Legends of the Dragonrealm

by Richard A. Knaak

Shade had witnessed past evidence of the turmoil that had overwhelmed the founders. In struggling to recast the future of their world as their kind began to die out, they had made several unsettling decisions. Not everyone had agreed with all those decisions. Factions had grown up. Power had been wielded.

  And, at least in this case, war had evidently broken out.

  All that remained of the architecture were a few rounded windows and fluted columns. In truth, Shade marveled that there had been anything left to find.

  The sky and landscape remained a purple hue. Each of the founders’ pocket worlds was unique and appeared to serve a specific purpose. Many acted as incubators for possible successor races to both the drakes and humans. The founders’ last experiments had grown to include an incredible array of astounding pocket worlds.

  The landscape shifted again. Now, the warlock’s captor stood in the midst of the rubble.

  “The Citadel of the Elem,” the dragon man remarked. A moment later, he added, “you don’t recall the Elem at all, I would wager.”

  Shade had no answer. Whatever knowledge his earlier incarnation had had concerning these Elem, it was indeed long lost.

  “It does not matter, I suppose,” his captor went on. “They are not important to this. All that matters is what was left behind...that still functions.”

  The shapeshifting creature stepped atop the highest pile of rubble...and thus enabled both of them to see what stood in the center of the fallen citadel.

  Shade had expected another obelisk or perhaps some raised platform, but instead there was a thin, metallic pole on top of which had been set what appeared to be a tiny pyramid of onyx.

  “Just a few moments more. Just a few moments more,” Shade’s captor muttered, descending to the pole. As they neared, the warlock realized that the pole was not metallic, but made of a familiar iridescent pearl substance he had seen on previous founder artifacts. That bespoke of tremendous power, which made him all the more concerned with what his captor intended.

  “Thousands and thousands of years suffering from your hubris, uncle,” the thing muttered. “All from spilling fear and promises in my ears. The land is watching you, Sarcos! The land is seeking to change you and all you know, Sarcos! Look and see what your kind once was before it was transformed into the drakes! See the glory of the Vraad, the glory of the Tezerenee!”

  Already I had fallen into darkness, into madness, Shade thought. Never would he have otherwise praised to anyone his foul race or in some ways his even fouler clan. The Tezerenee had represented everything monstrous about the ancient sorcerer race. Even in their relatively short existence in the Dragonrealm, they had left their mark, especially in the form of the necromancers called the Lords of the Dead.

  “Lowly as I was, already wracked by whispering voices no matter where I went, I was easy prey for your suggestions! Easy prey!” Sarcos hissed. “Easssy...”

  He paused before the pole. Even with Sarcos in control of his body, Shade could feel the tremendous forces drawn into the artifact. He already had some suspicions as to what Sarcos intended, but the ruined drake seemed more than happy to make things clear.

  “’I have located a thing’, you said. ‘A thing that the founders used to help them manipulate flesh into thought and then flesh again with but a whim.’ You claimed that you had divined its working and needed me—clearly sensitive to the whispers of the land, of the spirits of the founders—to aid. In return, you would restore me to the glory and cheat the land of its mastery.”

  Shade could imagine how his other self had played on the young drake. If Sarcos had been hearing the land’s many voices constant whispers, he had been near to insanity already. That had made him easy prey for the warlock.

  “‘I hear them, too, Sarcos. I know what they plan next...’”

  Had he still had control of his body, Shade would have cringed. He could not blame his curse on what had been done to Sarcos. It had been the original Gerrod who had caused all this and the fact that he had done so out of fear for his own existence did not forgive his crime against the young drake. Gerrod Tezerenee had brought his puppet to the chamber from which Sarcos had just taken Shade. He had taught the young drake all he could about the device and how it worked. Yet, one thing had prevented the pair from taking what Barakas Tezerenee’s last surviving son had said would be the final step. A true sense of what the instructions of the founders actually said.

  And then...they had uncovered the book. The book left by the founders.

  As fragmented as his memory had become due to the curse, Shade had always believed that the only traces of the founders’ language had been what he had located on artifacts such as the obelisk. Never had he come across an actual tome—

  But no...evidently I did... Despite his current state, the warlock listened intently. This was a piece of the puzzle that promised potential if he was able to escape.

  “The book...the book told us so much. Told us why it all had to be...reasons you would find amazing. It told us the basis of their magic and how it folds time itself, enabling nearly anything to be accomplished! Compared to that, even the power of the Vraad was nothing...” Sarcos touched the side of the pole. A series of silver symbols Shade recognized from other founder artifact flickered to life in the air before them. “Accomplish anything, but at the cost of betraying themselves.”

  His statement disturbed the warlock, for it hinted that there was some other purpose to this place that Sarcos was not making clear.

  “Soon...all is now in place. The missing component is in motion, the component whose absence left me like this, ever changing, ever tortured...which is why you fooled me into testing it first for you...”

  Sarcos touched three of the symbols.

  The pole hummed. The dragon man looked up. The pyramid glowed a fiery crimson.

