Instead, Gerrod had begun a cycle of madness, in the process becoming a creature living an endless series of half-existences that, when extinguished either by chance or intention, repeated over and over again. If he had been a hero in one, he had been an insidious villain in the next. Cities had fallen because of him, yet he had saved so many lives, no matter what the race.
And to mark that curse most, to mark that he was never quite an actual part of the mortal world, his face had always been seen as a blur, as never quite being in true focus. Valea had always wondered whether there was more that Gerrod had not told her, that the murky features were only an outward sign of a deeper alteration by the curse of both his body and soul.
No, not the curse, but the power Gerrod believed behind it. The land itself.
That last was not so outrageous as it might have sounded, Valea knew. Legend had it—not to mention her own experience—that the land had a mind of its own, that the many races that had ruled over it had done so only at its whim.
The actual truth was a complex and stunning one. Long, long ago, before the Dragon Kings, before the avian Seekers, before the burrowing Quel—before any of the ruling races there remained evidence of—there had been a people called by those few who knew of them now as simply the founders. If they had any other name, it had been lost to time. It was the last surviving members of the founders, so she had grown up hearing from her parents, who had evidently melded their spirits—or perhaps consciousnesses with the very land now called the Dragonrealm.
It had been in the process of seeking an escape from his curse that Gerrod as Shade had come across the dark legacy of that founding race, a legacy proving that too many of the tales concerning the founders were true. He had nearly run afoul of their grand design, only to be saved by the Crystal Dragon, lord of the Legar Peninsula and most enigmatic of the drake rulers.
The Crystal Dragon...who had also proven to be Gerrod’s own brother, long, long ago transformed intentionally along with most of the rest of the Vraad race into the first of the drake people by the ghostly minds now controlling the very land.
The chaos involved in those events had had reverberations the extent of which neither she nor Gerrod could yet guess. They only knew that one result of that chaos had been the change the enchantrees herself appeared to create in the warlock. He was now nearly his original self around Valea. However, that good fortune was tempered by the fact that a few yards beyond her presence the curse began to seize control of him again. Both also still feared what would happen if some calamity befell him and he died. There was the great concern that he might return as the Shade of old, in that new incarnation sinking once more into darkness and threatening the lives of all.
And for Gerrod, she understood, there was also the fear that the first person he harmed would be her.
“I wish I could recall better what knowledge I’d gathered from the phoenix,” he commented, referring to a magical creature that had turned out to be a guardian left behind by the founders to protect one of their greatest artifacts. The magical being had in the end managed to side with Gerrod against its former masters, then had forever sealed off the ancient sanctum Gerrod and Valea had discovered from all. As Shade, Gerrod had gathered hints of other such places of power, but in becoming something more akin to mortal, that knowledge had slipped away.
“You said you thought you remembered something about the limestone cliffs south of Irillian by the Sea. Isn’t that where we should go next?”
“It would make sense.” Gerrod peered over his shoulder. “but for some reason I cannot shake the feeling that there is something of import near here.”
Here was the outskirts of Gordag-Ai, one of the prominent kingdoms of the western part of the Dragonrealm. Despite truly only being a free kingdom since the downfall of its Dragon King some three decades ago, Gordag-Ai had had centuries of prosperity due to its value to its late drake lord. That had enabled it to maintain a robust economy where some kingdoms had struggled, but it had still been of great benefit when its princess, Irini, had married the reclusive king of Talak. As queen of the mountain kingdom, Irini had had tremendous influence on her husband’s decisions.
But Queen Irini was nearly a year dead, struck down while saving her husband from the same source of evil that could be blamed for the rise of ghosts in the Dragonrealm. As she and Gerrod—and especially Gerrod as Shade—had been principal in the destruction of that evil, Valea and he both remained aware that they also had some responsibility with the aftermath.
But there always remained the quest. Gerrod could not risk his curse overtaking him again. Valea knew to trust his instincts. If he sensed there was something tied to his situation here, then they could not leave until they discovered just what it was.
It did not escape her that once more Gordag-Ai appeared to have some import when it came to magic. Her father and Darkhorse had some years back confronted nearby a sad, mad creature whose sorrowful legacy and hatred had spanned the two centuries since the Turning War. The same creature had gathered several young spellcasters and turned them into assassins against the drakes, an ironic turn since he himself had been of that race.
“Gerrod, do you sense anything odd about this region? Is there anything you remember about it that would make it of importance in terms of magic?”
“Nothing I recall or sense...which does not mean that all here is innocence.” He shrugged and stared at the landscape, as if awaiting the answer from it.
Before Valea could ask more, she felt a female voice in her head calling her name.
Her mother. Valea strengthened the shields around her thoughts, hoping it would remain sufficient to block the probes of both her parents. Her father still had many misgivings concerning the man she loved and even her mother was not entirely happy with the situation.
Suddenly, Gerrod spun toward the city itself. He pointed one gloved finger at it.
