an inn. It is unwise to be seen tarrying outside the walls.”

“Particularly in the company of the Jura Dai,” their escort said dryly.

“Each day we draw closer to the day that will change,” the woman said, and Phaledra priestess of Erathis thought she heard an undertone of almost religious reverence.

“Perhaps,” he shrugged. “Until then, we survive as we may.” Without another word he turned and ran back into the desert, and only then did the two refugees see how much they, even Darkseeker, had slowed him down in their company.

“Come,” the woman said. Her tone was not unfriendly, but also brooked no argument and she took up a brisk walk toward the walled city without looking back to see if they were coming. Clasping hands almost unconsciously, the priestess and the werewolf followed their guide into their strange new world.