  “I was your sacrificial beast,” Sarcos snarled. “I thought I was your partner, but no...you knew that something else was still missing...and you wanted to see what would happen without it. How I screamed when the power tore me apart and remade me! How I screamed...but in the end, I’ve made you scream more.”

  He pressed two more of the symbols. The hum grew stronger.

  “I’ve watched and waited and now all things come together for me. It won’t be exactly as the book indicated, but it will be close enough.” Sarcos touched one last symbol. “There. Nothing more to do. No reason to keep talking. I’ve spent thousands of years waiting. Now, it will be as if I never suffered at all...”

  The humming grew deafening.

  “Gerrod!”

  NO...NO! Shade tried to shout. Run! Run!

  Sarcos turned to the voice. Valea’s voice.

  “And here she is. The loop is again complete. Still, I will not be deterred. I will be free at last,” the dragon man murmured.

  Valea stood atop one of the piles of rubble. Valea not alone. With her were two...three...no, four floating faces that appeared to be made of leaves.

  “This will not work anymore than the other times, Sarcos,” one of the leaf faces solemnly remarked. “You cannot change the result by doing the same thing over and over. The masters learned that too late.”

  “But I’m not doing the same thing over this time,” Sarcos retorted. “I couldn’t draw far enough. This time, I can. Look at him. You know he’s different now.”

  With a manic laugh, the dragon man touched the pole—

  “No!” Valea shouted. Through Sarcos, Shade felt her cast a spell.

  Which was, Shade understood too late, exactly what Sarcos wanted her to do.

  The dragon man touched a final symbol just as her spell touched them. The pole hummed. Both he and Shade shrieked together as incredible forces burst around the pole. The warlock felt himself torn from Sarcos, but that brought him no comfort. His greatest concern was for Valea, who also screamed. He could not see her, though, only th
e pole and Sarcos visible to him at the moment.

  Then, the rubble around them shot into the air. The ceiling reformed. Shattered fluted columns rose tall once more and statues reshaped. A vast marble floor with the leaf patterns Shade had noted on the creatures with Valea spread across a massive chamber.

  In several places around the area, dust gathered together, then reshaped into bones. Those bones then took on dried sinew and flesh which rapidly filled out into figures familiar to only a handful of beings in the Dragonrealm.

  They were ivory of skin, with long lush hair tinted emerald. That same emerald hue colored their wide, pupilless eyes. Each had a slight, upturned nose and ears that were somewhat pointed, like those of an elf. Lipless mouths briefly contorted as the corpses rose to life again.

  As they stood, their robes flowed as if with a life of their own. The figures appeared not to see either intruder, instead focused on their own private quests.

  Even as he fought back another scream, Shade both marveled and feared what Sarcos had wrought. Using the artifact, he had done what the faceless sorcerer could not have thought possible even for the amazing founders. Yet, clearly Sarcos—with some earlier variation of Shade—had discovered the ultimate creation of the lost race.

  A spell to turn back time.

  VI

  Valea blinked. Something had just happened. Something she could not put her finger on. The enchantress touched the empty air, seeking an entrance into the pocket world she was certain stood before her. Gerrod had to be inside, along with whatever possessed him.

  The more she concentrated, the more she was certain that Gerrod had gone this way. The enchantress concentrated...

  Suddenly, she stood inside a world of purple.

  Valea cared little about her astounding surroundings, only concerned with where Gerrod could be. His magical trace had taken on an odd aspect; it now felt as if it was both recent and so very, very old. The latter bothered her. She felt as if she tried to sense the trail of some spellcaster who had lived long ago.

  Valea had studied the legend of Shade long before she had even met him. She had come across traces of previous incarnations and had even noted some of the magical residue the accursed warlock had left in his wake. Yet, this was not the same. This was so incredibly ancient...but not.

  Welcome again, Valea Bedlam...

  She started. Although the voice was in her head, she knew without understanding how that the speaker was behind her. The enchantress turned—

  And confronted a flurry of brown, leaflike objects floating in a bundle in the air just before her. Valea instinctively looked past it for its caster, then realized that the leaves were the source of the voice.

  As she stared at them, they shaped into a face of sorts. Smaller leaves became the eyes and larger ones framed together to form the mouth.

  “Welcome again, Valea Bedlam,” it said out loud this time. “Sad it is that it must always be for the same end.”

  “How do you know me? What are you talking about?” Valea paused, then added, “What are you?”

  “We are the servants...the guardians...of this place.”

  “’We’?” Barely had she blurted that than around her swirled more leaves. They gathered together, creating three more ‘faces’.

  “We are the Elem. Created and set here to watch over this place and serve its users. Through all time.”

  “All time,” the other three repeated.

  The answer did not entirely surprise the enchantress, who had confronted equally strange servants left behind by the founders. Some had been extremely powerful, almost godlike.

  The Elem were tiny compared to the others Valea had met, but she suspected that they could not be judged by size alone. That they had survived so long meant tremendous power at their command.