“There...just for a moment...but there...” He pushed back his hood slightly, revealing dark, somewhat unkempt hair. “but now it’s gone again.”
The enchantress had not felt a thing, but that hardly surprised her. What Gerrod actually hunted were the minutest traces of the founders’ magic, something to which he and he alone was attuned.
“In Gordag-Ai itself?”
He gritted his teeth. “In it...or more likely below it.”
She smoothed her emerald riding outfit. While Valea preferred skirts when in public functions, the pants and boots were much more practical at times like this. “So, where do we go? The city center?”
Gerrod rewarded her with a sad chuckle. “Valea Bedlam might be welcome anywhere she chooses to materialize, but there will never be many places in the Dragonrealm willing to let Shade simply pop into their midst.”
“But you are no longer Shade,” she insisted, not for the first time. “You are not.”
He sighed, then quickly stepped back from her. Before she could stop him, he had moved enough of a distance for things to change. His crystalline eyes lost their glitter and his face in general grew less defined. Another two steps and what seemed a haze spread over his face. Valea tried in vain to keep his countenance in view, but quickly lost the battle. In seconds, all she could see were vague hints of where the eyes, nose, and mouth were. Whenever the enchantress attempted to focus on just one of those features, it seemed to further slip from her view.
“As you yourself pointed out, it is you that make me ‘Gerrod’ again, Valea. Away from you—surely a risk in Gordag-Ai—this is what I am.”
She remained undeterred. “We will just have to make certain that we are not separated then.”
The faceless sorcerer held out his left hand. “I remain aware just how fruitless it will be to convince you otherwise, but at the very least, we should materialize a short distance outside the city gates.”
“That makes sense.” The enchantress reached for his han
d. As she neared, his countenance began to coalesce again. Valea fought back an exhalation of relief once they were fully visible.
“I do not deserve you,” Gerrod murmured.
She said nothing. He gave her another sad smile, then concentrated.
Their surroundings shifted. They were still a distance form Gordag-Ai, but now its impressively-high walls could be appreciated. Still, Valea frowned. “We could have appeared a little nearer. Between the two of us, we can keep any spellcaster in the city from noticing our presence.”
“I have gained some bit of caution over my many lifetimes. With you next to me, I appreciate that sense of caution even more.”
Meaning that he had dropped them here to protect her. The crimson-tressed enchantress grimaced, but decided not to say anything. She would trust to him in this.
“It is near enough to sunset that we should wait until then,” he added after a moment.
She understood why he suggested that. Most spellcasters could create illusions to disguise themselves, but the unique nature of his curse made that virtually impossible. Any such illusions quickly failed. The land demanded that Shade had to be Shade, no matter how much that risked each incarnation.
“However,” Gerrod abruptly continued. “Perhaps a new if more mundane suggestion offers itself.”
He pointed back at the main road to Gordag-Ai, where a long caravan had just come into sight. More than a dozen tall, covered wagons slowly made their way toward the distant gates. Several hefty oxen followed behind.
“If they are bringing those animals for sale, then they will need to journey to the west end market. It will be dark long before we reach there, enabling us to slip out of the next to last wagon.”
“But we’ll need to use a spell to enter them,” she countered.
“Which is why we must do it now, before they get any nearer to the city.”
And before she could answer...they suddenly sat amidst a pile of goods and wares the boxes of which all bore the blue sea serpent emblem of Irillian by the Sea. While there were methods by which large amounts of goods could be moved by magic, those were rarely used save in times of war or disaster. Besides the fact that matters in the world were too risky to cast portals—in this case a blink hole due to the necessary size—for such use, most mortal creatures preferred the stability of normal travel.
“You should get some rest,” the warlock suggested to her. “We will be at least three more hours. If I feel myself nodding off, I will wake you.”
“It has been a long day. All right.” Unwilling to risk detection by even creating a pillow, the enchantress settled for one of the sacks near her.
It proved surprisingly comfortable. More exhausted then she wanted to admit, she fell asleep immediately.
Gerrod eyed her. He had seen how tired she was. He himself was exhausted, but he was used to that. What mattered was that Valea now rested.
With a grimace of apology, he vanished.
III
As Shade, he materialized in the midst of Gordag-Ai, a darkened corner obscuring him from the eyes of both the city guards and the populace. Several of the locals walked blithely past him, their loose, voluminous garments reminding the sorcerer of fluttering birds.
He had hated to lie to her, but what he had actually sensed had been something he needed to investigate alone. Already, Shade had a spell around him that he felt certain would be too powerful for whatever magic users Gordag-Ai had managed to gather over the past two decades. Most spellcasters of any competence had been trained by either Valea’s parents or the school that the Lord Gryphon of Penacles had now opened. Shade had every confidence that so long as it was for him alone, his protective spells would be sufficient.
Besides, if what he sensed was true, he needed to deal with it quickly.
He did not have to see his face to know the transformation had already taken place. What even Valea did not know—what he dared not tell her—was that the more that he stayed away from her, the stronger the curse returned. Even now, he could feel the ancient energies stirring anew inside, twisting him, making him their slave again. He felt a distance—a chasm—open up between him and all other creatures, Valea included.
