The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [98]
The elf looked down at it, and although his hand remained rock steady, his handsome face slowly slipped into a stony, brooding mask. His eyes held such glittering menace that both hostelers recoiled and had to be coaxed back.
As he swung himself down from the saddle and reached for the handle of the Sword's finely carved front door, Ilbryn Starym smiled softly.
And as one of the hostelers put it, "That were worse than 'is glaring!"
Still smiling, Ilbryn put one hand…the one flickering with the risen radiance of a ready, deadly spell-behind his back, and with the other opened the door and went in.
The hostelers lingered, half-expecting to hear a terrific crash, or smoke, or even bodies hurled out through the windows… but their hoped-for entertainment never came.
Twelve: The Empty Throne
It must bother most wizards a lot that for all their spells, they can't seize immortality. Many try to become gods, but few succeed. For this, let us all be very thankful.
Sambrin Ulgrythyn, Lord Sage of Sammaresh
from The View From Stormwind Hill
published circa The Year of the Gate
Far to the east of Westgate, even as a smiling elf slipped into an inn expecting trouble, a mist drifted through an old, deep forest.
It was a mist that sparkled and chimed as it went, moving purposefully through the trees. Sometimes it rose up into an almost humanoid, striding form, bulking tall, thick and strong, at other times it moved like an ever-leaping, undulating snake. No birds called in the shade around it, and nothing rustled in the dead leaves underfoot. Only its own whirling breezes stirred the creepers and tatters of hanging moss it wound its way through, silence ruled the forest it traversed.
This was no wonder, earlier chiming hungers had left not a creature alive in that part of the forest to witness its haste. The chiming mist had left the graveyard of the Frostfire Banner far behind, moving for miles along the deserted road to a place where most eyes would have missed the sapling-studded, overgrown remnants of a lane turning off into the woods.
The mist drifted along the dips and turns of that road, passing like eager smoke across crumbling stone bridges that took the road across rivulets, to the deep green place where the road ended… and the ruins began.
The lines of gigantic old trees flanking the overgrown road gave way to a litter of creeper-shrouded, sagging wagons and coaches. Beyond lay thickets, at their hearts overgrown mounds that had once been stables and cottages. Beyond the thickets rose shadow-tops so tall that their gloom choked away thickets and lay in endless shadow over the rotting ruin of a drawbridge across a deep, muddy cleft that had once been a moat… and the stone pillars or teeth within the moat, that had once been the stout buttresses of mostly fallen walls. Walls that had once frowned down on Faerun from a great height, formed a massive keep.
The long-fallen fortress was more forest and tumbled stone, now, than a building. The mist moved purposefully through the tangle of leaning trees and creepers that grew in its inner spaces, as if it knew what chambers could be found where. As it went, the walls became taller. Here and there ceilings or roofing had survived, though all of the archways gaped open and doorless, and there were no signs that anyone…or anything…dwelt within.
The mist came to a gently chiming halt in a chamber that had once been large and grand indeed. Gaps in its walls showed the forest just outside, but there was still a ceiling, and even furniture. A rotting-canopied bed larger than many stable stalls, stood with ornate gilded bedposts and cloth of gold glinting among the green mildew-fur of its bedding. Close by stood a lounge, canted over where one leg had broken, and beyond that several stools were enthusiastically growing mushrooms. A little way farther on, across the cracked marble floor, a peeling,