Legends of the Dragonrealm

by Richard A. Knaak

  “Leave those little twigs where they are!” the shadowy steed thundered. “Mark this day as one of gratitude on your part, foolish drakes! I have no interest in your scaly hides this day...unless you needlessly provoke me! Begone and we will pretend this encounter never happened!”

  The older dwarf muttered under his breath. The other dwarf looked at him, uncertain as to what he had whispered.

  “Duhn Tromu,” the older one repeated very quietly. “Has your ma not told you the stories? The Duhn Tromu...”

  “Aye, but it was just stories to frighten little ones! I outgrew it long ago—”

  “No one outgrows the Duhn Tromu because it’s no child’s tale, you damned fool!”

  At that moment, the stallion brought his front hooves down on the ground. They struck with a sound like thunder.

  The reptilian mounts spooked. One darted past the leader’s, dragging its helpless rider along with it. That immediately made the drakes in the rear chase after rather than face the black creature. In seconds, three of the drake warriors had abandoned the area.

  But in contrast to his companions, the lead rider glared defiantly at the stallion, then thrust a hand toward him. Crimson energy flared around the gauntleted appendage. Indeed, around the entire warrior.

  The shadowy horse snorted. “Very well! As you wish! I did warn you!”

  With astounding swiftness, the ghostly equine reared again. Distance should have prevented a successful hit, but the horse’s leg stretched forward. The hoof struck the drake’s monstrous mount directly on the skull.

  The reptilian beast’s head split open from the impact, fragments of bone, bits of brain, and a shower of blood accompanying the mortal blow. As the already-dead beast collapsed, the bronze rider tumbled forward. Despite desperate attempts to stop his momentum, he rolled into the stallion.

  The ebony creature melted into an almost spherical shape. As the drake came to a stop, what had once been an equine but was clearly much more enveloped the armored warrior.

  The drake screamed, to the dwarves his fading cry seeming as if that of someone falling a tremendous—endless—distance.

  As soon as the screaming subsided, the black thing reverted to its stallion form. The shadowy steed snorted as he peered past the mount’s huge corpse...and directly at where the two anxious watchers hid.

  “’Black Nightmare’, indeed!” the creature thundered. “I am now and ever Darkhorse and nothing more! Remember that!”

  And with that, he turned and headed northeast at a speed no mortal equine could have ever matched. Within seconds, the ghostly creature had vanished into the distance.

  The two hill dwarves stood. The older stared at the younger and vice versa.

  Dwarves rarely ran unless it was into battle...but this time the pair eagerly made an exception.

  “Don’t be draggin’ behind, Olyn!” growled the graybeard. “There’s no shame in retreatin’ from that one! Only shows sense!”

  “Moving as fast as I can, Master Thurn!” the younger dwarf gasped as he tried to keep up. Olyn was a fit warrior, but Master Thurn was known for his tremendous stamina and speed for one of their kind even at the age of one hundred twenty. Olyn, barely forty, could hardly keep up, even with images of a creature out of his bedtime fears to stir him on.

  “Well, move faster yet! You saw what happened to that one fool of a drake! ‘Tis just as they always said!”

  “What did happen?”

  Master Thurn shoved aside his beard, which insisted on fluttering into his face. “That drake he fell in—well—he was swallowed—by my ax, you saw what happened! We’re talking when we could be runnin’ faster! I won’t feel safe until we’re in the south entrance—”

  He stumbled to a halt. Olyn, behind him, did not see what so startled the older dwarf and so ran into Master Thurn’s back.

  “What?”

  “Hush, lad! It hasn’t—damn! It has seen us! Back away! Quickly now!”

  Olyn peered around him. “What do you—”

  He did not get any farther. The two gripped their axes tighter as they stared at what loomed before them. It was like nothing they had ever seen.

