The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel)

by Beard, Matthew

  Nergei tried again and again to catch the old man with a blast of fire, but again and again the old man rebuffed it with a gesture. And with each rebuff, he turned a tiny portion of his magic on Luzhon. Nergei gave up when it became clear he could not touch the old man, and instead he stood between the spellcaster and Luzhon, covering her with his body. “Intending to die for something as childish and familiar as love, boy? For the attentions of a girl far beyond your social standing? I did a poor job of teaching you your place. Dragonbrood. Fatherless boy.”

  Nergei remained silent. He faced the old man, knowing it was unlikely he could save Luzhon. At least, though, he would die first. He would give his life for her to have a few minutes more of her own. A pointless gesture, he thought, but the only one he had left to offer.

  But Sten had managed to come around. His left arm was numb, his shoulder searing. He got to his feet, though, and dragging his hammer behind him, the strap around his wrist, he walked to the Old Stargazer, approached him from behind, and spoke. “You have killed my oldest and dearest friend.”

  The old man spun to see the warrior approach, and with a grasping of his hand in the air in front of him, he lifted the warrior off his feet. “I had forgotten you,” he said.

  Sten felt the crushing force of a magical grip on his chest, but lifted his right arm and rubbed his head, the sword hanging at his side. “It has been a good life, old man. Mine, anyway. Can you say the same? Can you say that what you sacrificed was worth it?”

  The Old Stargazer shook his head and laughed. “I feel clearer now than ever,” he said. “And I will have another lifetime or two to decide the answer to your question. Perhaps after I kill you, I will bring you back as I did my friends, and we will debate this, yes?” With that, the Old Stargazer flooded Sten’s body with force, throwing him into the sky, exploding him from the inside, tearing him down the middle.

  And Nergei jumped up on the old man’s back, his hands engulfed in fire, and he gripped the old man’s neck and palmed the old man’s face. The strength of his grip and the heat of the flame—hotter than he had ever been able to call forth—melted through the skin of the old man’s neck, and melted into his face. The hand over his mouth and the hand buried into his neck stifled his attempt to scream. Nergei squeezed as hard as he could, the hand on the old man’s neck melting deeper and deeper until he found himself gripping the old man’s spine. And the hand on his face dug in too. His thumb and forefinger dug into and destroyed the old man’s eyes, his palm cooked the old man’s tongue. The Old Stargazer’s beard went up in flames and his muscle burned away to bone. Nergei shook with fear and anger, then finished killing his master.

  Nergei wept over the body, burned and blackened. It took Luzhon some time to recover from the Old Stargazer’s attacks, but when she did, she covered Nergei with her body, held him close in her arms, and wept along with him.

  “What do we do, Nergei,” said Luzhon through her tears. “All this death.”

  “My master,” he replied. “I had to kill the man who raised me. Who sheltered me. Can there be a greater sin than to destroy your benefactor?”

  “We had no choice, Nergei. We had no other option.”

  “What if we had walked away?”

  “You never had the option, child,” said a voice behind them. It was the revenant.

  “What are we to do now, monster?” asked Luzhon.

  “Erak,” said the revenant. “My name is Erak. You can address me as such.”

  “Your name means nothing to us,” said Nergei.

  “Not yet, perhaps,” said Erak. “But I can answer your question. Now, you leave the Shadowfell. You are not one of the mistress’s subjects—yet. You do not belong here. So we will return you to your Haven. There is an empty observatory for the boy. There are men of marrying age and a dowry, I assume, for the girl. You return to Haven having ended whatever it was that was happening here, and you live and you forget. You return to your home. Just say the word.”

  Luzhon grabbed Sten’s blade from the floor of the great hall. She found the bone white bow and the quiver with the bone white arrows, and slung it on her back. She pulled the rings from the fingers of the corpse of the old man, searched his robes for a purse full of roots, found a small book covered in runes and handed them to Nergei.

  “Haven be damned,” she said. “Send us to the city.”

