• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Mouths formed in the air all around her, maws she didn’t bother to open her eyes to see, blind eel-like tentacles that saw her without eyes. Worms ending in jaws with great long fangs that struck at her like snakes, then bit and tore, savaging her as she hastened on, trying to get through them without losing overmuch blood. The maws hissed and roared or gloated wetly nigh her ears as they drooled her gore … as Storm stumbled across what she’d been expecting to find, heavy chain that clanked and skirled on stone beneath her.

The manacles, lying discarded on the passage floor. She kicked them and plucked them up, through all the vicious biting, and clung to them as she fought her way on.

Then the biting mouths and their roaring were behind her, and she was walking in air that crackled and snapped as many small lightnings stabbed at her, raking their snarling forks across her skin, her muscles trembling in their grip, spasming and cramping painfully as she lurched on.

Out of that torment into another, a nightmare of half-formed, shadowy coils that tugged at Storm, tightening like so many ghostly yet solid snakes of titanic size, coils that always, despite her upflung and clawing hands, managed to encircle her throat and start to strangle her, until she was walking arched over almost backward, caught beyond sobbing or gasping for breath, fighting through gathering dimness to—win free and snap back upright into a last torture of sharp, unseen points that jabbed at her eyes, solid shards of air that struck only at eyes and throat and mouth … to let go of her at last, leaving Storm staggering forward spitting blood from her many-times-stung tongue to regain breath and balance in the widening mouth of a cavern.

Alone and almost blind in near darkness, the only light coming from faint, fitful pulsings of the roiling ward behind her, Storm gasped and stretched and panted, seeking an end to her trembling as she tore off robe and jerkin again, to take off the war wizard cloak so she could wrap it firmly around the manacles and keep them from clinking.

After what seemed a very long time, she felt her body would obey her again. Not bothering to dress again, Storm caught up her clothes, the magics she’d brought, and the muffled manacles, and strode through the deepening darkness for a long way, across the level stone floor of a great cavern, until a faint glow became visible ahead.

She headed for it, and it became several glows, close together and down low and flickering feebly, at about the same time as the smooth stone under her boots started to slope down and the faint echoes of her progress changed, making it clear that the unseen ceiling of the cavern was descending as she went on, to hang close above her, the cave narrowing, descending, and getting damper.

And starting to stink, too. Not the smell of decay or earth or stone, but the musky stench of an unwashed and filthy human.

Then, at last, Storm reached the source of the glows and the reek.

Her sister Alassra, once queen of Aglarond and forever infamous in legend as the mad Witch-Queen and slaughterer of Red Wizards, the Simbul, was sitting alone, naked and filthy, with her feet in a pool. The water that fed it dripped down the cave walls in a dozen ceaseless flows.

Still shapely under the filth, still silver-haired, Alassra looked perhaps a lush and well-preserved forty-odd winters—but also, by the same scrutiny, seemed an utterly mad, keening wreck.

Gibbering and drooling wordlessly, she rocked and swayed back and forth, eyes staring wildly but seeing nothing.

A long, heavy chain that Storm knew ended in a shackle around her sister’s ankle rose out of the water past her, to end at a massive metal ring set deep into the rock. It had been forged by dwarves but enspelled by Elminster and all of Alassra’s sisters who could work magic powerful enough, its links bearing Alassra’s blood slaked in her silver fire, let out in wounds they’d gently made. It called to her