  Her initial surprise fading, Valea focused on Gerrod again. “I’m looking for someone—”

  “He Who Also Serves...the Shade...yes, he also returns. Scaros cannot accept that to repeat the cycle is to repeat the cycle. It will always end as it always had...and yet, we must still work to stop him.”

  The creature was making no sense, but Valea had no time for that. All that mattered was Gerrod. “Where is he—Shade? What’s happened?” Valea eyed the empty landscape ahead. “What happened there? I can sense something—”

  “Not something. Some when.”

  “Some when,” repeated the other heads.

  Her frustration grew. “Give me a simple answer!”

  The leaves that formed the face shook as if a light wind flowed through. “Simple is that time is not. Time is the key that the great ones chose, stealing from their very existence to recreate all. Both glorious and insidious.”

  An angry Valea sent a swirl of wind through the Elem, briefly scattering their leafy forms. As the lead one gathered himself together, the crimson-tressed enchantress muttered, “A simple answer. Please. There’s something before us, isn’t there, something I can’t quite sense!”

  “There was, there is, and there will be. That is its nature. That is its function. When the creators made their decision, they had to locate a place of absolute stability, a place unchanging through time. It had to be so or else their work would be for naught. It was a daring, dreadful thing they did, ever aware that they had created their own downfall but certain that they also brought their rise again.”

  Valea had no idea what they meant. Indeed, her only concern was finding Gerrod. Whatever foul arcane device the founders had left behind could remain sealed of here forever as far as she was concerned. The enchantress despised all things related to the founders, who seemed to her as cold and inhuman as the burrowing Quel or the monstrous Storm Dragon.

  “Just tell me where Gerrod is and how to get him out. That’s all I want!”

  The Elem frowned as one. The leader responded, “Sarcos has awakened the device without us. The same as he did each time before when we refused to help him. Each time, the Shade went back with him.”

  “Stop calling him that! What do you mean, ‘each time’? We’ve never been here—” Valea froze as she realized what they meant. Gerrod had never been here...but in at least one of his previous Shade incarnations he had been. “Are you saying that they’ve both gone—did you say ‘back’?”

  The Elem as a whole shimmered. They did virtually everything in unison.

  “Back we said, yes.”

  “Do you really mean—as in time?”

  The leaf creatures rustled violently. Valea shook her head. What was being suggested was impossible as far as she knew. Her parents, certainly knowledgeable, had said that there were no records of any such successful spell...and if either they or the Dragon Kings would have had access to such, the Dragonrealm would have been a far, far different place.

  Yet, the Elem gave no sign that she had misunderstood. Indeed, they only looked more agitated.

  She finally had to ask, “Is what you say true?”

  The lead Elem shook violently again, the first time it had done so alone. “True and will be true...the creators sensed their world beginning to fade and so they sought to replenish it. There was no source, though, and so they had to hunt beyond their world.”

  The story sounded too much like those she had heard of the Vraad, only on a much greater magnitude. “They discovered some source. Where did they find it?”

  “Not where...but when.”

  “When...” echoed the other three.

  “But that makes no sense. They found a source of power in the past? But what source could be so great that they wouldn’t have known of it before—no!” She felt the blood rush from her face. “You can’t be serious...”

  “There was only one source of power great enough to serve the creators’ needs,” the lead Elem responded with something akin to a sigh. “The power of they themselves. The masters...they took from the past t
o save their future, that is how they saw it.”

  Despite her fear for Gerrod, what the Elem told her was so insane that she could not help trying to find some reason in it. Tried and failed. “But...if they steal from the past...doesn’t that make the future...their time, I mean...doesn’t it...create the problem they had? That can’t be right!”

  The Elem merely stared at her.

  Valea remained dumbfounded. “But by doing that they were ensuring the very downfall of their own world!”

  “Yet believing then that they would have ultimate control over their future,” the lead Elem stated. “That, to them, was worth losing the past.”

  She shook. The founders had become so obsessed with resurrecting their world that they had actually become the cause of its collapse. It was a maddening, endless loop. So much skill, so much power put into mastering time itself and all to achieve utter insanity! Valea thought.

  The only hope she took from all of it was that it seemed that the spell was self-contained and that even the creature Sarcos had been unable to alter that. That meant that once again she only needed to concentrate on rescuing Gerrod.

  “How do I retrieve Gerrod—Shade—from the spell? There must be a way!”

  The foremost Elem shimmered. “You have tried. Your part in the loop is complete. He cast you out to save you. The Shade will die and the loop will begin anew. We have tried and we have failed over and over. So has the Shade. Sarcos will continue his endless quest for revenge and escape forever.”

  “Forever,” repeated the others.

  “We remained with you at the Shade’s bequest. As we each time have. Your time is past now, though. You are no more a part of this cycle.”

  “No more,” echoed the rest of the Elem.

  Valea felt an ancient power stir...and realized that it was the Elem casting a spell.

  “No!” she shouted, countering with her own magic. “I’ll not—”

  But before she could finish, she stood once more near the tower in Gordag-Ai.

  Stood there...and wondered why she had come to this faraway kingdom in the first place.