• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He rocked back on his heels, amazed at the coincidence.

Remembering.

The portal had been inside the Dangling Tower. Q’arlynd had led Halisstra and her companions to it, only to be confronted by the portal’s protector, an iron golem. The golem had attacked the group, driving them back from the portal and seizing Q’arlynd. When a fissure opened in the floor beneath the golem, it had fallen through, dragging Q’arlynd along as well. Q’arlynd had been in the clutches of the golem, falling, as the stalactite that housed the Dangling Tower tore free of the cavern’s ceiling and plunged down through the city, careening off the streets and buildings below. He’d escaped the golem by teleporting away in mid-fall.

He’d assumed that his sister and her companions had been killed when the tower smashed to pieces on the cavern floor far below. He hadn’t even bothered to search for Halisstra’s body, thinking it would lie buried deep in the rubble, but the survival of the portal presented a new possibility. Perhaps Halisstra had managed to escape through it as the tower was falling. If so, she might still be wherever it led. She, too, would have assumed her sibling was dead. The last she’d seen of Q’arlynd he was in the grip of a golem dragging him to a certain-death fall. She likely would have heard of the city’s complete destruction—which would explain why, if she was still alive, she hadn’t returned to Ched Nasad.

If Halisstra was alive and Q’arlynd could locate her, he might be able to improve his lot. Instead of being a vassal to another House—little better than a slave, really—he would once again be part of a noble House. It would, of course, be a House of two, but time would remedy that. House Melarn would rise again.

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to slow down. Halisstra may not have even made it through the portal, he reminded himself. Her skeleton might very well be somewhere under the heap of rubble on which he squatted. He would not allow himself to hope. Not yet.

A sighing noise behind him made him whirl, his free hand reaching for the wand sheathed at his hip, but it was only the driftdisc he’d summoned earlier. It could just as easily, however, have been one of his enemies. He chastised himself for letting his guard down. It was a stupid thing to do, if one wanted to keep on living.

And Q’arlynd wanted very much to do just that.

He glanced back at the arch. The script no longer glowed. It should be a simple enough matter to re-activate the portal—the inscription was in Draconic, which Q’arlynd could read—but he wasn’t about to step blindly into unknown territory, not without learning all he could about the dead priestess. She had, after all, come from wherever the portal led to.

He took a careful look around, noting landmarks in the rubble. Then he settled himself cross-legged on the driftdisc and sped away.

Nearly three hundred leagues to the east, in a little-visited section of the sprawling underground labyrinth known as Undermountain, a Darksong Knight and a novice priestess of Eilistraee patrolled a dark cavern that wound its way past several natural columns of stone. Nearly a thousand years ago, the cavern had been one arm of a sprawling Underdark city. The drow who built that city were long gone—consumed by the slimes and oozes they had venerated—but traces of what they built could be seen still. The columns and walls, for example, were carved with notches that had once served as handholds and footholds. Holes in the cavern ceiling were the entrances to buildings that had been hollowed by magic out of native stone. Still more holes, arranged in intricate, lacelike patterns, had served as windows in the floors of these buildings. Some of the clearstone in these windows was still intact, but centuries of accumulated bat guano had obliterated any view inside.

The Darksong Knight pointed out those details as they walked along. “We only recently claimed this area. We hope to incorporate