I am Shade. I am and will always be Shade, even with her at my side. It was a sobering thought, one that he did not like to even remind himself about.
And so Shade focused on what he had sensed but that he had not mentioned to Valea.
He sensed...himself.
It should have been an impossibility, but it had happened at least one time previous so far as his admittedly-splintered memory could recall. Then, the forces unleashed on him had splintered him into multiple pieces, scattering lesser Shades all over the Dragonrealm. Gradually, they had been brought together, although at great cost. At that time, he had been able to detect his other selves, albeit with tremendous effort. This, though...this did not hide from him. It was almost as if either it did not know he was near enough to detect it or it simply did not care.
Or, more likely, it had arranged a trap.
Against most anything else, Shade would have grudgingly accepted Valea’s aid. She was, after all, one of the Bedlams and the only one he could absolutely trust. Against himself, though...
You hesitate too long, Shade berated himself. Do what must be done!
The warlock nodded...and faded again.
He materialized deep, deep underground. Part of what he saw was carved from rock, but part had also been dug out with much effort. Not human effort, though, he suspected. He could sense ancient traces of magical energy that clearly predated humans and even drakes, which meant that it even predated Shade.
Shade ran a hand over the nearest wall, which had a symbol carved into it. It vaguely resembled a bird, but a fantastical bird. One with which he was all too familiar, in fact.
A phoenix. Shade’s blood stirred. Although the founder race had a proclivity for certain spirit animals, one of the most significant where he was concerned was the phoenix. For the founders, the phoenix had literally meant transformation. They had even shaped the magical servant guarding one of their arcane devices into such a beast. Wherever Shade had found hints of the forces that he needed to escape his curse, the mark of the phoenix had generally been present.
Heart beating faster, the faceless spellcaster peered down the darkened path to his right. He could still sense his own unique trace about, but now very diffused, which made no sense. It was as if he were all around himself.
Although Shade could recall only pieces of his various incarnations’ existences, he knew that more than a few had come across plots and artifacts related to previous Shades. Sometimes, an incarnation would even try to leave a clue to a potential future self, preferably one who leaned toward the same direction.
But I have surely been near this kingdom many times more than I recall. I should have noticed this trace earlier. I should have.
Shade took a step down the darkened path, then suddenly held one gloved palm forward. A flash of silver shot forth, briefly illuminating the corridor ahead.
Simple stone walls greeted his gaze. Shade studied the path ahead until the last vestiges of the flash faded. Then, still feeling some trepidation, the hooded warlock stepped forward.
Barely had he done so than hands of stone darted out of the flanking walls. They seized his arms, his legs, and his voluminous cloak.
The last proved a mistake for Shade’s attackers. The cloak immediately wrapped around the hands grabbing it and squeezed until the stone limbs crumbled. The cloak then dropped down to Shade’s legs, wrapping around those stone limbs as well.
As his garment did that, Shade himself cast a brief spell. His body became an inferno nearly matching the heat of the Red Dragon himself. The other clinging hands quickly blackened, then melted.
The moment he was free, Shade lunged forward. The heat spell was a potent o
ne that affected even him. It was one of those last resort tricks, used with the knowledge that it might do as so many of those who feared or hated Shade desired...kill him. Bad enough, he thought, that he had to be afraid of what he would become due to the acts of others without being the cause of it himself.
Regaining his mental balance, Shade used his powers to probe the areas from which the hands had sprouted. There were only scant remnants of the energies originally used to create and manipulate them. Shade admired the subtlety with which the arrangement had been created, especially considering the incredible age he also noted. This trap had been set in place by the same beings who had carved out this ancient place. That it still functioned after so long bespoke of their skills.
And that, in turn, encouraged the warlock on. While on the one hand the fact that his long-ago incarnation had obviously failed to break the curse meant that there was possibly nothing for him to now find, there was also yet the hope that perhaps that other version of Shade had simply missed something.
It was alway a hope.
The passage abruptly opened up into another chamber. There, Shade stumbled to a halt, stunned. Whatever else had happened to his previous self, that Shade had surely seen this.
A tall, golden obelisk rose to within inches of the high ceiling, its sides etched in the familiar if frustrating to decipher script of the founders. Shade stepped toward the obelisk as if hypnotized. He had come across only one other akin to this—at least as far as he could recall—and it had been one of the key tools to finally locating the Tower of the Phoenix and the astounding device it had housed. While the tower was no longer accessible from the mortal plane, this obelisk, with its various symbols, pointed to a possible second tower still within his magical reach.
Shade had always suspected that other towers existed, some of them perhaps even potentially located on the massive continent to the east, but this obelisk’s position could only mean that there was one not all that far from Gordag-Ai. The obelisks functioned as conduits for the spellwork for which the towers were used. In the case of the founders’ magic, that meant a short enough distance.
Legends of the Dragonrealm Page 25