  Yet, to Master Thurn there was a recognition of something familiar, something that—

  “Damn! Look out, lad, it’s—”

  II

  The drakes and hill dwarves already forgotten, Darkhorse raced among the hills filled with an unusual concern. The legendary creature some thought a demon and others a hero had traversed the land called the Dragonrealm for many, many centuries—millennia even—often aiding those allied against the drake lords either surreptitiously or outright. During that time, he had witnessed countless friends and foes alike perish violently and had nearly lost his own existence several times over.

  Even now, he should have been with the wizard Cabe Bedlam dealing with strange and potentially sinister events to the far north, beyond but also including the foreboding Tyber Mountains. Darkhorse should have been investigating that and other matters as he had promised the human mage...but then he had heard the call.

  It had pulled at him so hard that he had had no choice but to finally pursue it. It had already taken him across half the continent, seemingly calling to him from a hundred places at once and yet not actually being at any of them. Darkhorse had finally believed that he had discovered the source in the hills near Gordag-Ai, only to instead come across the four drake warriors and the two wide-eyed dwarves. Even despite the brevity of that episode, the shadow steed had lost the trail. Now he ran along, hoping against hope that he would pick up some new sign of it.

  At the top of one of the last hills before Gordag-Ai, Darkhorse paused again. The icy eyes stared at the distant mountains that marked the southernmost peaks of the Tybers. He recalled again the mission that Cabe Bedlam had sent him on, a mission of great import. Darkhorse had already spent too much time chasing after whatever siren song he had heard in his mind. If the trail had ceased to be, then it behooved him to—

  His head swiveled around at an impossible angle. Darkhorse stared back in the direction from which he had just come.

  There it was again. That call that was not a call.

  His body shifted instantly so that he now faced the path behind him. With a snort of frustration, Darkhorse raced back.

  He arrived at his previous location barely a few seconds later. At first, he saw only the reptile’s huge corpse. Yet, the sense that the source of his frustration was still nearby remained strong. Stronger than ever, in fact.

  Moving cautiously, Darkhorse followed what he believed the trail. His heightened senses noted something else in the process; the faint traces of the dwarves’ passage in the same direction.

  The shadow steed increased his pace. He did not like the notion of the two paths crossing, especially where the dwarves were concerned.

  Unfortunately, only a moment later, his worst fears were realized as he came upon one of the stout warriors cowering against an oak.

  Darkhorse judged him young by the standards of the race, although even the shadowy stallion had had little dealings with the reclusive dwarves. Still, there was no gray in the lengthy brown beard and ponytailed hair and few lines in the gruff face.

  The dwarf stared ahead, not noticing the towering form quietly approaching until Darkhorse finally stood in front of him. The ebony stallion immediately regretted his stealth as the dwarf shrieked at sight of him and tried to do the impossible for any of his race by trying to climb the mighty oak.

  “Cease your fear!” Darkhorse demanded, trying to keep his voice to a low bellow. Even after so long, his understanding of mortal emotions had its gaps, but he could see nothing that he had done to deserve such a horrific reaction. After all, he had approached out of concern, not threat.

  Despite what he believed a reasonable demand, the dwarf continued to try to climb. The thick finge
rs and dense nails, designed to dig in rock and compressed dirt, easily tore into the bark and the softer under layer.

  Darkhorse finally created a limb vaguely resembling an arm with a three-digited hand, then seized the dwarf by his wrist. As thin as the newly-formed limb looked, it would have taken far more than the dwarf’s not inconsiderable struggle to free him. Darkhorse turned the frantic warrior around to face him, then waited a reasonable few seconds for the swarthy warrior to calm.

  But still the dwarf acted as if every Dragon King ever to live pursued at his heels. The shadow steed finally decided to speak again.

  “Tell me of the danger! Where is it? Where is your friend?” All the while he had been dealing with the panicked dwarf, Darkhorse had been studying the area with both his magical senses and extra eyes sprouting from various parts of his torso. Thus far, though, there was no hint of either the missing dwarf or anything else, but he continued to search. Eye after eye burst into life, studied the woods before it, then sank into the body as another formed elsewhere.