  EPILOGUE

  Mikal and Magla left in the morning, two months after the battle for Haven. They had loaded up their horses—two fresh animals given to them by the villagers in thanks for their work—and headed south. Mikal had needed the months to repair the spells that had been protecting Haven for so many years. It was such old magic, so different from his own, but he spent time in the old man’s library trying to find clues to its origins and ways to synthesize it with his. Magla spent her time on the mountain with the animals, searching for any sign of taint left by the kenku. She found Ekho’s tribe and informed them of her death. To her gratification, her story softened the hearts of the goliaths who had banished Ekho, and she was, for her great sacrifice, readmitted to the tribe by ritual.

  Mikal was the first to become aware of the deaths of Sten and Spundwand. Imony had seen the four make the climb to the observatory on the day they disappeared, and as they never did return, their fate was assumed. (Though Imony did spend time with Magla in the forest looking for clues to their whereabouts.) The old man was gone. The observatory was in flux, and rooms of it existed in both the world and the Shadowfell.

  One day, weeks after the disappearance of the old warrior, his dwarf companion, and the two youths who had helped gather his party together to defend Haven, the bodies appeared, preserved for burial, in the orrery.

  Imony wept to see her friends—especially over Spundwand—and after that refused to return to the observatory where she had been assisting Mikal. All of Haven came out to bury the warriors in a place of honor in the cemetery near the path up to the old man’s home. Londih spoke eloquently but mostly about himself. Kohel played at grief. The rest of Haven, though, felt genuine sadness. What little they knew of the warriors, they learned in the weeks after the battle from Imony, who had known them better than anyone. The mysterious men who saved them became less mysterious. Their heroism with such little promise of recompense became unambiguous.

  The old man had, when he ripped open the seams between planes, done irreparable damage. When Mikal decided he no longer needed access to the books in the library, he sealed the observatory, and told all in the village to stay out of it. “There is dangerous magic at work in there,” he said. “I have made the way in as guarded as I can. Enter and you could doom Haven. Tell the generations to come of this. The observatory is to go untouched forever.” The villagers agreed. Life would go back to a kind of normalcy. The observatory would be alone, overlooking Haven for the rest of time, as far as they were concerned. It could stand as a mausoleum to the Old Stargazer who had once been their guardian, and to the two young people who had last been seen entering it.

  Some small hope remained for Luzhon and Nergei because, unlike Sten and Spundwand, no bodies had appeared for them. Some small hope, at least, lingered in Luzhon’s family. Nergei would have had only the old man to mourn him.

  When Mikal and Magla left the village, they waved good-bye to Imony. She had decided to stay on in Haven and to try to take the place of the old man as its new protector. Unlike the old man, she found a place to live in town. She had no secrets, no distance from the villagers. She was of Haven in a way that the old man never would allow himself to be.

  The children of the village loved her especially, and crowded around her as she walked through the square. And every morning, when the little ones gathered, she taught them another of her many skills with the brush and with the fist.

  She stayed, more than anything, to be near the graves of her friends. Daily she walked up the hill to sit beneath a tree near the resting places of Sten and Spundwand. She took her brush and her parchment w
ith her, and she traced her symbols on it, over and over. She talked to them sometimes. Mostly to Spundwand. She told Brickboots about her days. She asked after his own. She talked about the past. She was finally able to tell the old dwarf all about the school she had been sent to in the West—all the details she had missed in their conversations after they had found each other again in the city.

  The magic that hung over Haven was no longer managed by an arcanist, watched and cared for, but it sufficed. The trees could become a disorienting maze, and the fog so thick, a roamer would find themselves returning to the same tree three times without noticing a change in direction. The magic did its job mostly. And when it did not, when a small party of thieves or a ravenous or rabid creature found its way to the southern road, invariably there would be Imony, waiting silently, standing by the gate pulling the petals from a flower or staring at the clouds. A little round woman, alone in the road, kicking a stone, seemingly easy pickings for the tip of a bandit’s blade. It never ended well for those who dared to raid Haven. Never once.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To some Matthew Beard is thought of as a recluse, but those people haven’t been a part of his Tuesday night game. Between Michigan and Washington, the author’s time is spent in pursuit of writing, gaming, and general Epicurean pleasures. As a side gig, Matthew Beard likes to take pictures of dice and monsters. The Last Garrison is his first published novel.