Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [42]
Another occurrence, pertinent to future events, also happened during this interval:
The Heroes of the Lance, on their epic journey toward Thorbardin, visited the mountain of Skullcap, where it is rumored they discovered an artifact, the skull of Fistandantilus, which had lain untouched in the depths of that place for more than a century. It is possible that they brought it near to the surface, though certainly they did not take it with them.
In any event, while I have been unable to confirm everything that has happened in regard to this story, it can be deduced from subsequent events that the skull was no longer languishing in the deepest depths of that horrid fortress.
As Always,
Your faithful servant,
Foryth Teel
CHAPTER 14
Dragon Reign 356 AC Mid-Yurthgreen Time is a highly subjective reality. Hours, days, weeks, and years all mean different things, are held to different values by the many versions of mortality. For example, two days might encompass the entire lifetime of a certain bug, and for that creature, the ricking of a minute is an interval for great feasting, or for traveling a long distance. To a human, a minute is a more compact space- time, perhaps, for a sip of wine, a bite of bread, a phrase or two of conversation.
Yet to a truly long-lived being-an elf, for example, or a dragon-minutes can pass tenfold, a hundredfold, without arousing interest or concern. A single such interval is space for a slow inhalation, or an idle thought. It is certainly not time enough for serious cogitation, never enough for the making of an important decision.
And, by extension, the counting of months and years by such entities can also assume insignificant proportions. When compared to the more frantic pace of humanity’s existence, very long times may pass in nothing more than a haze of quiet reflection.
Or in the case of a dragon, an extended nap.
It was thus for Flayzeranyx, who awakened in the cool depths of his cave with no awareness of the season, nor even of the number of years that might have passed since he had commenced his hibernation. Even the red dragon’s return to consciousness was a gradual thing, an event spread over the span of several weeks.
Only after he had lifted the crimson, heavy lids that completely concealed his eyes did the great serpent notice the gradual increase and decrease of light from the direction leading toward the mouth of his cave.
Through the gauzy inner lids that still cloaked the slitted yellow pupils, Flayze realized that these shifts in brightness represented the cycles of day passing into night, and then merging into the following dawn.
Idly he counted the cycling of five such periods of dark and brightness.
By then he began to notice a nagging thirst, a dry rasp that cracked around the base of his tongue and made his mouth feel as though it were full of dust. And then, very vaguely, he noticed the first traces of hunger rumbling in the vast depths of his belly. There was still no real sense of urgency to his awareness, but he realized that it was time for him to move.
Slowly Flayze rose, pressing with his four powerful legs to lift his serpentine body, supple neck, and sinuous tail from the floor. A few old scales snapped free, chips of scarlet floating to the floor. The dragon wriggled, a violent shiver that rippled the length of his body, and many more scales broke loose. Those that remained, at last bared by the sloughing of the ancient plates, gleamed with a bright slickness suggestive of fresh blood.
Climbing toward the dimly recalled cavern entrance, Flayze ascended a rock-strewn floor, slinking with oily ease over steep obstacles, relishing the grace of movement, the power incumbent in his massive body. He sniffed the air, smelling water and greenery, and he was glad that he had not emerged during winter, when the hunting-and even the quenching of his thirst-could be rendered much more problematic by the presence of snow