  Darkhorse belatedly realized that the extra eyes might be adding to the dwarf’s distress. Dismissing the excess eyes and reverting back to a full equine form as much as possible—he still needed the limb to keep his companion from running—the eternal tried to speak even quieter. “I will help. Just tell me what happened...”

  “You—you—” Beyond that, all the dwarf could do was stare at a spot to Darkhorse’s right.

  The ebony stallion eyed the place in question, but saw nothing odd. He looked again at the dwarf—and then out of the corner of his eye noticed a peculiar rippling.

  When he tried to look directly at it, it vanished. Yet, the moment Darkhorse started to turn away again, the rippling ] renewed with vigor.

  Keeping his gaze at just the right angle, he said to the dwarf, “You see that motion in the air to my side, do you not?”

  To his relief, his frantic companion managed to nod. Encouraged, Darkhorse muttered, “Your friend. Is that where what happened to him took place?”

  Another nod. Yet, despite the progress he was finally making with his questioning, the shadow steed remained perturbed. The fear in what should have been a stalwart dwarf’s gaze still focused more on Darkhorse than whatever threat that had taken the older dwarf. Darkhorse could not understand. He had made it clear that he was here to help, yet his companion continued to ignore that very obvious fact.

  The rippling abruptly magnified. Darkhorse caught himself before making the mistake of turning to look. For some reason, he could only view it in such a way.

  “You...” the dwarf repeated, catching the shadow steed’s attention with his unexpected comment.

  “Yes, me. We have settled that!” Darkhorse cautiously created a tendril out of the side of his chest. Keeping the rippling at the edge of his vision, he maneuvered the new limb toward it.

  The dwarf shook his head fervently. “No! Master Thurn! He said—”

  At that moment, the rippling magnified a hundredfold. Something dark shot out of it toward the ebony stallion’s latest appendage.

  Darkhorse tossed his fearful charge as far and yet as gently as he could. He hoped that he had at least prevented the dwarf from suffering further due to the eternal’s mistake.

  A horrific emptiness coursed through Darkhorse, made the worse for him by his at last recognizing its origins. Of all things, he had not expected this.

  Never this.

  The rippling drew his tendril into its center. Try as he might, Darkhorse could not pull the new limb free. Daring to glance at the location no longer made the rippling vanish. A trap had been set and he had fallen right into it.

  The emptiness he felt filled him, in the process stirring further an ancient fear. That, in turn, fueled Darkhorse’s struggle to free himself. He finally severed the tip of the tendril, sacrificing that small part of him rather than be drawn with it through what he knew at last to be a portal.

  The rippling quickly swallowed up the fragment. A moment later, the rippling ceased and the area returned to normal.

  As Darkhorse retracted what remained, he searched with his magical senses for any last trace of the sinister portal. There was nothing, though. It was as if what had just happened had only been his imagination.

  “Was that it, then? Was that it?” he demanded of the dwarf. “That is what took your friend—”

  Darkhorse stopped when he saw that he was addressing empty air. In the brief chaos, the other dwarf had run off. The shadow steed snorted. He could not exactly blame even a generally-stalwart creature like a dwarf to remain near such an dangerous and unsettling situation. Darkhorse himself might have fled had he known exactly what had been awaiting him. Even now, the memory of what had happened remained seared in his mind. He could never have mistaken what he had sensed, as disturbing as it was to think what that then meant.

  Something—or someone—had reached out into the Dragonrealm from the Void.

  III

  Darkhorse scuffed the ground with a hoof as he contemplated his choices. He had few. Despite all the tales, all the legends, most knew very little concerning his fantastic origins. Even the fact that he most often resembled an equine was a point with so many fanciful and utterly false origin stories.

  He should have gone to Cabe Bedlam. The wizard was the closest thing to a friend he had and despite having asked Darkhorse to help him with the other matter, Cabe would have gladly helped the eternal with this new situation.

  But that would have entailed explaining things that would have made the mage realize how much Darkhorse had never told him about his past. No, there was only one spellcaster of power that could help him at this point. Only one who would not question Darkhorse on certain aspects of this unnerving incident.

  Only the Gryphon, a creature of secrets himself, would respect the shadow steed’s need for privacy in regard to the full truth.

  With a shake of his head, the ebony stallion opened the way...

  “It would be so nice if, on an occasion or two, you managed to send word of your coming first, Darkhorse.”

  The shadow steed dipped his head. “My apologies, Lord Gryphon! I will endeavor to remember!”

  “Yes...we can hope for that, at least.” High marble shelves full of thick tomes filled the room, an impressive display of magical and military knowledge ironically made insignificant by the fact that a gargantuan and legendary library system lurked somewhere below the city. Penacles was a place renowned as a fount of gathered wisdom where the mystic arts were concerned, the library system’s origins stretching back even before the rise of the Dragon Kings. If there was information that could aid Darkhorse now, then surely it had to be here.

  Once, Penacles had been the center of the kingdom of Clan Purple, one of the most dominant of the drake clans. Two hundred years ago, the downfall of its sinister lord had been the one bright spot in an attempted revolt against the Dragon Kings as a whole. One of the few survivors of that unfortunate struggle had been the City of Knowledge’s current master...the Gryphon. He had turned Penacles from being not only a place of learning to a beacon of freedom that had at last helped stir the continent to a much more promising future.

  Few beings there were that impressed Darkhorse more than the figure before him. The wizard Bedlam and his family were among those few. The accursed warlock Shade was another. Yet, in his own way, the Gryphon was at least as unique as any of them...if not far more.

  The Gryphon rose from the wide, wooden chair in which he had been reading. He was as his name suggested, a fantastic being who in many ways resembled the winged beast. Although he stood and moved like a man, the Gryphon had the head of a raptor, even to the very sharp, very deadly beak. Only his eyes were more human than avian, eyes filled with the wisdom of years.

  His hands ended in talons, with the wrists covered in a combination of feather and fur. The Gryphon wore a loose ou
tfit with a cloak attached at the shoulders and although his boots looked as those of any soldier, they and the pants were in fact designed to hide the fact that his legs and feet were more of a leonine nature.

  Magic allowed the Gryphon to alter his countenance to one more human, but the people of Penacles loved their loyal lord so much that they had no fear of his true appearance. Their love made utter sense, too, for the Gryphon had nearly sacrificed himself several times over to keep the kingdom free.

  “There’s something you want of me that you don’t want Cabe to know about,” the lord of Penacles commented politely.

  “As astute as ever!”

  “Hardly astute. What bothers you, Darkhorse? It must be of tremendous consequence. There’s even something amiss in your tone.”

  The eternal gouged a furrow in the marble floor before he realized what he was doing. “Forgive me—”

  “It will be repaired. Speak.”

  “Lord Gryphon...you know from where I come! The Void.”

  The lionbird rubbed the underside of his beak. “Yes, and may I never find myself in that infernal emptiness again in my life. A sorrowful place, Darkhorse.”

  “You will get no argument from me! The day I learned of this plane was the day I was reborn...which brings me to my fear.”

  The Gryphon’s eyes narrowed. “Yureel...”

  It hardly surprised Darkhorse that his companion would have correctly judged the eternal’s concern. Only two things had ever entered the Dragonrealm from the endless Void. Darkhorse had been the first.

  And then there had been Yureel. Yureel, from whom Darkhorse had been so long ago split off much the way the shadow steed had split off the bit of tendril rather than be dragged toward the rippling.

  Once, there had been a black mass with no name, but with a consciousness. It had drifted through the Void, constantly surrounded by emptiness save those rare times when some object of some fool of a spellcaster had ended up entering the blank dimension. That dark mass—then with no concept of what a name was—had found a vile amusement in using the few lost travelers as ‘toys’, torturing them in one manner or another until they perished.